It’s impossible for me watch this and not believe we’ll see a day when it will be nearly impossible to distinguish between the best robots and humans. Oh sure, you be able Turing Test them and know which is which. But they don’t need to be human like to be very useful to humans.
Could one of these clean the hospital room of a COVID patient? Disarm that camper bomb in Nashville? Will one of these guys take me upstairs to my office when I’m no longer able to climb the stairs.
You an go all RoboCop and Terminator on this but I choose to believe we’ll find more good uses than bad. And perhaps the Boston Dynamics guys can build in some failsafes for when they’re misused.
PS: This video has been viewed almost 9 million times in the last 24 hours.
“My solution is that all robots must be raised for their first few years in Minnesota, where everyone is kind and generous. I assume there are other spots around the world in which the culture evolved to be unusually friendly. Part of the value of your future robot is where it was imprinted with its base personality. Someday the Minnesota Series of robots will fetch top dollar.” — Scott Adams
“When robots start doing all of the medical research, the speed of discoveries will increase a hundredfold. Robots will simply try every idea until someday there is a cheap pill that keeps your body young and healthy. The government will get out of the healthcare field when the cost of medical services becomes trivial, and I think robots will get us there.” — Scott Adams
“Spofforth had been designed to live forever, and he had been designed to forget nothing. Those who made the design had not paused to consider what a life like that might be like.” — Mockingbird (Walter Tevis)
“At some point the real cost of healthcare, energy, construction, transportation, farming, and just about every other basic expense will fall by 90% as robots get involved. It would be absurd to assume we know anything about the economy in thirty years. Nothing will look the same.” — Scott Adams
“The highest-earning professions in the year 2050 will depend on automations and machines that have not been invented yet. That is, we can’t see these jobs from here, because we can’t yet see the machines and technologies that will make them possible. Robots create jobs that we did not even know we wanted done.” — Kevin Kelly
Assuming this is an early glimpse of one possible future… how do I feel about it? Mixed, I think. If humans still have some evolving to do — and I sure hope we do — it seems likely such evolution will be in this direction. It’s tempting to slap a “good” or “bad” label on this but such value judgements are human tags and I’m starting to find them irrelevant. Perhaps with time and luck, we can make better versions of ourselves.
Two Oxford researchers recently analyzed the skills required for more than 700 different occupations to determine how many of them would be susceptible to automation in the near future, and the news was not good: They concluded that machines are likely to take over 47 percent of today’s jobs within a few decades.
Men hold 97 percent of the 2.5 million U.S. construction and carpentry jobs. The Oxford study estimates that these male workers stand more than a 70 percent chance of being replaced by robotic workers. By contrast, women hold 93 percent of the registered nurse positions. Their risk of obsolescence is vanishingly small: .009 percent.
By contrast, women typically work in more chaotic, unstructured environments, where the ability to read people’s emotions and intentions are critical to success. If your job involves distracting a patient while delivering an injection, guessing whether a crying baby wants a bottle or a diaper change, or expressing sympathy to calm an irate customer, you needn’t worry that a robot will take your job, at least for the foreseeable future.
“The age of robotics could replace religion, at least for the young. We will come to see our bodies as moist robots working according to the rules of physics, not magical beings with invisible souls that guide our actions. In other words, when robots start acting exactly like humans, humans will feel more like robots at the same time. It probably works both ways. At some point in human history – and I think today’s kids will live to see it – humans and robots will be working together, living together, and probably dating.”
“The poor among us, and people with certain religious beliefs, will remain 100% human for as long as the more advanced beings – the cyborgs and robots – allow it. Life will be somewhat awkward when part of civilization is immortal and part is not. But the one thing we know for sure is that the richest cyborgs and robots will eventually consolidate power. For starters, only the people who have wealth will be able to afford the jump to immortality. So the first robots with human minds and the first immortal cyborgs will be rich. Just imagine how much money Larry Ellison will someday have if he stubbornly refuses to die and dilute his fortune across less-capable heirs. Eventually most of the world will be owned by five multi-trillionaire robots that live on yachts the size of Connecticut. The immortal cyborgs, with the limitations of their organic parts, will be mere millionaires who can’t stop complaining about “the Kevlar ceiling.”
“It’s hard to wrap your head around the idea that a digital representation of your mind, no matter how accurate, is still “you” in some sense. But I think that fear will go away as soon as we see the first robot that thinks and acts exactly like Uncle Bob did before he made the jump. If Uncle Bob the robot acts human enough, we’ll come to see him as the same entity that once inhabited an organic shell. When technology is sufficiently advanced, we’ll get past the magical thinking about spirits and souls and the specialness of having organic parts.”
I’m a big fan of UPS. Today a nice man delivered a parcel while I was in the front yard playing fetch with the dogs. He stopped for a moment to throw the ball and chat. I mentioned an article I’d read about how UPS uses sophisticated tech to find the shortest routes, etc.
The driver smiled and explained that UPS knows when his seat buckle is (and is not) buckled; when the door to the fan is open and for how long; and how often he back up, and at what speed. Every Monday morning he’s given a printout of this data.
I should add he didn’t seem to have a negative opinion about this.
Later in the day I was in Staples where it occurred to me that the people who work there (probably) get paid the same whether they are helping a customer… or doing nothing. Doing nothing is a less attractive option if a manager is about or, obviously, if the clerk is just eager to help customers.
Could a future AI monitor the in-store video of employees interacting with employees and reward those who spend more time helping customers than those who have developed the knack of avoiding them? The AI would be smart enough to know when the employee was bugging the shit out of a browser, just to game the system.
Before you ask, no, I don’t think I’d much like working in this environment. But I might like it better than being replaced by the friendly artifical person that will be rolling silently up and down the aisles in the near future.
“There’s a couple of arguments against the idea that AI is coming soon. One is, as you say, a philosophical argument, which boils down to “However smart machines seem to get, they’ll never have true human intelligence.” I just don’t think that matters. You can call it intelligence or something difference, but that’s semantic. What matters is that they can accomplish the same things humans can.”
“So who has all the money? It’s whoever has the robots. And who has the robots? The people who have all the money. Today’s income inequality will be peanuts compared to income inequality then. […] If I’m right about what happens with artificial intelligence, there won’t be any work, period, so there won’t be dignity in work. We’ll have to find dignity in doing other things.”
“My solution is that all robots must be raised for their first few years in Minnesota, where everyone is kind and generous. I assume there are other spots around the world in which the culture evolved to be unusually friendly. Part of the value of your future robot is where it was imprinted with its base personality. Someday the Minnesota Series of robots will fetch top dollar.”
