Robots Will Create 'Permanently Unemployable Underclass'

[vt]

Re: Yes Virginia, Those Are Robot Camel Jockeys

http://venturebeat.com/2015/01/02/ro...outube-videos/

Robots can now learn to cook just like you do: by watching YouTube videos

Image Credit: Erik Charlton/Flickr


January 2, 2015 4:30 PM
Jordan Novet
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Researchers have come up with a new way to teach robots how to use tools simply by watching videos on YouTube.
The researchers, from the University of Maryland and the Australian research center NICTA, have just published a paper on their achievements, which they will present this month at the 29th annual conference of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.
The demonstration is the latest impressive use of a type of artificial intelligence called deep learning. A hot area for acquisitions as of late, deep learning entails training systems called artificial neural networks on lots of information derived from audio, images, and other inputs, and then presenting the systems with new information and receiving inferences about it in response.
The researchers employed convolutional neural networks, which are now in use at Facebook, among other companies, to identify the way a hand is grasping an item, and to recognize specific objects. The system also predicts the action involving the object and the hand.
To train their model, researchers selected data from 88 YouTube videos of people cooking. From there, the researchers generated commands that a robot could then execute.
“We believe this preliminary integrated system raises hope towards a fully intelligent robot for manipulation tasks that can automatically enrich its own knowledge resource by “watching” recordings from the World Wide Web,” the researchers concluded.
Read their full paper, “Robot Learning Manipulation Action Plans by ‘Watching’ Unconstrained Videos
from the World Wide Web,” here (PDF).

[vt]

Re: Yes Virginia, Those Are Robot Camel Jockeys

http://www.washingtonpost.com/postev...e-youre-ready/

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/019b3702-9...#axzz3O03OIpfY

[don]

Re: Yes Virginia, Those Are Robot Camel Jockeys

Deal Makers Invade CES, the Land of Geeks

David Carr THE MEDIA EQUATION

As I walked past the booth staffed by robots selling robots, the plants that water themselves and the prototype Mercedes with no driver at the International CES trade show last week, it occurred to me that the future of human existence might not require many humans.

At CES, the huge technology event in Las Vegas, reality is reconfigured and purportedly improved by the presence of software and machines and the absence of actual people. I watched one guy put on a pair of virtual reality glasses, then get strapped into a big, complicated contraption that mapped his movements as he trotted along hunting with a futuristic gun. I wanted to tell him: Find some friends, go outside, play paintball, run in three actual dimensions.

Huge crowds gathered around a robot from Toshiba named ChihiraAico, who smiled and gestured as she spoke to the crowd. Her performance, including preprogrammed winks, was equal parts cheesy and charming. As I watched her, I was reminded that the future never seems to quite arrive, and it ages quickly if it does. The spooky presence of the communications android brought to mind Disneyland animatronics from half a century ago and served as a reminder that people still cannot wait to have a robot for a friend.

Toshiba’s Chihira Aico robot.CreditRobyn Beck/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Not to say that the spectacle wasn’t enjoyable. You can’t spend the day looking at butterfly cages full of tiny drones bathed in blue high-definition lights (from the vast television sets that are everywhere) and not be taken by the gee-whiz of it all. Sure, a lot of the stuff will never find traction any place besides the convention hall, but the concentration of ingenuity, design and wonder is remarkable to behold.

Then again, some, if not a good portion of the almost 200,000 people at the trade show never made it to the 2.2 million square feet of exhibit space. What used to be a gathering of geeks hugging themselves over new technology has become, along with the Cannes Lions festival in June, a kind of Woodstock for marketers, brands, agencies and media companies. Google, Facebook and Twitter were there, but so were Procter & Gamble, Toyota and Wells Fargo.

All day and every day last week, the people who run huge companies were having top-to-top meetings in various hotel suites to set up deals for the next year, while their underlings prowled the floor looking for the next big thing. In the evening, those hordes took over the mega-clubs of Vegas to toast common interests and good fortune. It’s a parallel universe that has little to do with the technology being showcased.

CES now has a gravitational pull beyond gadgets — everyone goes because, well, everyone goes. On Tuesday night, MediaLink, a media consulting company, hosted what it called a dinner but was really a full-on poolside bacchanal for the kings and queens of Silicon Valley and all the streets — Madison, Vine, Wall — frolicking together in the Foxtail nightclub at the chic, new SLS hotel. It was a target-rich environment for anyone who wanted to gain access to capital, technology, know-how or power.

Michael Kassan founded MediaLink, and many people blame him for blowing the whistle that turned CES from a nerd curio into a bonanza for marketers, agencies and media organizations.

“Originally, it was about bringing together the people who wear the pocket squares with the people who wear the pocket protectors,” he said by phone on Friday, the day CES ended. “There’s been a mash-up between chief technology officers and chief marketing officers as what they do becomes more interrelated. Now it has taken off, and it’s the place where Google talks with Unilever and Facebook gets together with Kraft.”

The ancient trope of the convention-goer in bad ties making bad decisions far from home has been replaced by something much sexier. Instead of golf and cigars, it was bottle service and exclusive seating at a Snoop Dogg concert. Top executives from technology and consumer brands met at a kind of convention over the convention, far from the floor and whatever gewgaw happened to be wowing the attendees.

At Cannes Lion, which takes place in the south of France, a similar explosion in marketing and advertising has emerged. The event was conceived as a site for creative talent in the advertising world to share ideas, but then big brands wanted insights into the creative process, and the account executives and media sellers soon followed.

CES gives people who market products a look at the context those products will soon fall into. People complain, trash-talking Vegas or the unwashed nerds who make it all possible, but they show up in bigger and bigger numbers every year.

“At CES, we end up seeing people that we also see in New York, and it can be sort of silly,” said Matt Seiler, global chief executive of IPG Mediabrands. “But we travel in packs, and because everyone is in the same place at the same time, good things tend to happen.”

Technology has come to so dominate culture that it can run over many things in its path. Car companies aren’t waiting for the auto shows to unveil products, because cars are now rolling data centers. Mark Fields, the chief executive of Ford Motor, gave a keynote address at CES this year, and Mercedes-Benz unveiled a prototype of a self-driving car called the F015 that looked more like a pod for consuming media than a road vehicle.

