Getting Along with Robots
I posted the Inside Alibaba’s Smart Warehouse Staffed by Robots video on Facebook the other day. No one liked it or commented on it.
My mother used to say: “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say it.” I guess I have to appreciate all the folks that followed her precept!
Why It Seemed Cool
If you just watch the video, you see all these little blue guys just waiting to get under the palettes of stacked inventory boxes, 10 times their height and weight. So cute. Little flat R2D2’s.
And then the camera cuts to show – from both the robot eye level and the overhead point of view – many of the machines ferrying palettes about, all at the same time.
The whole effect is like lego assembly, like puzzles, a thing of intricacy and fascination.
Why Not Cool?
So why no Likes? It seems obvious – robots are taking people’s jobs. Although few of my Facebook friends would see warehouse work as their career path, many would take a loading job if that was all that was available. I know I would. So in this sense automation hurts. Or at least it did before the reported unemployment rate here in the U.S. circa 2018 fell to much lower levels.
Where will people go to work as job after job gets automated out? Today, we can move on to higher skilled jobs (perhaps controlling the robots) or jobs that involve caring for people in ways that machines can’t do yet. And yet the machines are evolving so fast. Where will we humans end up when robots and artificial intelligence (AI) systems continue to take over the work we once performed?
Can we all Get Along?
One hopes that if computing machines and robots get to the point where they can replace everything we do (even on the caring and nurturing side) they themselves become almost human. We might then have much in common with them. We could all live together in a beautiful cybernetic future, as Richard Brautigan envisioned in the poem: Machines of Loving Grace.
But, even we humans aren’t living together all that well in this acrimonious political world. Add sentient machines to the mix, and their ability to get along with people might be determined by their initial programming and how they evolved from there. Is there reason to suppose they would end up becoming enlightened and altruistic, or would they more likely be motivated only to protect their own survival? Would they learn prejudice against human emotion and human life? It is certainly possible to imagine dystopian futures like those in the Terminator moves.
Existential Questions without Answers
Like the Alibaba video, this is a quite a puzzle. There no answers to it yet. The Matrix movie came closest to addressing the existential questions; when the machines are winning, the superhero Neo comes to save humanity by wielding Godlike powers no one can explain. There’s much more story and philosophy in the Matrix, but humanity’s salvation comes down to the divine element.
We Have to Do Better
Advanced technology has a way of sneaking up on us; as a species we never seem to consider or agree on the long-term consequences. Look at automobiles. Would people have “voted for them” if they knew how cars would transform the air, the landscape, and the climate for the worse? Perhaps not. Anyway, they were given no idea.
I realize I’ve opened up this question but provided no better analysis than what’s available in pop scifi movies! Someone must have written well-reasoned papers forecasting both our long-term employment prospects, and how we might get along with the machines once they become more than our equals in every way. I’ll try and get back to you on this in another post.
Machines of Loving Grace
Are computing machines our friends or our enemies? After living with them as an average American for almost 60 years as of 2018, it is interesting to reflect on how attitudes change, and where we are today.
Source: Marcus Felsman’s English Blog
Today’s 60-to-70 somethings didn’t grow up with computers. Instead, computers arrived like something out of science fiction during our tumultuous teenage years. The computers of that time were accessed through punch cards or bulky cathode ray terminals (CRTs) in reality. But the Star Trek TV series and the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey” depicted fully functional speech recognition, artificial intelligence (AI), food processors, and handheld communicators.
Funny thing, we have now built all those Star Trek devices (except for the transporter beam). Children and younger adults now take them for granted. The 60-to-70 years old can only imagine what it must be like to grow up surrounded by computers at an early age; our children had Windows, Macs, and eventually cell phones. Our grand children have enjoyed smartphones and personal digital assistants almost from infancy, and now have AI with Alexa, Echo, Cortana, and Siri.
Ambivalence
Humans and their technologies have transformed much of Earth into a machine world, but we still have a love/hate relationship with machines.
At least one megacorp has its roots in a Silicon Valley hippie: Steve Jobs. Please read this page from Walter Isaacson’s book on Jobs to learn a bit about how, in the 1960s and early 1970s, attitudes changed from dismissing computing as a tool of Big Brother to embracing it as a symbol of individual empowerment.
