7 ms·

Welcoming Our New Robotic Overlords

78 points by stefie10 9y ago

thriftwy 9y ago
I think that soon it will be considered a bad practice to possess a skill or to use some knowledge for decisions.. If you have learned to do something, you will proceed by teaching a machine learning system that. And then you will use that, and not your internal knowledge. The reason will be cited as follows: If you know something, this introduces bus factor. People can't get in your head to validate if you're applying your knowledge fairly, or biased, or maliciously misappropriating things. Your reasoning is unverifiable. You can leave for greener pastures, carrying your skills and knowledge with you. While machine learning system is repeatable, you can have all kinds of checks and KPIs. And it's protected by IP laws. Human domain knowledge will be discouraged.
- mholmes680 9y ago
  I don't know if this adds or subtracts from your dystopian view, but the act of training the machine would introduce the same reasoning/bias flaws one has. (see the MIT moral machine)
  - thriftwy 9y ago
    At least it is repeatable and measurable. But yours isn't. I'm not sure it's dystopian. Maybe human decision making will be considered art. That's an awesome thing, but not necessary what you do in workplace.
    - stefie10 9y ago
      Someone wise once told me, even after we have strong AI and don't need to program, he will still program, because the process of programming leads to understanding, and he will still want to understand things. The AI might be able to write the program better and faster, but it won't be able to help him gain the understanding he would have gotten from writing the program himself.
      - thriftwy 9y ago
        This is why you will learn to program, write the program, gain the understanding, train the ML system properly to reproduce your results, and then basically unlearn everything.
        stefie10 9y ago
        Why would you unlearn though? Eventually the AI will do all of the above as well. Maybe eventually programming will be like blacksmithing or weaving is today...
        Danihan 9y ago
        Completely obscure?
        stefie10 9y ago
        I was thinking more like the Renaissance fair today. You'd visit the fair that recreates a hack-a-thon in the late 90s. At the fair, you'd see the old programmer at his terminal, coding in Perl in an emacs window... instead of turkey legs, you'd have Fritos and Mountain Dew...
  - stefie10 9y ago
    Weapons of Math Destruction is also a good resource on this topic, about how bias is already being encoded in "black box" algorithms that has real effects on things like the availability of credit.
- drvdevd 9y ago
  This is an interesting take, but I think part of what makes us human is our inability to disassociate our “domain knowledge” from our sense of self. Much domain knowledge is in some sense innate or even subconscious, picked up in the field. I think it would be more efficient just to spy on people’s thoughts (and work) in some manner if there is a fear they could misapply their knowledge or leave a critical process hanging.
  - thriftwy 9y ago
    Yes they will allow for a degree of inefficiency if it removes human factor. The reasoning will go, yes we are losing $1 on every automated transaction, but we can make more of them, and we certainly avert one $10,000 corruption case and one $100,000 case where we get sued for human decision. You can't sue machine learning algorighm (that how it would go). But human, you can, even frivolously.
    - stefie10 9y ago
      Yes but you can sue the company that owns the machine learning algorithm, probably for much more money than you can sue an individual. You can even imagine class action law suites and the like. (I am one of the researchers mentioned in the article.)
      - thriftwy 9y ago
        You can also have paper trail documenting that you never did anything illicit during the development of the model. There will be protocols for sensitive areas. Can't do the same with individual decision making.
      - fenwick67 9y ago
        It is much harder to ask an algorithm about it's reasoning than a person's. "Joe, why did you fire Carla?" "She was late to work every other day and spent all day on her phone" "HR-bot 5000, why did you fire Carla?" "Weights indices 59738, 837, and 28836 added to over 0.67, yielding a score of only .85, which is below the firing threshold" Certainly you could look at the input data and try to convince a jury that her performance wasn't acceptable but you can't prove that is why the AI fired her.
- cproctor 9y ago
  This is an interesting thought experiment, but I imagine it having precisely the opposite effect. Modernism, as a technology, works precisely by making power relationships seem obvious, natural, and therefore not something subject to critique. These relationships include definitions of gender, race, and class, as well as capitalist and colonial relationships, and many more. Probably the most salient power relationship to this article is deciding who should benefit from the work of robots. Acting through computers amplifies this effect, and makes it easier to uphold oppressive power relationships while keeping one's hands clean. I recognize that this is not immediately an empirical claim, but I will observe that discarding it offhand in favor of the equally ideological dominant interpretation would be exactly the dynamic I'm pointing out.
- jefurii 9y ago
  Reminds me of a Karl Schroeder novel (Permanence) in which characters encounter an alien race (or the remains of an extinct one?) which evolved to have intelligence but not consciousness. Or are we turning ourselves into philosophical zombies?
- Danihan 9y ago
  It already is. For instance, let's say you pull up to a red light and the intesection is empty. No cars, no pedestrians. Common sense tells you to just run the light, there is no reason not to. But it's illegal for a human to use their own judgement to do this, and the instructions of the red light have to be followed regardless.
  - X2kJSkesvUFhG8B 9y ago
    > the instructions of the red light have to be followed regardless No they don't. If there's no enforcement, and no moral reason to follow the law, you've reduced yourself to a robot if you follow it. As far as red lights are concerned though, you'd better be damn sure cars or bikes or pedestrians aren't going to leap out from around a corner before you run them. Especially if the intersection is empty at 3am and visibility is poor. In fact in that situation it's better to play it safe.
  - goatlover 9y ago
    If there is no camera and no police, you can run treat the light as a stoplight. Just be safe about it. By can, I mean that a human being can choose to do so. Maybe smart cars in the future won't allow the driver to make that decision. But nothing forces us to always obey traffic laws right now.