In the same way, Dish Network didn’t wait for the television critic’s convention to announce Sling, its low-cost, over-the-web package of cable channels that just happens to include ESPN — it did so at CES last Monday. (In case people didn’t grasp how big a deal it was, Dish’s president and chief executive, Joseph Clayton, came in banging a huge drum as he led a marching band accompanied by a bunch of people in kangaroo costumes.)

Watching it all, I had a feeling that consumers will be traveling around in big bubbles of data that will, if all goes as planned, make the things around them smarter and their own lives better, with much of the technology driving it barely visible.

Rather than emphasizing an individual product, this year reflected the growth of cheaper and smarter sensors, signal-gatherers that can be hacked together to create an interconnected life. Imagine your smart car pulling up to your smart house where your smartwatch will download your health data to a smart kitchen so it knows what you should have for dinner, while your smart television tunes in to programs it knows you want to see.

If you are in the business of marketing products that are going to be in that refrigerator or on those screens, you’d want to be in Las Vegas to see what is coming next. And while you are at it, you’d be more than happy to cut a deal with the abundant digital and traditional publishers who were there vying for attention and money. Think about it: What better place to explore the world of virtual reality than Vegas, a place where both Venice and New York are rendered as casinos?

The crush of all those people looking for a peek over the hill makes getting around a bit of a challenge. I was staying at the Mandalay Bay, at the opposite end of the strip from the convention center. The cab line was hopeless and I was relieved when a shuttle to the show pulled up. And just in case I’d forgotten where I was, the van was equipped with mood lighting and a stripper pole right in the middle. For all I know, the pole was embedded with a number of sensors, and at CES sometime soon, there will be a hologram dancing around it.

[don]

Re: Yes Virginia, Those Are Robot Camel Jockeys

The Glass Cage: Automation and Us

by Nicholas Carr
Norton, 276 pp., $26.95

Sue Halpern

APRIL 2, 2015 ISSUE

NYRB

CCI/Art Archive/Art Resource
Artwork for the cover of a 1959 issue of the French science fiction magazine Galaxie

In September 2013, about a year before Nicholas Carr published The Glass Cage: Automation and Us, his chastening meditation on the human future, a pair of Oxford researchers issued a report predicting that nearly half of all jobs in the United States could be lost to machines within the next twenty years. The researchers, Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne, looked at seven hundred kinds of work and found that of those occupations, among the most susceptible to automation were loan officers, receptionists, paralegals, store clerks, taxi drivers, and security guards. Even computer programmers, the people writing the algorithms that are taking on these tasks, will not be immune. By Frey and Osborne’s calculations, there is about a 50 percent chance that programming, too, will be outsourced to machines within the next two decades.

In fact, this is already happening, in part because programmers increasingly rely on “self-correcting” code—that is, code that debugs and rewrites itself*—and in part because they are creating machines that are able to learn on the job. While these machines cannot think, per se, they can process phenomenal amounts of data with ever-increasing speed and use what they have learned to perform such functions as medical diagnosis, navigation, and translation, among many others. Add to these self-repairing robots that are able to negotiate hostile environments like radioactive power plants and collapsed mines and then fix themselves without human intercession when the need arises. The most recent iteration of these robots has been designed by the robots themselves, suggesting that in the future even roboticists may find themselves out of work.

The term for what happens when human workers are replaced by machines was coined by John Maynard Keynes in 1930 in the essay “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren.” He called it “technological unemployment.” At the time, Keynes considered technical unemployment a transitory condition, “a temporary phase of maladjustment” brought on by “our discovery of means of economizing the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour.” In the United States, for example, the mechanization of the railways around the time Keynes was writing his essay put nearly half a million people out of work. Similarly, rotary phones were making switchboard operators obsolete, while mechanical harvesters, plows, and combines were replacing traditional farmworkers, just as the first steam-engine tractors had replaced horses and oxen less than a century before. Machine efficiency was becoming so great that President Roosevelt, in 1935, told the nation that the economy might never be able to reabsorb all the workers who were being displaced. The more sanguine New York Times editorial board then accused the president of falling prey to the “calamity prophets.”

In retrospect, it certainly looked as if he had. Unemployment, which was at nearly 24 percent in 1932, dropped to less than 5 percent a decade later. This was a pattern that would reassert itself throughout the twentieth century: the economy would tank, automation would be identified as one of the main culprits, commentators would suggest that jobs were not coming back, and then the economy would rebound and with it employment, and all that nervous chatter about machines taking over would fade away.

When the economy faltered in 1958, and then again in 1961, for instance, what was being called the “automation problem” was taken up by Congress, which passed the Manpower Development and Training Act. In his State of the Union Address of 1962, President Kennedy explained that this law was meant “to stop the waste of able- bodied men and women who want to work, but whose only skill has been replaced by a machine, moved with a mill, or shut down with a mine.” Two years later, President Johnson convened a National Commission on Technology, Automation, and Economic Progress to assess the economic effects of automation and technological change. But then a funny thing happened. By the time the commission issued its report in 1966, the economy was approaching full employment. Concern about machines supplanting workers abated. The commission was disbanded.

That fear, though, was dormant, not gone. A Time magazine cover from 1980 titled “The Robot Revolution” shows a tentacled automaton strangling human workers. An essay three years later by an MIT economist named Harley Shaiken begins:

As more and more attention is focused on economic recovery, for 11 million people the grim reality is continued unemployment. Against this backdrop the central issue raised by rampant and pervasive technological change is not simply how many people may be displaced in the coming decade but how many who are currently unemployed will never return to the job.

Unemployment, which was approaching 10 percent at the time, then fell by half at decade’s end, and once more the automation problem receded.

Yet there it was again, on the heels of the economic collapse of 2008. An investigation by the Associated Press in 2013 put it this way:

Five years after the start of the Great Recession, the toll is terrifyingly clear: Millions of middle- class jobs have been lost in developed countries the world over.

And the situation is even worse than it appears.

Most of the jobs will never return, and millions more are likely to vanish as well, say experts who study the labor market….

