Dick Pountain/Idealog 278/04 September 2017 09:57
Am I worried about a robot taking my job? The very question triggers in my imagination (and probably yours too) the vision of a shiny white plastic humanoid, possibly bearing a Honda logo, whirring smoothly into my study, sitting down in my typist's chair and tapping out this column on the keys of my laptop. But of course this isn't what happens at all.
Much of my job has already been automated away. 200 years ago I'd be writing this in ink with a dip pen, and forming each letter by hand. Now I press a key and the firmware of my computer forms each letter: I just choose the words and put them into order (were I foolish enough to turn on predictive text, the computer would try to bugger that up too). When I finished 200 years ago I'd probably roll up the paper and hand it to a boy who would run it round to the editorial office - robots had his job long ago. Now I press another key or two to send it by email. I'm just a word chooser and orderer and I get paid to do it, a crucial point.
Since we're such a social species it's hardly surprising that we're obsessed by humanoid robots, but they really aren't the biggest threat. They will certainly continue to improve in capability, and find roles in many service industries and social care where the more human they seem the better. Such applications raise deep ethical questions, and some very able people are already working on answers My old friend Prof Alan Winfield (alanwinfield.blogspot.co.uk) works with the EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council), IEEE and other bodies on a code for ethical regulation of robotics, based on principles like:
~ Robots should not be designed solely or primarily to kill or harm humans.
~ Robots should be designed to comply with existing laws, rights and freedoms, including privacy.
~ Humans, not robots, are responsible agents, so a person must be attributed legal responsibility for every robot.
~ Robots are industrial products that must meet industry standards of safety and security.
~ Robots should not employ deliberately deceptive appearance to exploit vulnerable users: their mechanical nature should remain obvious.
No, the main threat is not a robot taking your job but of your job disappearing through less visible automation. "Moravec’s paradox" (named for AI researcher Hans Moravec) observes that it's easier for AI to imitate the advanced cognitive skills of a chess grandmaster than the simple perceptual and motor skills of a two-year old child. The hardest part of my opening scenario isn't writing this column, but walking through the door and sitting in the chair, which makes a humanoid robot hopelessly inefficient and far too expensive for the job. Cheaper and more efficient instead to generate this column using an AI program that scrapes all my 20 years of previous columns and does some inferring (though I do flatter myself that you might notice the difference...)
In a powerful recent Guardian article (https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/aug/20/robots-are-not-destroying-jobs-but-they-are-hollow-out-the-middle-class) Larry Elliot proposes a scenario in which increasingly polarised Western capitalist societies fragment further still. A tiny rich minority purchases the technology to automate away middle class jobs, then re-deploys the labour so displaced to perform cheaply those manual and service tasks that can't profitably be performed by machines. Automating those tasks would also have caused mass unemployment and destroyed the market for products, whereas paying a minimal universal wage might keep the whole shebang running after a fashion, with 1% living in extreme luxury and 99% still living, but in extreme drudgery.
Last Sunday I booked online our winter's worth of concert tickets - no box-office clerks were employed, even on the telephone. When the various days arrive, we'll travel, say to the Wigmore Hall, by bus (in 5 years time that might be driverless) to watch very talented people make unamplified music on acoustic wooden instruments designed over a century ago. And I'm prepared to pay and travel to hear this even though I could listen to "the same" music on Spotify. That evening I watched on TV a BBC Prom of marvellous Indian classical music, and noticed that one trio was using an electronic drone box in place of a human tanpura player, thus saving one quarter of their labour cost.
These are the sorts of decision that automation will increasingly face us with. I think I'm pretty good at choosing words and putting them into the right order, but the market may eventually not agree. However if we keep listening only to the market, then sooner rather than later we may find life is no longer worth living. What kinds of skills do we wish to preserve, regardless of efficiency or profit?
Friday 16 February 2018
FAME GAME
Dick Pountain/Idealog 277/05 August 2017 11:05
I'm not overly prone to hero-worship, but that's not to say that I don't have a few: they include soldiers, scientists, philosophers and musicians, from Garibaldi to Richard Feynman. One of these heroes died in February of this year, Hans Rosling a Swedish doctor, academic, statistician and public speaker. That may not sound a typically heroic CV, but his heroism consisted in inventing ways to make statistics both exciting and comprehensible to the public, then deploying this ability for a humane end, namely to counteract panic about overpopulation. This wasn't speculation, but based on his early experience as a doctor in various developing countries.
His brilliant 2013 documentary "Don't Panic - the Truth About Population" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FACK2knC08E) employed state-of-the-art Musion 3D animated infographics to show that as a nations' population achieves higher living standards their average fertility drops so steeply that total world population is already peaking, and is set to plateau at around 11 billion by 2100. And he believed this number could be fed if resources (particularly African land) were sensibly used. To be sure 2013 now feels like a previous epoch in which one could sensibly assume people would get steadily more prosperous, and that no crackpot religion would take power to push the birthrate back up again.
Anyhow, I wanted to pay tribute to Rosling's amazing facility with statistics and his belief that when used properly they reveal truths that can help us survive, and so I've devised a thought-experiment that might have appealed to his impish Scandinavian sense of humour. It goes something like this.
Create a 3D coordinate system with three orthogonal axes labelled Knowledge, Fame and Wealth. Define these three quantities simplistically but pragmatically by devising functions to extract them from existing available databases. For example you might create a Knowledge function that compiles each person's years of primary, secondary and possibly tertiary education; Fame might be derived from a person's extended family size, to which add Google hits on their name, Facebook and Twitter friends, and for a few add professional data like number of TV or movie performances, books published, sporting successes and so on; Wealth would have to come from government tax databases, bank records (pehaps supplemented from the Panama Papers) and similar. Compile these three parameters for every person in the world, then plot them all into your 3D space.
