I am most delighted by the newest addition to my home office. It is Alexa. Unfortunately, Alexa was banned by my wife from being downstairs. However, Alexa listens to me! But, now I have this sudden fear that Alexa might fire me ....
Please allow me to explain.
Watson and Alexa
I recently had the chance to listen to the product development teams from IBM and Amazon, among others. The IBM team that also works with Watson and Deep Blue were talking about not just the Internet of Things, but the Internet of Caring Things. That is, a whole array of intelligent and interconnected devices that can make one's home a smart home, thus making it potentially very safe for elderly people living at home.
The Amazon team introduced me to the Amazon Echo, an internet device that is voice activated. It is a marvel of a device, and responds to 'Alexa.' I procured it and promptly learned how to order Pizza with it!
Things Internet
Ever since the transistor was invented, and steady progress was made in the capability of memory chips, our electronics have been getting better and better. Along with that the ability of devices to be responsive to their environment and navigate is also becoming highly sophisticated. All of this is very enticing and one can see how it can make life very convenient.
A quick illustrative list of these developments includes drones, automated vacuum cleaners, driverless cars, robotic butlers, care givers, genomics to provide tailored medicine, and personal digital assistants.
Once the excitement of these developments subsides, one is tempted to ponder what it might mean or us as a society. And I see some troubling prospects.
Artificial Intelligence
Whenever we see an impressive feat such as IBM Watson's chess playing capabilities, we console ourselves by saying , well it can never beat a real champion (although it did!)
What this misses, is that Watson can beat 99.999% of chess players.
If you were to then translate this power to all domains of life, AI will be better than most humans in most things!
Man and Machine
Ray Kurzweil is the Chief Technology Officer at Google. He predicts the singularity in 2045. Singularity is when machine intelligence overtakes human intelligence, and perhaps when man and machine fuse.
This is a world in which humans would be wearing exo-skeletons for strength, replacing organs regularly with artificial ones, have nano-technology devices coursing through their bodies, have brain implants to enhance mental functions and tailored gene therapy to enable us to live longer.
Such a human will be unrecognizable from the human today!
Kurzweil says, the 'jobs' of that coming era will be for those who understand this new world in which man and machine are organically fused .....
Jobs!
Each of these devices if applied at scale could mean the loss of jobs. We have a long history of this. The majority of the labor force was in farming at the turn of the last century and with industrial revolution, farm labor is barely in the single digits as a percentage of the population. In the U.S. it is about 1% of the labor force.
It is easy to say that traditional jobs will be replaced by new jobs. But are we creating as many new jobs as the ones lost? And how about those, unable to make the transition to this new world?
White Collar Jobs - It might be a blind spot. But when we say jobs, we tend to think of the factory worker, or the bank teller. But the rise of Artificial Intelligence poses real threats to white collar jobs. Medicine, Legal and the Education professions.
Books
Two books are excellent and worth reading on this topic.
Rise of the Robots by Martin Ford. This is a current best seller and describes the above developments in great detail, with more alarm.
The Mind's I by Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett. This is my #1 book of all time - please don't tell my pastor! This book was published in the 1980s and is an entertaining, yet profound rumination about the 'I' or our sense of self.
Movies
Short Circuit with Steve Guttenberg. The robot Johnny #5 comes alive. A fun and delightful movie to watch. My favorite line from this movie is when Johnny #5 goes around looking for "input, ..... more input."
Ex Machina with Ballet Dance Alicia Vikander. This movie is based on the famous 'Turing Test' in Artificial Intelligence. It is a beautifully made movie, with graceful movements. And the story packs a true punch.
Here is an opportunity for you to protest that I have not mentioned HAL and others from other great movies on the topic of Artificial Intelligence....!
Are we ready?
There are entrepreneurs and technologists racing away at developing all these marvelous things internet. But is our society ready for it? Our law makers, our policy makers, law enforcement officials and indeed the institutions that are the guardians of culture - do they see this and know how to help society navigate?
Usually, big changes in law happen under extreme duress. Emancipation after the Civil War in the U.S comes to mind.
The crisis that can be caused by the developments in AI and the Internet of Things with jobs, personal identity of human beings, of our whole culture might be drastic. So drastic that we might be at a point of no return (cross the singularity, as Kurzweil would say).
So, the next time I ask Alexa to order Pizza for me, I know what I am really thinking, but am afraid of asking, 'Alexa, .... you firing me?'
Please allow me to explain.
Watson and Alexa
The Amazon team introduced me to the Amazon Echo, an internet device that is voice activated. It is a marvel of a device, and responds to 'Alexa.' I procured it and promptly learned how to order Pizza with it!
Things Internet
A quick illustrative list of these developments includes drones, automated vacuum cleaners, driverless cars, robotic butlers, care givers, genomics to provide tailored medicine, and personal digital assistants.
Once the excitement of these developments subsides, one is tempted to ponder what it might mean or us as a society. And I see some troubling prospects.
Artificial Intelligence
Whenever we see an impressive feat such as IBM Watson's chess playing capabilities, we console ourselves by saying , well it can never beat a real champion (although it did!)
If you were to then translate this power to all domains of life, AI will be better than most humans in most things!
Man and Machine
Ray Kurzweil is the Chief Technology Officer at Google. He predicts the singularity in 2045. Singularity is when machine intelligence overtakes human intelligence, and perhaps when man and machine fuse.