They’re being obliterated by technology.

Year after year, the software that runs computers and an array of other machines and devices becomes more sophisticated and powerful and capable of doing more efficiently tasks that humans have always done. For decades, science fiction warned of a future when we would be architects of our own obsolescence, replaced by our machines; an Associated Press analysis finds that the future has arrived.

Here is what that future—which is to say now—looks like: banking, logistics, surgery, and medical recordkeeping are just a few of the occupations that have already been given over to machines. Manufacturing, which has long been hospitable to mechanization and automation, is becoming more so as the cost of industrial robots drops, especially in relation to the cost of human labor. According to a new study by the Boston Consulting Group, currently the expectation is that machines, which now account for 10 percent of all manufacturing tasks, are likely to perform about 25 percent of them by 2025. (To understand the economics of this transition, one need only consider the American automotive industry, where a human spot welder costs about $25 an hour and a robotic one costs $8. The robot is faster and more accurate, too.) The Boston group expects most of the growth in automation to be concentrated in transportation equipment, computer and electronic products, electrical equipment, and machinery.

Meanwhile, algorithms are writing most corporate reports, analyzing intelligence data for the NSA and CIA, reading mammograms, grading tests, and sniffing out plagiarism. Computers fly planes—Nicholas Carr points out that the average airline pilot is now at the helm of an airplane for about three minutes per flight—and they compose music and pick which pop songs should be recorded based on which chord progressions and riffs were hits in the past. Computers pursue drug development—a robot in the UK named Eve may have just found a new compound to treat malaria—and fill pharmacy vials.

Xerox uses computers—not people—to select which applicants to hire for its call centers. The retail giant Amazon “employs” 15,000 warehouse robots to pull items off the shelf and pack boxes. The self-driving car is being road-tested. A number of hotels are staffed by robotic desk clerks and cleaned by robotic chambermaids. Airports are instituting robotic valet parking. Cynthia Breazeal, the director of MIT’s personal robots group, raised $1 million in six days on the crowd-funding site Indiegogo, and then $25 million in venture capital funding, to bring Jibo, “the world’s first social robot,” to market.

What is a social robot? In the words of John Markoff of The New York Times, “it’s a robot with a little humanity.” It will tell your child bedtime stories, order takeout when you don’t feel like cooking, know you prefer Coke over Pepsi, and snap photos of important life events so you don’t have to step out of the picture. At the other end of the spectrum, machine guns, which automated killing in the nineteenth century, are being supplanted by Lethal Autonomous Robots (LARs) that can operate without human intervention. (By contrast, drones, which fly without an onboard pilot, still require a person at the controls.) All this—and unemployment is now below 6 percent.

Gross unemployment statistics, of course, can be deceptive. They don’t take into account people who have given up looking for work, or people who are underemployed, or those who have had to take pay cuts after losing higher-paying jobs. And they don’t reflect where the jobs are, or what sectors they represent, and which age cohorts are finding employment and which are not. And so while the pattern looks familiar, the worry is that this time around, machines really will undermine the labor force. As former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers wrote in The Wall Street Journal last July:

The economic challenge of the future will not be producing enough. It will be providing enough good jobs…. Today…there are more sectors losing jobs than creating jobs. And the general-purpose aspect of software technology means that even the industries and jobs that it creates are not forever.

To be clear, there are physical robots like Jibo and the machines that assemble our cars, and there are virtual robots, which are the algorithms that undergird the computers that perform countless daily tasks, from driving those cars, to Google searches, to online banking. Both are avatars of automation, and both are altering the nature of work, taking on not only repetitive physical jobs, but intellectual and heretofore exclusively human ones as well. And while both are defining features of what has been called “the second machine age,” what really distinguishes this moment is the speed at which technology is changing and changing society with it. If the “calamity prophets” are finally right, and this time the machines really will win out, this is why. It’s not just that computers seem to be infiltrating every aspect of our lives, it’s that they haveinfiltrated them and are infiltrating them with breathless rapidity. It’s not just that life seems to have sped up, it’s that it has. And that speed, and that infiltration, appear to have a life of their own.

Just as computer hardware follows Moore’s Law, which says that computing power doubles every eighteen months, so too does computer capacity and functionality. Consider, for instance, the process of legal discovery. As Carr describes it,

computers can [now] parse thousands of pages of digitized documents in seconds. Using e-discovery software with language-analysis algorithms, the machines not only spot relevant words and phrases but also discern chains of events, relationships among people, and even personal emotions and motivations. A single computer can take over the work of dozens of well-paid professionals.

Or take the autonomous automobile. It can sense all the vehicles around it, respond to traffic controls and sudden movements, apply the brakes as needed, know when the tires need air, signal a turn, and never get a speeding ticket. Volvo predicts that by 2020 its vehicles will be “crash-free,” but even now there are cars that can park themselves with great precision.

The goal of automating automobile parking, and of automating driving itself, is no different than the goal of automating a factory, or pharmaceutical discovery, or surgery: it’s to rationalize the process, making it more efficient, productive, and cost-effective. What this means is that automation is always going to be more convenient than what came before it—for someone. And while it’s often pitched as being most convenient for the end user—the patient on the operating table, say, or the Amazon shopper, or the Google searcher, in fact the rewards of convenience flow most directly to those who own the automated system (Jeff Bezos, for example, not the Amazon Prime member).

Since replacing human labor with machine labor is not simply the collateral damage of automation but, rather, the point of it, whenever the workforce is subject to automation, technological unemployment, whether short- or long-lived, must follow. The MITeconomists Eric Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, who are champions of automation, state this unambiguously when they write:

Even the most beneficial developments have unpleasant consequences that must be managed…. Technological progress is going to leave behind some people, perhaps even a lot of people, as it races ahead.1

Flip this statement around, and what Brynjolfsson and McAfee are also saying is that while technological progress is going to force many people to submit to tightly monitored control of their movements, with their productivity clearly measured, that progress is also going to benefit perhaps just a few as it races ahead. And that, it appears, is what is happening. (Of the fifteen wealthiest Americans, six own digital technology companies, the oldest of which, Microsoft, has been in existence only since 1975. Six others are members of a single family, the Waltons, whose vast retail empire, with its notoriously low wages, has meant that people are much cheaper and more expendable than warehouse robots. Still, Walmart has benefited from an automated point-of-sale system that enables its owners to know precisely what is selling where and when, which in turn allows them to avoid stocking slow-moving items and to tie up less money than the competitors in inventory.)