    - Danihan 9y ago
      Enforcement is just a technicality.
      - contingencies 9y ago
        In China and many other countries, rules are typically so numerous, draconian or fuzzy that you are nominally constantly breaking something. If the authorities want to alter your behavior, they call in the specter of potential enforcement to encourage behavioral change. On the one hand this seems horrible - shifting sands, constant unknowns, zero security - but in reality it's kind of liberating - less need to hire lawyers and asking for forgiveness is tolerated. The gap between enforcement and law is precisely where most people seek to operate, because it typically creates additional efficiencies. In short, enforcement is law. Or to rephrase this in the words of Snowden - Policy is a one-way ratchet that only loosens over time.
- s_kilk 9y ago
  This would effectively freeze all development and leave us collectively stuck at the current level of expertise. If every doctor trains an ML algo, then forgets how to be a doctor, then medicine stops dead at that level.
  - FLUX-YOU 9y ago
    >If every doctor trains an ML algo, then forgets how to be a doctor, then medicine stops dead at that level. It's very rare that technology becomes ubiquitous and free very quickly. You will still need doctors in poor areas, destitute countries, and in the military. Still, education and society would likely optimize for getting people to the edge of knowledge more quickly if ML algos truly took over a field like medicine.
  - mholmes680 9y ago
    i dunno... i just read about alphago zero. Only needed to teach it the rules of the game, and it thrashed the current level of cumulative human expertise (alpha go) 100-0 matches, which had just thrashed a single human the year before. This seems like its happening at some hedge funds as well for stock picking. I guess the closed system of the game rules is more manageable than all of medicine, but... I can't agree with "stuck as the current level of expertise".
    - knicholes 9y ago
      I wasn't able to determine from what I read yesterday if AlphaGo Zero played vs AlphaGo or vs itself (AlphaGo Zero). This probably isn't the place to ask, but if it is, do you know?
      - nschucher 9y ago
        It was trained with self-play and evaluated on AlphaGo Lee (the version that beat Lee Sedol) and AlphaGo Master (the version that beat Ke Jie and I believe a number of online matches against top-ranked professional players).
- goatlover 9y ago
  Seems like that would greatly reduce the value of labor.
- jpindar 9y ago
  A lot of businesses now don't care about their bus factor, I don't see why that would change.
boundring 9y ago
The article is focused on robotic automation of menial tasks, primarily in industrial settings (factories, warehouses), not automation of judgements which could be subject to bias... Thriftwy raises an interesting point, speculatively, but there's little bias to be found in supply logistics or assembly of parts. Marginally touched upon in the article was the displacement of lower-class workers. Is expansion of automation going to lead humanity toward dispossession of low-income workers, or will universal welfare become the result of outmoded jobs? I don't think Asimov's "Aurorans,"--elite-yet-few humans supported by legions of robotic servants--is possible, but it's a thing.
- stefie10 9y ago
  I started working in robotics because I wanted to empower people and make the world a better place. But what I have started to appreciate is that increasing automation is by default a transfer of wealth from labor to capital owners. The two million long-haul truck drivers who are going to be replaced by self-driving trucks are going to lose income; the owners of the self-driving trucks are going to capture that wealth. I am not sure what the right social policies are to address this; retraining, basic income, and universal healthcare all seem reasonable. But I think a lot of people don't appreciate how automation leads to both increased productivity and also increased inequality.
  - indigochill 9y ago
    Although I agree automation necessarily moves wealth from labor to capital sources, I think an underappreciated concept by those concerned about automation is how increased productivity at least historically has benefited the overall economy. The industrial revolution went a long way towards advancing economic inequality, but had it not happened we collectively wouldn't enjoy anywhere near the quality of life we now do (and that goes for pretty much anyone who's worn a t-shirt). But yes, it would be best if we could find ways to help laborers adapt to new automation and advance technology in a socially responsible way. Not that I have any great ideas for how that would work.
    - 9y ago
TYPE_FASTER 9y ago
Jobs have been made obsolete many times over. There are fewer blacksmiths than there used to be when a horse was a primary method of transportation. Manufacturing jobs declined during globalization/offshoring during the eighties. Did knowledge work take the place of those manufacturing jobs? Would the employment numbers look different if VisiCalc hadn't come along? The questions are: what do the population numbers look like that are impacted by these changes in job-type demand? How many blacksmiths were many obsolete by the car? How many manufacturing jobs were removed from the pool by moving to offshore manufacturing? How many manufacturing/warehouse/etc. jobs will be replaced by automation? The last question is probably the hardest to answer, because we don't know yet. It depends on the evolution of the sensors (solid state LIDAR), other hardware, and automation methods.
lubesGordi 9y ago
Every single technological advancement relieves someone of work. This allows people to put their money towards things that they would rather put money towards, creating more jobs there. This makes the world a better place.
- stefie10 9y ago
  I agree, but technical advancements can also lead to a transfer of wealth from worker to capital owner. For example, there are roughly two million long-haul truck drivers in the US today. When we have self-driving trucks, they will lose their jobs. It's not a very fun job, and self-driving trucks will be better and safer. But it will also transfer wealth from the worker to the capital owner. It may also create other jobs etc., but clearly the wealth transfer is one part of the effect. I think that as a result it is important to pursue social policies to mitigate the disruption experienced by displaced workers, and to spread the benefit of the technology to a larger fraction of society.
- L_Rahman 9y ago
  Is there a well-cited 1200-1800 word categorical debunking of trickle down economics somewhere on the internet? Please tell me so that I can bookmark it and paste when I see comments like this on the internet.

