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.