As Paul Krugman wrote a couple of years ago in The New York Times:

Smart machines may make higher GDP possible, but they will also reduce the demand for people—including smart people. So we could be looking at a society that grows ever richer, but in which all the gains in wealth accrue to whoever owns the robots.

In the United States, real wages have been stagnant for the past four decades, while corporate profits have soared. As of last year, 16 percent of men between eighteen and fifty-four and 30 percent of women in the same age group were not working, and more than a third of those who were unemployed attributed their joblessness to technology. As The Economist reported in early 2014:

Recent research suggests that…substituting capital for labor through automation is increasingly attractive; as a result owners of capital have captured ever more of the world’s income since the 1980s, while the share going to labor has fallen.

There is a certain school of thought, championed primarily by those such as Google’s Larry Page, who stand to make a lot of money from the ongoing digitization and automation of just about everything, that the elimination of jobs concurrent with a rise in productivity will lead to a leisure class freed from work. Leaving aside questions about how these lucky folks will house and feed themselves, the belief that most people would like nothing more than to be able to spend all day in their pajamas watching TV—which turns out to be what many “nonemployed” men do—sorely misconstrues the value of work, even work that might appear to an outsider to be less than fulfilling. Stated simply: work confers identity. When Dublin City University professor Michael Doherty surveyed Irish workers, including those who stocked grocery shelves and drove city buses, to find out if work continues to be “a significant locus of personal identity,” even at a time when employment itself is less secure, he concluded that “the findings of this research can be summed up in the succinct phrase: ‘work matters.’”2

How much it matters may not be quantifiable, but in an essay in The New York Times, Dean Baker, the codirector of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, noted that there was

a 50 to 100 percent increase in death rates for older male workers in the years immediately following a job loss, if they previously had been consistently employed.

One reason was suggested in a study by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the author of Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (1990), who found, Carr reports, that “people were happier, felt more fulfilled by what they were doing, while they were at work than during their leisure hours.”

Even where automation does not eliminate jobs, it often changes the nature of work. Carr makes a convincing case for the ways in which automation dulls the brain, removing the need to pay attention or master complicated routines or think creatively and react quickly. Those airline pilots who now are at the controls for less than three minutes find themselves spending most of their flight time staring at computer screens while automated systems do the actual flying. As a consequence, their overreliance on automation, and on a tendency to trust computer data even in the face of contradictory physical evidence, can be dangerous. Carr cites a study by Matthew Ebbatson, a human factors researcher, that

found a direct correlation between a pilot’s aptitude at the controls and the amount of time the pilot had spent flying without the aid of automation…. The analysis indicated that “manual flying skills decay quite rapidly towards the fringes of ‘tolerable’ performance without relatively frequent practice.”

Similarly, an FAA report on cockpit automation released in 2013 found that over half of all airplane accidents were the result of the mental autopilot brought on by actual autopilot.

If aviation is a less convincing case, since the overall result of automation has been to make flying safer, consider a more mundane and ubiquitous activity, Internet searches using Google. According to Carr, relying on the Internet for facts and figures is making us mindless sloths. He points to a study in Science that demonstrates that the wealth of information readily available on the Internet disinclines users from remembering what they’ve found out. He also cites an interview with Amit Singhal, Google’s lead search engineer, who states that “the more accurate the machine gets [at predicting search terms], the lazier the questions become.”

A corollary to all this intellectual laziness and dullness is what Carr calls “deskilling”—the loss of abilities and proficiencies as more and more authority is handed over to machines. Doctors who cede authority to machines to read X-rays and make diagnoses, architects who rely increasingly on computer-assisted design (CAD) programs, marketers who place ads based on algorithms, traders who no longer trade—all suffer a diminution of the expertise that comes with experience, or they never gain that experience in the first place. As Carr sees it:

As more skills are built into the machine, it assumes more control over the work, and the worker’s opportunity to engage in and develop deeper talents, such as those involved in interpretation and judgment, dwindles. When automation reaches its highest level, when it takes command of the job, the worker, skillwise, has nowhere to go but down.

Conversely, machines have nowhere to go but up. In Carr’s estimation, “as we grow more reliant on applications and algorithms, we become less capable of acting without their aid…. That makes the software more indispensable still. Automation breeds automation.”

But since automation also produces quicker drug development, safer highways, more accurate medical diagnoses, cheaper material goods, and greater energy efficiency, to name just a few of its obvious benefits, there have been few cautionary voices like Nicholas Carr’s urging us to take stock, especially, of the effects of automation on our very humanness—what makes us who we are as individuals—and on our humanity—what makes us who we are in aggregate. Yet shortly after The Glass Cage was published, a group of more than one hundred Silicon Valley luminaries, led by Tesla’s Elon Musk, and scientists, including the theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, issued a call to conscience for those working on automation’s holy grail, artificial intelligence, lest they, in Musk’s words, “summon the demon.” (In Hawking’s estimation, AI could spell the end of the human race as machines evolve faster than people and overtake us.) Their letter is worth quoting at length, because it demonstrates both the hubris of those who are programming our future and the possibility that without some kind of oversight, the golem, not God, might emerge from their machines:

[Artificial intelligence] has yielded remarkable successes in various component tasks such as speech recognition, image classification, autonomous vehicles, machine translation, legged locomotion, and question-answering systems.

As capabilities in these areas and others cross the threshold from laboratory research to economically valuable technologies, a virtuous cycle takes hold whereby even small improvements in performance are worth large sums of money, prompting greater investments in research….

The potential benefits are huge, since everything that civilization has to offer is a product of human intelligence; we cannot predict what we might achieve when this intelligence is magnified by the tools AI may provide, but the eradication of disease and poverty are not unfathomable. Because of the great potential of AI, it is important to research how to reap its benefits while avoiding potential pitfalls.