78 points by stefie10 9y ago

I think that soon it will be considered a bad practice to possess a skill or to use some knowledge for decisions.. If you have learned to do something, you will proceed by teaching a machine learning system that. And then you will use that, and not your internal knowledge. The reason will be cited as follows: If you know something, this introduces bus factor. People can't get in your head to validate if you're applying your knowledge fairly, or biased, or maliciously misappropriating things. Your reasoning is unverifiable. You can leave for greener pastures, carrying your skills and knowledge with you. While machine learning system is repeatable, you can have all kinds of checks and KPIs. And it's protected by IP laws. Human domain knowledge will be discouraged.

mholmes680 9y ago
I don't know if this adds or subtracts from your dystopian view, but the act of training the machine would introduce the same reasoning/bias flaws one has. (see the MIT moral machine)
- thriftwy 9y ago
  At least it is repeatable and measurable. But yours isn't. I'm not sure it's dystopian. Maybe human decision making will be considered art. That's an awesome thing, but not necessary what you do in workplace.
  - stefie10 9y ago
    Someone wise once told me, even after we have strong AI and don't need to program, he will still program, because the process of programming leads to understanding, and he will still want to understand things. The AI might be able to write the program better and faster, but it won't be able to help him gain the understanding he would have gotten from writing the program himself.
    - thriftwy 9y ago
      This is why you will learn to program, write the program, gain the understanding, train the ML system properly to reproduce your results, and then basically unlearn everything.
      - stefie10 9y ago
        Why would you unlearn though? Eventually the AI will do all of the above as well. Maybe eventually programming will be like blacksmithing or weaving is today...
        Danihan 9y ago
        Completely obscure?
        stefie10 9y ago
        I was thinking more like the Renaissance fair today. You'd visit the fair that recreates a hack-a-thon in the late 90s. At the fair, you'd see the old programmer at his terminal, coding in Perl in an emacs window... instead of turkey legs, you'd have Fritos and Mountain Dew...
- stefie10 9y ago
  Weapons of Math Destruction is also a good resource on this topic, about how bias is already being encoded in "black box" algorithms that has real effects on things like the availability of credit.
drvdevd 9y ago
This is an interesting take, but I think part of what makes us human is our inability to disassociate our “domain knowledge” from our sense of self. Much domain knowledge is in some sense innate or even subconscious, picked up in the field. I think it would be more efficient just to spy on people’s thoughts (and work) in some manner if there is a fear they could misapply their knowledge or leave a critical process hanging.
- thriftwy 9y ago
  Yes they will allow for a degree of inefficiency if it removes human factor. The reasoning will go, yes we are losing $1 on every automated transaction, but we can make more of them, and we certainly avert one $10,000 corruption case and one $100,000 case where we get sued for human decision. You can't sue machine learning algorighm (that how it would go). But human, you can, even frivolously.
  - stefie10 9y ago
    Yes but you can sue the company that owns the machine learning algorithm, probably for much more money than you can sue an individual. You can even imagine class action law suites and the like. (I am one of the researchers mentioned in the article.)
    - thriftwy 9y ago
      You can also have paper trail documenting that you never did anything illicit during the development of the model. There will be protocols for sensitive areas. Can't do the same with individual decision making.
    - fenwick67 9y ago
      It is much harder to ask an algorithm about it's reasoning than a person's. "Joe, why did you fire Carla?" "She was late to work every other day and spent all day on her phone" "HR-bot 5000, why did you fire Carla?" "Weights indices 59738, 837, and 28836 added to over 0.67, yielding a score of only .85, which is below the firing threshold" Certainly you could look at the input data and try to convince a jury that her performance wasn't acceptable but you can't prove that is why the AI fired her.
cproctor 9y ago