You'll protest that this is impossible and I'll agree, but will then point out that a) it's only a thought-experiment and b) think back to the 2016 US election when certain Big Data firms like Cambridge Analytics claimed to have done something not too far off for most of the US electorate. It's nowhere near so far-fetched as it was even two years ago.
What you'd now be looking at is a solid of roughly spherical proportions close to the origin, containing the vast majority of the world population, with numerous spiky protuberances that contain all the world's academics, celebrities and plutocrats: a sort of world hedgehog. The length and volume of these protuberances would be a measure of the inequalities along all three axes. Now let's get more implausible still, by updating this chart on a yearly basis and animating it in Rosling/Musion style, so that it throbs and twitches, grows and shrinks in various directions.
If you could project the data back into the medium-distant past you'd see the effect of various political programs and social movements: following World War Two the whole sphere would expand along at least the Wealth and Knowledge axes, up until the late 1970s when Wealth motion might cease, and may even go into reverse. From that point onwards you'd see some swelling along the Fame axis as the internet gives more people their Warholian 15 minutes, but the spikes along Fame and Wealth directions would grow enormously longer and far thinner as Wealth becomes far more concentrated. As for Knowledge, who knows: are we really getting smarter or dumber? It's easy to jump to conclusions here. Literacy is still probably increasing through much of the developing world, except where religious extremists obstruct it, while university attendance has continued to spread in the developed world, but may soon go into reverse due to massively increased costs - and there are furious arguments about quality and maintenance of standards. I do wish I had this experiment running and could see the "real" picture.
I'm sure you know that cynical modern proverb "The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese". Well this proverb, like my thought experiment, illustrates the difference between natural and social competition. In human societies the playing field is anything but flat, in fact it's a spiky surface, something like a naval mine or huge sea urchin.
I'm not overly prone to hero-worship, but that's not to say that I don't have a few: they include soldiers, scientists, philosophers and musicians, from Garibaldi to Richard Feynman. One of these heroes died in February of this year, Hans Rosling a Swedish doctor, academic, statistician and public speaker. That may not sound a typically heroic CV, but his heroism consisted in inventing ways to make statistics both exciting and comprehensible to the public, then deploying this ability for a humane end, namely to counteract panic about overpopulation. This wasn't speculation, but based on his early experience as a doctor in various developing countries.
His brilliant 2013 documentary "Don't Panic - the Truth About Population" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FACK2knC08E) employed state-of-the-art Musion 3D animated infographics to show that as a nations' population achieves higher living standards their average fertility drops so steeply that total world population is already peaking, and is set to plateau at around 11 billion by 2100. And he believed this number could be fed if resources (particularly African land) were sensibly used. To be sure 2013 now feels like a previous epoch in which one could sensibly assume people would get steadily more prosperous, and that no crackpot religion would take power to push the birthrate back up again.
Anyhow, I wanted to pay tribute to Rosling's amazing facility with statistics and his belief that when used properly they reveal truths that can help us survive, and so I've devised a thought-experiment that might have appealed to his impish Scandinavian sense of humour. It goes something like this.
Create a 3D coordinate system with three orthogonal axes labelled Knowledge, Fame and Wealth. Define these three quantities simplistically but pragmatically by devising functions to extract them from existing available databases. For example you might create a Knowledge function that compiles each person's years of primary, secondary and possibly tertiary education; Fame might be derived from a person's extended family size, to which add Google hits on their name, Facebook and Twitter friends, and for a few add professional data like number of TV or movie performances, books published, sporting successes and so on; Wealth would have to come from government tax databases, bank records (pehaps supplemented from the Panama Papers) and similar. Compile these three parameters for every person in the world, then plot them all into your 3D space.
You'll protest that this is impossible and I'll agree, but will then point out that a) it's only a thought-experiment and b) think back to the 2016 US election when certain Big Data firms like Cambridge Analytics claimed to have done something not too far off for most of the US electorate. It's nowhere near so far-fetched as it was even two years ago.
What you'd now be looking at is a solid of roughly spherical proportions close to the origin, containing the vast majority of the world population, with numerous spiky protuberances that contain all the world's academics, celebrities and plutocrats: a sort of world hedgehog. The length and volume of these protuberances would be a measure of the inequalities along all three axes. Now let's get more implausible still, by updating this chart on a yearly basis and animating it in Rosling/Musion style, so that it throbs and twitches, grows and shrinks in various directions.
If you could project the data back into the medium-distant past you'd see the effect of various political programs and social movements: following World War Two the whole sphere would expand along at least the Wealth and Knowledge axes, up until the late 1970s when Wealth motion might cease, and may even go into reverse. From that point onwards you'd see some swelling along the Fame axis as the internet gives more people their Warholian 15 minutes, but the spikes along Fame and Wealth directions would grow enormously longer and far thinner as Wealth becomes far more concentrated. As for Knowledge, who knows: are we really getting smarter or dumber? It's easy to jump to conclusions here. Literacy is still probably increasing through much of the developing world, except where religious extremists obstruct it, while university attendance has continued to spread in the developed world, but may soon go into reverse due to massively increased costs - and there are furious arguments about quality and maintenance of standards. I do wish I had this experiment running and could see the "real" picture.
I'm sure you know that cynical modern proverb "The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese". Well this proverb, like my thought experiment, illustrates the difference between natural and social competition. In human societies the playing field is anything but flat, in fact it's a spiky surface, something like a naval mine or huge sea urchin.
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