The progress in AI research makes it timely to focus research not only on making AI more capable, but also on maximizing the societal benefit…. [Until now the field of AI] has focused largely on techniques that are neutral with respect to purpose. We recommend expanded research aimed at ensuring that increasingly capable AI systems are robust and beneficial: our AI systems must do what we want them to do.

Just who is this “we” who must ensure that robots, algorithms, and intelligent machines act in the public interest? It is not, as Nicholas Carr suggests it should be, the public. Rather, according to the authors of the research plan that accompanies the letter signed by Musk, Hawking, and the others, making artificial intelligence “robust and beneficial,” like making artificial intelligence itself, is an engineering problem, to be solved by engineers. To be fair, no one but those designing these systems is in a position to build in measures of control and security, but what those measures are, and what they aim to accomplish, is something else again. Indeed, their research plan, for example, looks to “maximize the economic benefits of artificial intelligence while mitigating adverse effects, which could include increased inequality and unemployment.”

The priorities are clear: money first, people second. Or consider this semantic dodge: “If, as some organizations have suggested, autonomous weapons should be banned, is it possible to develop a precise definition of autonomy for this purpose…?” Moreover, the authors acknowledge that “aligning the values of powerful AI systems with our own values and preferences [may be] difficult,” though this might be solved by building “systems that can learn or acquire values at run-time.” However well-meaning, they fail to say what values, or whose, or to recognize that most values are not universal but, rather, culturally and socially constructed, subjective, and inherently biased.

We live in a technophilic age. We love our digital devices and all that they can do for us. We celebrate our Internet billionaires: they show us the way and deliver us to our destiny. We have President Obama, who established the National Robotics Initiative to develop the “next generation of robotics, to advance the capability and usability of such systems and artifacts, and to encourage existing and new communities to focus on innovative application areas.” Even so, it is naive to believe that government is competent, let alone in a position, to control the development and deployment of robots, self-generating algorithms, and artificial intelligence. Government has too many constituent parts that have their own, sometimes competing, visions of the technological future. Business, of course, is self-interested and resists regulation. We, the people, are on our own here—though if the AI developers have their way, not for long.

1. *Carr discusses integrated development environments (IDEs) which programmers use to check their code, and quotes Vivek Haldar, a veteran Google developer: “‘The behavior all these tools encourage is not ‘think deeply about your code and write it carefully,’ but ‘just write a crappy first draft of your code, and then the tools will tell you not just what’s wrong with it, but also how to make it better.’” ↩
2. 1The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (Norton, 2014), pp. 10–11. ↩
3. 2Michael Doherty, “When the Working Day Is Through: The End of Work As Identity?” Work, Employment and Society, Vol. 23, No. 1 (March 2009). ↩

[don]

Re: Yes Virginia, Those Are Robot Camel Jockeys

Caterpillar's Mining Automation Journey


Mining automation has long been a dream for those in the industry. Caterpillar is making it happen in a big way - and continuing it's journey to developing a fully autonomous mine site.

[don]

and she's hot . . .

The perfect 21st-century female looks like a million bucks though costs a great deal more. In “Ex Machina,” Alex Garland’s slyly spooky futuristic shocker about old and new desires, the female in question is a robot called Ava, a name suggestive of both Adam and Eve. Ava has a serene humanoid face and the expressive hands and feet of a dancer, but also the transparent figure of a visible woman anatomy model. Beautiful and smart, sleek and stacked, Ava is at once decidedly unsettling and safely under lock and key, which makes her an ideal posthuman female.

“Ex Machina” is itself a smart, sleek movie about men and the machines they make, but it’s also about men and the women they dream up. That makes it a creation story, except instead of God repurposing a rib, the story here involves a Supreme Being who has built an A.I., using a fortune he’s made from a search engine called Blue Book. Mr. Garland, who wrote and directed, isn’t afraid of throwing around big names or heavy ideas, and he has pointedly named the search engine after Ludwig Wittgenstein’s 1930s “Blue Book.” The trouble with thinking machines, Wittgenstein writes, isn’t that we don’t know yet if they can do the job, but “that the sentence ‘a machine thinks (perceives, wishes)’ seems somehow nonsensical.” And it seems so because such a machine is not (yet) known to us.

“Ex Machina” skips right over that little problem and, like all good science fiction, asserts that the apparently implausible (thinking machines) is absolutely here and now. It makes the imaginative leap, as does Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson), a software grunt who’s won a visit with his employer, the reclusive Blue Book mogul, Nathan (a terrific Oscar Isaac). Shortly after the movie opens, Caleb is being helicoptered to Nathan’s remote compound, a modernist retreat that’s part Zen palace, part patrician man cave, with verdant views, smart-house technology and one curiously mute female employee, a zomboid beauty named Kyoko (Sonoya Mizuno). This isn’t a house, Nathan explains while giving a tour; it’s a research facility in which he’s been working on an artificial intelligence project.

That would be Ava, a conceptual knockout played by the sensational young actress Alicia Vikander. Intricately rendered from her peekaboo belly to the mesh skin that covers much of her visibly artificial parts, Ava looks at once familiar and new, distinctly human and thoroughly machined, evoking by turns the robot in “Metropolis” and a parade of puppet and android vixens. With computer-generated imagery obscuring much of her body, Ms. Vikander builds her controlled performance incrementally, at times geometrically, with angled gestures, head tilts and precision steps. As Ava begins to expresses herself more, making eyes at the exit, Ms. Vikander, who studied ballet, may also remind you of that dancing doll Coppélia, if by way of a “Blade Runner” replicant.

Wowed by Nathan’s attentions or maybe by Ava’s proportions — and presumably by the whole groovy setup that makes the house seem like a docked spaceship — Caleb signs onto Nathan’s endeavors. These at first mostly involve the dudes’ hanging out and Caleb’s chatting with Ava through the thick glass partition that, inexplicably, separates her from the rest of the spread. To explain Caleb’s role, Nathan invokes the Turing test(the imitation game named for its creator, Alan Turing), which hinges on the idea that if a person doesn’t know that he or she is talking to a computer, it makes sense to call the computer intelligent. Except that Caleb, as he points out, knows that he’s talking to a machine. Airily dismissing that nit, Nathan narrows his eyes and asks how Ava makes Caleb feel.