This is an interesting thought experiment, but I imagine it having precisely the opposite effect. Modernism, as a technology, works precisely by making power relationships seem obvious, natural, and therefore not something subject to critique. These relationships include definitions of gender, race, and class, as well as capitalist and colonial relationships, and many more. Probably the most salient power relationship to this article is deciding who should benefit from the work of robots. Acting through computers amplifies this effect, and makes it easier to uphold oppressive power relationships while keeping one's hands clean. I recognize that this is not immediately an empirical claim, but I will observe that discarding it offhand in favor of the equally ideological dominant interpretation would be exactly the dynamic I'm pointing out.
jefurii 9y ago
Reminds me of a Karl Schroeder novel (Permanence) in which characters encounter an alien race (or the remains of an extinct one?) which evolved to have intelligence but not consciousness. Or are we turning ourselves into philosophical zombies?
Danihan 9y ago
It already is. For instance, let's say you pull up to a red light and the intesection is empty. No cars, no pedestrians. Common sense tells you to just run the light, there is no reason not to. But it's illegal for a human to use their own judgement to do this, and the instructions of the red light have to be followed regardless.
- X2kJSkesvUFhG8B 9y ago
  > the instructions of the red light have to be followed regardless No they don't. If there's no enforcement, and no moral reason to follow the law, you've reduced yourself to a robot if you follow it. As far as red lights are concerned though, you'd better be damn sure cars or bikes or pedestrians aren't going to leap out from around a corner before you run them. Especially if the intersection is empty at 3am and visibility is poor. In fact in that situation it's better to play it safe.
- goatlover 9y ago
  If there is no camera and no police, you can run treat the light as a stoplight. Just be safe about it. By can, I mean that a human being can choose to do so. Maybe smart cars in the future won't allow the driver to make that decision. But nothing forces us to always obey traffic laws right now.
  - Danihan 9y ago
    Enforcement is just a technicality.
    - contingencies 9y ago
      In China and many other countries, rules are typically so numerous, draconian or fuzzy that you are nominally constantly breaking something. If the authorities want to alter your behavior, they call in the specter of potential enforcement to encourage behavioral change. On the one hand this seems horrible - shifting sands, constant unknowns, zero security - but in reality it's kind of liberating - less need to hire lawyers and asking for forgiveness is tolerated. The gap between enforcement and law is precisely where most people seek to operate, because it typically creates additional efficiencies. In short, enforcement is law. Or to rephrase this in the words of Snowden - Policy is a one-way ratchet that only loosens over time.
s_kilk 9y ago
This would effectively freeze all development and leave us collectively stuck at the current level of expertise. If every doctor trains an ML algo, then forgets how to be a doctor, then medicine stops dead at that level.
- FLUX-YOU 9y ago
  >If every doctor trains an ML algo, then forgets how to be a doctor, then medicine stops dead at that level. It's very rare that technology becomes ubiquitous and free very quickly. You will still need doctors in poor areas, destitute countries, and in the military. Still, education and society would likely optimize for getting people to the edge of knowledge more quickly if ML algos truly took over a field like medicine.
- mholmes680 9y ago
  i dunno... i just read about alphago zero. Only needed to teach it the rules of the game, and it thrashed the current level of cumulative human expertise (alpha go) 100-0 matches, which had just thrashed a single human the year before. This seems like its happening at some hedge funds as well for stock picking. I guess the closed system of the game rules is more manageable than all of medicine, but... I can't agree with "stuck as the current level of expertise".
  - knicholes 9y ago
    I wasn't able to determine from what I read yesterday if AlphaGo Zero played vs AlphaGo or vs itself (AlphaGo Zero). This probably isn't the place to ask, but if it is, do you know?
    - nschucher 9y ago
      It was trained with self-play and evaluated on AlphaGo Lee (the version that beat Lee Sedol) and AlphaGo Master (the version that beat Ke Jie and I believe a number of online matches against top-ranked professional players).
goatlover 9y ago
Seems like that would greatly reduce the value of labor.
jpindar 9y ago
A lot of businesses now don't care about their bus factor, I don't see why that would change.