This is a world in which humans would be wearing exo-skeletons for strength, replacing organs regularly with artificial ones, have nano-technology devices coursing through their bodies, have brain implants to enhance mental functions and tailored gene therapy to enable us to live longer.
Such a human will be unrecognizable from the human today!
Kurzweil says, the 'jobs' of that coming era will be for those who understand this new world in which man and machine are organically fused .....
Jobs!
Each of these devices if applied at scale could mean the loss of jobs. We have a long history of this. The majority of the labor force was in farming at the turn of the last century and with industrial revolution, farm labor is barely in the single digits as a percentage of the population. In the U.S. it is about 1% of the labor force.
It is easy to say that traditional jobs will be replaced by new jobs. But are we creating as many new jobs as the ones lost? And how about those, unable to make the transition to this new world?
White Collar Jobs - It might be a blind spot. But when we say jobs, we tend to think of the factory worker, or the bank teller. But the rise of Artificial Intelligence poses real threats to white collar jobs. Medicine, Legal and the Education professions.
Books
Two books are excellent and worth reading on this topic.
Rise of the Robots by Martin Ford. This is a current best seller and describes the above developments in great detail, with more alarm.
The Mind's I by Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett. This is my #1 book of all time - please don't tell my pastor! This book was published in the 1980s and is an entertaining, yet profound rumination about the 'I' or our sense of self.
Movies
Short Circuit with Steve Guttenberg. The robot Johnny #5 comes alive. A fun and delightful movie to watch. My favorite line from this movie is when Johnny #5 goes around looking for "input, ..... more input."
Here is an opportunity for you to protest that I have not mentioned HAL and others from other great movies on the topic of Artificial Intelligence....!
Are we ready?
There are entrepreneurs and technologists racing away at developing all these marvelous things internet. But is our society ready for it? Our law makers, our policy makers, law enforcement officials and indeed the institutions that are the guardians of culture - do they see this and know how to help society navigate?
Usually, big changes in law happen under extreme duress. Emancipation after the Civil War in the U.S comes to mind.
The crisis that can be caused by the developments in AI and the Internet of Things with jobs, personal identity of human beings, of our whole culture might be drastic. So drastic that we might be at a point of no return (cross the singularity, as Kurzweil would say).
So, the next time I ask Alexa to order Pizza for me, I know what I am really thinking, but am afraid of asking, 'Alexa, .... you firing me?'
12 comments:
We live in exciting and crazy new times. Enjoy the weekend.
Good stuff. What was going through my mind while reading it, you’ll not be surprised, was how far behind the curve we are in terms of what we should be thinking about and debating.
While I’m not a big believer in Kurzweil’s singularity, I’ve no doubt that we’re heading into a world that will be very different than the world we now live in. This world will bring all sorts of difficult moral, political and cultural issues for us to fight over.
Instead, we’re still arguing about issues that surfaced in the mid-sixties… a half a century ago.
Things may be speeding up on the technology and world events fronts, but on this all important front, not nearly fast enough.
Wonderful future-sights into the world unfolding before us. Thanks for that.
As you hinted, I am concerned that our biggest challenge is largely invisible to most of the world. Change will come so fast that we will be unprepared and ill-equipped to manage it. Unfortunately, I believe we are already seeing the impact - through dis-socialization due to mobile technology, hire rates of ADHD and autism in our children, disaffected work populations of the technology-deficient, ... So I'm all for more conversations about these new world stories that will make up our world.
I echo your concerns!
Here's my thought.
As scary as it portends, Singularity would still be a distant dream so long as AI is based on the predictable nature of humans. We already have a simple example of AI in our daily lives - the famous checkout coupon that spits out at the cash register based on the products we buy. But our interests keep changing all the time and therefore, at some point, there is too much randomness that no amount of AI would be depict our likes/dislikes with certainty.
Internet of 'caring' things may serve some physical needs of humans - not their emotional needs, the very essence of the human aspect!
In one James Patterson's novel, there's this all powerful guy who has a beautiful woman who satisfies all his whims and fancies - the only thing that gets revealed finally is that it is actually a robot and not a woman! Let's hope that this doesn't become a reality - at least in our life time :-)
Excellent thoughts Susee - thanks for the reply!
As you said with your Patterson comment, emotional help is at hand too.
In an experiment with the robot butler, responds expressed 'delight' at the robot's little jig for a dance.
Let's be watchful as a human species....
Will the developers of AI allow the technology to overtake them? Probably Alvin Toffler's Future Shock with a much sharper division than we can ever imagine. A few humans will still rule the world.
I was waiting for the write up after Alexa. Very well written. Enjoyed reading as my Sunday morning article. I felt I was reading something out of The Economist. It explores valid many points that society hasn't fully considered yet.
Short Circuit movies were amongst my childhood favourites. A lesser known is id Disney's Not Quite Human - where a scientist invents his own robotic son (that ran on a floppy disk). I, Robot was good too.
Excellent! Kelly and I read this together last night and thoroughly enjoyed it. Thank you so very much for sharing.
Although the japanese insist robots are the future. It will allow them to continue to avoid any serious change in immigration policy.
Very interesting. Thanks for sending. My only experience related to this was at the Canadian G7 Alzheimer’s event they had an onstage demo of an elder-care robot – malfunctioned, complete disaster. The final blow came with the question asking why it took two men to carry it up two stairs.
Enjoyed reading your blogs. You have a nice way of bring complex ideas in a simple way that appeals to readers to keep them engaged.
just visualising the exo skeletons and artificial organs!!!!
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