With that appeal to feeling, the movie is off and running. The lab starts to heat up, as does Caleb, who, even as he intellectually spars with Nathan (they’re not remotely in the same weight class), becomes emotionally invested in Ava, friendly chat by chat, shy smile by smile. If, as Wittgenstein also writes, “the human body is the best picture of the human soul” then Caleb’s body when he’s with Ava is an entire Instagram feed of male surrender, from his widening eyes to slackening mouth. Physiognomy is often destiny for actors, and a close-up of Mr. Gleeson’s slender, bobbing throat — stretched across the screen as if offering itself to a knife — nicely suggests why he landed this role.

Mr. Garland, a novelist turned screenwriter making his directing debut, sets an eerily, cleverly unsettled stage. The prowling camerawork establishes a sense of absolute control that fits with this strange fishbowl world and is accentuated by copious production design details, including the glass walls and ubiquitous security cameras. He plays with visual contrasts — Mr. Isaac’s compact, muscled body and Mr. Gleeson’s long, drooping one, picture windows that look out onto an expansively lush landscape and windowless rooms that register as upmarket prison cells — that dovetail with the narrative’s multiple, amusingly deployed dualities: confinement and liberation, agency and submission, mind and body. It sounds more serious than it plays because while Mr. Garland wants to tease your brain, he’s an entertainer, and in time ditches science and philosophy for romance and action.

Some of what follows conforms to template, though there’s more here than slick genre moves, including Mr. Isaac and Ms. Vikander, who suggest complexities not on the page. While Nathan’s charisma throws the triangulated drama off balance, “Ex Machina” belongs to Ava, whose depths of meaning enrich the movie and then engulf it. Ava has antecedents in “Pygmalion,” “Metropolis” and elsewhere. Yet even as she transcends the human-machine divide, she defies categorization because of the radical autonomy she shares with the weird sisters inhabited by Scarlett Johansson in “Her,” “Under the Skin” and “Lucy,” and Tatiana Maslany’s clones in the TV show “Orphan Black.” These are the new heroines: totally hot, bracingly cold, powerfully sovereign — and posthuman.




http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/10/mo...ef=movies&_r=0

[lektrode]

Re: and she's hot . . .

ditto del'd

[lektrode]

Re: and she's hot . . .

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/10/mo...ef=movies&_r=0

altho it would appear that 'she's hotter' in the movie than up close n personal ?

You Need to Get to Know Ex Machina’s Alicia Vikander

and hows this for a... uhhh... 'timely' title/storyline?

Tulip Fever (2015) Filming / Release TBA

Alicia as Sophia.
A 17th century romance in which an artist falls for a married young woman while he's commissioned to paint her portrait. The two invest in the risky tulip market in hopes to build a future together.

The in-demand actress spoke with Indiewire about her breakthrough performance in Alex Garland's acclaimed sci-fi.

[vt]

Re: and she's hot . . .

Will robots reduce FIRE? Probably not, but entry level positions will be in danger.

http://blogs.wsj.com/japanrealtime/2...japanese-bank/

[santafe2]

Re: Yes Virginia, Those Are Robot Camel Jockeys

In September 2013, about a year before Nicholas Carr published The Glass Cage: Automation and Us, his chastening meditation on the human future, a pair of Oxford researchers issued a report predicting that nearly half of all jobs in the United States could be lost to machines within the next twenty years.

Although I do subscribe to the general thesis that over time, humanity as we know it is screwed, the US is well positioned to attract the best survivors and those who will thrive in the 21st Century. The US political and social system is designed to destroy the weak and promote the strong. This is not the country of kumbaya. If half of all jobs are destroyed in the US over the next 20 years, more jobs will be created from the bones of the unemployed. It's not pretty but that's how the US moves forward.

[don]

Re: Yes Virginia, Those Are Robot Camel Jockeys

grin & bear it, the translation is Googles . . . .

The next 508 Peugeot lead only in traffic ...

by Emilien Ercolani, 16 April 2015 11:41

The French manufacturer does not intend to miss the train of the smart car: 2018 announces a future model of its 508 with "driving aids in bottling situation.

"This is a first step, in a way: Imagine a car that automatically adapts to a bottling situation ahead a little when necessary and "accordion made" for you. All drivers who have experienced this long minutes have dreamed, and Peugeot will do in 2018.

Indeed, it is the CEO of PSA Peugeot Citroën, Carlos Tavares, who made the announcement Wednesday at a hearing at the National Assembly: the next big sedan, model 508, is equipped with technology automated driving.

"This will be a first for our group" is it glad. And it will be especially a first step towards the era of cars more intelligent. After the cars are parked all alone So here come the cars that lead only in certain situations, before the cars that should ultimately lead by themselves for short!

Peugeot has not yet fully detailed his concept: it is not known if the driver will completely do something else for a traffic jam or if it will still "attend" the car in one way or another. Note that other manufacturers are working on these kinds of concepts, including the BMW-Mercedes-Audi Germans.

[santafe2]

Re: Robots Will Create 'Permanently Unemployable Underclass'

It's an opinion piece from the NYT and breaks down along the usual lines at the end but it's worth reading.



CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — THE machine hums along, quietly scanning the slides, generating Pap smear diagnostics, just the way a college-educated, well-compensated lab technician might.

A robot with emotion-detection software interviews visitors to the United States at the border. In field tests, this eerily named “embodied avatar kiosk” does much better than humans in catching those with invalid documentation. Emotional-processing software has gotten so good that ad companies are looking into “mood-targeted” advertising, and the government of Dubai wants to use it to scan all its closed-circuit TV feeds.

Yes, the machines are getting smarter, and they’re coming for more and more jobs. Not just low-wage jobs, either.

Today, machines can process regular spoken language and not only recognize human faces, but also read their expressions. They can classify personality types, and have started being able to carry out conversations with appropriate emotional tenor.

Machines are getting better than humans at figuring out who to hire, who’s in a mood to pay a little more for that sweater, and who needs a coupon to nudge them toward a sale. In applications around the world, software is being used to predict whether people are lying, how they feel and whom they’ll vote for.