boundring 9y ago

The article is focused on robotic automation of menial tasks, primarily in industrial settings (factories, warehouses), not automation of judgements which could be subject to bias... Thriftwy raises an interesting point, speculatively, but there's little bias to be found in supply logistics or assembly of parts. Marginally touched upon in the article was the displacement of lower-class workers. Is expansion of automation going to lead humanity toward dispossession of low-income workers, or will universal welfare become the result of outmoded jobs? I don't think Asimov's "Aurorans,"--elite-yet-few humans supported by legions of robotic servants--is possible, but it's a thing.

stefie10 9y ago
I started working in robotics because I wanted to empower people and make the world a better place. But what I have started to appreciate is that increasing automation is by default a transfer of wealth from labor to capital owners. The two million long-haul truck drivers who are going to be replaced by self-driving trucks are going to lose income; the owners of the self-driving trucks are going to capture that wealth. I am not sure what the right social policies are to address this; retraining, basic income, and universal healthcare all seem reasonable. But I think a lot of people don't appreciate how automation leads to both increased productivity and also increased inequality.
- indigochill 9y ago
  Although I agree automation necessarily moves wealth from labor to capital sources, I think an underappreciated concept by those concerned about automation is how increased productivity at least historically has benefited the overall economy. The industrial revolution went a long way towards advancing economic inequality, but had it not happened we collectively wouldn't enjoy anywhere near the quality of life we now do (and that goes for pretty much anyone who's worn a t-shirt). But yes, it would be best if we could find ways to help laborers adapt to new automation and advance technology in a socially responsible way. Not that I have any great ideas for how that would work.
  - 9y ago

TYPE_FASTER 9y ago

Jobs have been made obsolete many times over. There are fewer blacksmiths than there used to be when a horse was a primary method of transportation. Manufacturing jobs declined during globalization/offshoring during the eighties. Did knowledge work take the place of those manufacturing jobs? Would the employment numbers look different if VisiCalc hadn't come along? The questions are: what do the population numbers look like that are impacted by these changes in job-type demand? How many blacksmiths were many obsolete by the car? How many manufacturing jobs were removed from the pool by moving to offshore manufacturing? How many manufacturing/warehouse/etc. jobs will be replaced by automation? The last question is probably the hardest to answer, because we don't know yet. It depends on the evolution of the sensors (solid state LIDAR), other hardware, and automation methods.

lubesGordi 9y ago

Every single technological advancement relieves someone of work. This allows people to put their money towards things that they would rather put money towards, creating more jobs there. This makes the world a better place.

stefie10 9y ago
I agree, but technical advancements can also lead to a transfer of wealth from worker to capital owner. For example, there are roughly two million long-haul truck drivers in the US today. When we have self-driving trucks, they will lose their jobs. It's not a very fun job, and self-driving trucks will be better and safer. But it will also transfer wealth from the worker to the capital owner. It may also create other jobs etc., but clearly the wealth transfer is one part of the effect. I think that as a result it is important to pursue social policies to mitigate the disruption experienced by displaced workers, and to spread the benefit of the technology to a larger fraction of society.
L_Rahman 9y ago
Is there a well-cited 1200-1800 word categorical debunking of trickle down economics somewhere on the internet? Please tell me so that I can bookmark it and paste when I see comments like this on the internet.