Today, debates rage anew over AI, privacy, surveillance, censorship and technological monopolies. As a sixty-something, I know what people in my age group (and perhaps my children’s) conflicted-ly think on these issues, but frankly have only vague ideas on how younger millennials view them. That is great fodder for future posts! For now, check out Isaacson’s bit of history and Richard’s Brautigan’s poem “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace.”
“I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.”
I’m with you Richard. Bless you, and RIP.
Looking Ahead
With all the discontent out there about government surveillance and intrusive advertising, have we returned to a negative view of computing?
Perhaps, on balance, we have a more nuanced view of computing that acknowledges any technology is neutral and can be used for either good or bad purposes. And some of the current Internet’s detractors are learning to love a new model – based on blockchains – that I’ll write about in another post on the topic of Decentralization!
Computing and the Counter-Culture
The following excerpt from Walter Isaacson’s book “Steve Jobs” is crucial. Without reading this page from history, we would never have read the poem “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace” and perhaps never begun our Machine World series. Isaacson wrote:
“In San Francisco and the Santa Clara Valley during the late 1960s, various cultural currents flowed together. There was the technology revolution that began with the growth of military contractors and soon included electronics firms, microchip makers, video game designers, and computer companies. There was a hacker subculture—filled with Wireheads, phreakers, cyberpunks, hobbyists, and just plain geeks—— that included engineers who didn’t conform to the HP mold and their kids who weren’t attuned to the wavelengths of the subdivisions. There were quasi-academic groups doing studies on the effects of LSD; participants included Doug Engelbart of the Augmentation Research center in Palo Alto, who later helped develop the computer mouse and graphical user interfaces, and Ken Kesey, who celebrated the drug with music-and-light shows featuring a house band that became the Grateful Dead. There was the hippie movement, born out of the Bay Area’s beat generation, and the rebellious political activists, born out of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley. Overlaid on it all were various self-fulfillment movements pursuing paths to personal enlightenment: zen and Hinduism, meditation, and yoga, primal scream and sensory deprivation, Esalen and est.
This fusion of flower power and processor power, enlightenment and technology, was embodied by Steve Jobs as he meditated in the mornings, audited physics classes at Stanford, worked nights at Atari, and dreamed of starting his own business. ‘There was just something going on here,’ he said, looking back at the time and place. ‘The best music came from here—the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Joan Baez, Janis Joplin—and so did the integrated circuit, and things like the Whole earth Catalog.’
Initially the technologists and the hippies did not interface well. Many in the counterculture saw computers as ominous and Orwellian, the province of the Pentagon and the power structure. In the Myth of the Machine, the historian Lewis Mumford warned that computers were sucking away our freedom and destroying “life-enhancing values.” An injunction on punch cards of the period—~’Do not fold, spindle or mutilate’–became an ironic phrase of the anti war left.
But by the early 1970s a shift was under way. ‘Computing went from being dismissed as a tool of bureaucratic control to being embraced as a symbol of individual expression and liberation,’ John Markoff wrote in hid study of the counterculture’s convergence with the merchants of the computer industry, What the Dormouse Said. It was an ethos lyrically expressed in Richard Brautigan’s 1967 poem, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, and the cyberdelic fusion was certified when Timothy Leary declared that personal computers had become the new LSD and years later revised his famous mantra to proclaim, ‘turn on boot up jack in.’ The musician Bono, who later became a friend of Jobs, often discussed with him why those interested in the rock drugs rebel counterculture of the bay area ended up helping to create the personal computer industry. ‘The people who invested the twenty-first century were pot-smoking, sandal-wearing hippies from the West Coast like Steve, because they saw differently,’ he said. ‘The hierarchical systems of the East Coast, England, German, and Japan do not encourage this different thinking. The sixties produced an anarchic mind-set that is great for imagining a world not yet in existence.'”
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In case you haven’t seen it already, please check out our first Machine World post as it was inspired by Isaacson’s fascinating history lesson.