To crack these cognitive and emotional puzzles, computers needed not only sophisticated, efficient algorithms, but also vast amounts of human-generated data, which can now be easily harvested from our digitized world. The results are dazzling. Most of what we think of as expertise, knowledge and intuition is being deconstructed and recreated as an algorithmic competency, fueled by big data.

But computers do not just replace humans in the workplace. They shift the balance of power even more in favor of employers. Our normal response to technological innovation that threatens jobs is to encourage workers to acquire more skills, or to trust that the nuances of the human mind or human attention will always be superior in crucial ways. But when machines of this capacity enter the equation, employers have even more leverage, and our standard response is not sufficient for the looming crisis.

Machines aren’t used because they perform some tasks that much better than humans, but because, in many cases, they do a “good enough” job while also being cheaper, more predictable and easier to control than quirky, pesky humans. Technology in the workplace is as much about power and control as it is about productivity and efficiency.

This used to be spoken about more openly. An ad in 1967 for an automated accounting system urged companies to replace humans with automated systems that “can’t quit, forget or get pregnant.” Featuring a visibly pregnant, smiling woman leaving the office with baby shower gifts, the ads, which were published in leading business magazines, warned of employees who “know too much for your own good” — “your good” meaning that of the employer. Why be dependent on humans? “When Alice leaves, will she take your billing system with her?” the ad pointedly asked, emphasizing that this couldn’t be fixed by simply replacing “Alice” with another person.

The solution? Replace humans with machines. To pregnancy as a “danger” to the workplace, the company could have added “get sick, ask for higher wages, have a bad day, aging parent, sick child or a cold.” In other words, be human.
I recently had a conversation with a call center worker from the Philippines. While trying to solve my minor problem, he needed to get a code from a supervisor. The code didn’t work. A groan escaped his lips: “I’m going to lose my job.” Alarmed, I inquired why. He had done nothing wrong, and it was a small issue.“It doesn’t matter,” he said.

He was probably right. He is dispensable. Technology first allowed the job to be outsourced. Now machines at call centers can be used to seamlessly generate spoken responses to customer inquiries, so that a single operator can handle multiple customers all at once. Meanwhile, the customer often isn’t aware that she is mostly being spoken to by a machine.

This is the way technology is being used in many workplaces: to reduce the power of humans, and employers’ dependency on them, whether by replacing, displacing or surveilling them. Many technological developments contribute to this shift in power: advanced diagnostic systems that can do medical or legal analysis; the ability to outsource labor to the lowest-paid workers, measure employee tasks to the minute and “optimize” worker schedules in a way that devastates ordinary lives. Indeed, regardless of whether unemployment has gone up or down, real wages have been stagnant or declining in the United States for decades. Most people no longer have the leverage to bargain.

In the 1980s, the Harvard social scientist Shoshana Zuboff examined how some workplaces used technology to “automate” — take power away from the employee — while others used technology differently, to “informate” — to empower people.

For academics, software developers and corporate and policy leaders who are lucky enough to live in this “informate” model, technology has been good. So far. To those for whom it’s been less of a blessing, we keep doling out the advice to upgrade skills. Unfortunately, for most workers, technology is used to “automate” the job and to take power away.

And workers already feel like they are powerless as it is. Last week, low-wage workers around the country demonstrated for a $15-an-hour wage, calling it economic justice. Those with college degrees may not think that they share a problem with these workers, who are fighting to reclaim some power with employers, but they do. The fight is poised to move up the skilled-labor chain.

Optimists insist that we’ve been here before, during the Industrial Revolution, when machinery replaced manual labor, and all we need is a little more education and better skills. But that is not a sufficient answer. One historical example is no guarantee of future events, and we won’t be able to compete by trying to stay one step ahead in a losing battle.

This cannot just be about machines’ capabilities or human skills, since the true solution lies in neither. Confronting the threat posed by machines, and the way in which the great data harvest has made them ever more able to compete with human workers, must be about our priorities.

It’s easy to imagine an alternate future where advanced machine capabilities are used to empower more of us, rather than control most of us. There will potentially be more time, resources and freedom to share, but only if we change how we do things. We don’t need to reject or blame technology. This problem is not us versus the machines, but between us, as humans, and how we value one another.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/19/op...ming.html?_r=0

[Woodsman]

Re: Robots Will Create 'Permanently Unemployable Underclass'

It's an opinion piece from the NYT and breaks down along the usual lines at the end but it's worth reading.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/19/op...ming.html?_r=0

A complementary piece, wide-ranging and similarly worthwhile.

For most of human history, the top speed at which human beings could travel had been around 25 miles per hour. By 1900 it had increased to 100 miles per hour, and for the next seventy years it did seem to be increasing exponentially. By the time Toffler was writing, in 1970, the record for the fastest speed at which any human had traveled stood at roughly 25,000 mph, achieved by the crew of Apollo 10 in 1969, just one year before. At such an exponential rate, it must have seemed reasonable to assume that within a matter of decades, humanity would be exploring other solar systems.

Since 1970, no further increase has occurred. The record for the fastest a human has ever traveled remains with the crew of Apollo 10. True, the commercial airliner Concorde, which first flew in 1969, reached a maximum speed of 1,400 mph. And the Soviet Tupolev Tu-144, which flew first, reached an even faster speed of 1,553 mph. But those speeds not only have failed to increase; they have decreased since the Tupolev Tu-144 was cancelled and the Concorde was abandoned.

...

By the sixties, conservative political forces were growing skittish about the socially disruptive effects of technological progress, and employers were beginning to worry about the economic impact of mechanization. The fading Soviet threat allowed for a reallocation of resources in directions seen as less challenging to social and economic arrangements, or indeed directions that could support a campaign of reversing the gains of progressive social movements and achieving a decisive victory in what U.S. elites saw as a global class war. The change of priorities was introduced as a withdrawal of big-government projects and a return to the market, but in fact the change shifted government-directed research away from programs like NASA or alternative energy sources and toward military, information, and medical technologies.

...

But if there was a conscious, or semi-conscious, move away from investment in research that might lead to better rockets and robots, and toward research that would lead to such things as laser printers and CAT scans, it had begun well before Toffler’s Future Shock (1970) and Gilder’s Wealth and Poverty (1981). What their success shows is that the issues they raised—that existing patterns of technological development would lead to social upheaval, and that we needed to guide technological development in directions that did not challenge existing structures of authority—echoed in the corridors of power. Statesmen and captains of industry had been thinking about such questions for some time.

...

In fact, the United States never did abandon gigantic, government-controlled schemes of technological development. Mainly, they just shifted to military research—and not just to Soviet-scale schemes like Star Wars, but to weapons projects, research in communications and surveillance technologies, and similar security-related concerns. To some degree this had always been true: the billions poured into missile research had always dwarfed the sums allocated to the space program. Yet by the seventies, even basic research came to be conducted following military priorities. One reason we don’t have robot factories is because roughly 95 percent of robotics research funding has been channeled through the Pentagon, which is more interested in developing unmanned drones than in automating paper mills.

A case could be made that even the shift to research and development on information technologies and medicine was not so much a reorientation toward market-driven consumer imperatives, but part of an all-out effort to follow the technological humbling of the Soviet Union with total victory in the global class war—seen simultaneously as the imposition of absolute U.S. military dominance overseas, and, at home, the utter rout of social movements.

For the technologies that did emerge proved most conducive to surveillance, work discipline, and social control.

...

Competition forces factory owners to mechanize production, to reduce labor costs, but while this is to the short-term advantage of the firm, mechanization’s effect is to drive down the general rate of profit. For 150 years, economists have debated whether all this is true. But if it is true, then the decision by industrialists not to pour research funds into the invention of the robot factories that everyone was anticipating in the sixties, and instead to relocate their factories to labor-intensive, low-tech facilities in China or the Global South makes a great deal of sense.

Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit

[don]

Re: Robots Will Create 'Permanently Unemployable Underclass'

Hands-Free Cars Take Wheel, and Law Isn’t Stopping Them

By AARON M. KESSLERMAY 2, 2015


A General Motors promotional film envisions the future: Drivers enter the highway, put their cars on “autopilot” and sit back as the vehicle takes over and heads for the horizon. The film’s date? 1956.

Sixty years later, automakers are making that dream a reality.

But the technology has sprinted ahead so fast that lawmakers and regulators are scrambling to catch up with features like hands-free driving that are now months away, rather than years.


This summer, Tesla, the maker of high-end electric cars, is promising to equip its Model S sedan to take over highway driving under certain conditions. In January, Audi will introduce a vehicle that can pilot itself through traffic jams. And next year, Cadillac will offer no-hands highway driving with its “Super Cruise.”

Limited forms of hands-free driving have already arrived. Luxury brands like Mercedes-Benz and Infiniti offer “lane keeping” features that allow drivers to take their hands off the wheel for periods of time on straight stretches of road.

But the innovations have prompted the question: Is it legal?

The vast majority of states do not have any rules at all. The few that do passed the laws primarily to allow research and testing. Only New York specifically requires that drivers keep one hand on the wheel, but that dates to a law from 1967.

As a result, automakers are pushing into a regulatory void.

“Where it’s not expressly prohibited, we would argue it’s allowed,” said Anna Schneider, vice president for governmental relations at Volkswagen, which owns Audi.

“We don’t need any change in legislation to put Super Cruise on the road,” said Dan Flores, a spokesman for General Motors. Tesla declined to comment on the issue.

On a recent afternoon, a Volvo official demonstrated its new XC90 sport utility vehicle along a leafy road in New Jersey. Set for release in June, the XC90 has a semiautonomous feature called “pilot assist” intended for congested traffic.

After a driver pressed a button on the steering wheel, sensors scanned the road and locked on to the vehicle a few car lengths ahead. A white icon lit up on the dashboard, and the wheel began moving on its own.

As the road curved, the Volvo steered itself through it, automatically adjusting the throttle and steering. The vehicle seamlessly kept on going, though after about five seconds, a subtle dashboard light asked the driver to keep a gentle touch on the wheel.

Not that it was needed — the Volvo could keep going hands-free for miles at speeds up to 30 miles per hour on a properly marked road. But for now Volvo has programmed the XC90 to start slowing down if a driver does not heed the warning light, making the vehicle a bridge between “lane keeping” and the truly hands-free technology set to hit the market soon.

“This is about making the tedious parts of people’s drives less stressful,” said Jim Nichols, a spokesman for Volvo. “We’re not talking about a driver simply checking out and not paying attention.”

Car manufacturers see hands-free technology as the natural next step in driving — an evolution that has gone from cruise control to anti-lock brakes to electronic stability control. None of those innovations required permission from regulators.

And legal experts say the automakers’ positions are most likely correct — that in the absence of specific laws against it, hands-free driving is legal.

“Most states don’t expressly prohibit automated vehicles,” said Bryant Walker Smith, a professor of law and engineering at the University of South Carolina.

But that does not necessarily mean drivers will not face scrutiny.

“It’s not just what’s on the books; it’s what’s enforced,” Mr. Smith said. “If a police officer sees you driving down the road with no hands, he could determine that’s reckless and still give you a ticket. Individual officers have a tremendous amount of discretion.”

No federal rules explicitly bar the practice, either. Part of why federal and state officials have struggled to define autonomous rules is that the issue cuts across traditional legal turf.

“The federal government largely regulates vehicle design, such as ‘Does it meet crash safety standards,’ ” Mr. Smith said. The states are the ones that have regulated drivers and their behavior, he said. “Now the car is becoming the driver.”

California, Nevada, Michigan, Florida and the District of Columbia legalized autonomous technology in certain circumstances — primarily to encourage testing. Several others are considering rules.

But for consumers, and local officials themselves, the fractured nature of what is allowed, and where, may create uncertainty.

[dcarrigg]

Re: Robots Will Create 'Permanently Unemployable Underclass'

Hey, Santafe, I just realized how hostile that last post sounded when I re-read it just now.

Sorry about that. Lordy, lordy what was I bent out of shape about that night?