The real reason robots are replacing human labor

The great danger of so-called artificial intelligence is not that computers will become sentient beings, but that decision-makers will treat them as if they are.

Machines are tools.  They are a means to multiply human strength and to duplicate repetitive human tasks.  They are highly useful.  But they are not a substitute for human skill and judgment.

The use of automatic pilots in airplanes is a good example.  An automatic pilot will make fewer errors than a human pilot, especially if airline management has pushed the human pilot to the point of exhaustion.  But excessive use of automatic pilots means that the human pilot’s skills wither, and the human is less able to respond in an emergency that doesn’t fit the computer algorithm.

Another example is the use of the Internet and automatic answering machines for customer service.  I don’t think anybody who has ever had to deal with one of these things thinks that they provide improved customer service.  Their purpose is to create a barrier between the organization and the public in order to save money, but also in order to free the managers from the inconvenience of having to deal with actual human beings.

Machines don’t talk back.  Not even self-directed machines talk back.  Neither do they exercise judgment or think of ways to do the work better.

But from the standpoint of a bureaucrat whose goal is the seamless exercise of power, the latter consideration is unimportant.   It is much more convenient to program machines than to deal with employees or deal with the public.

The passing scene: Links & comments 11/19/14

The Myth of AI: a conversation with Jaron Lanier for Edge.

Jaron Lanier, a computer scientist, social critic and pioneer virtual reality researcher, said a computer algorithm is no more a form of life, and artificial intelligence is no more a form of intelligence, than a computer is a type of person.

The great danger is not that intelligent computers will take over, but that human beings will abdicate their decision-making to computer algorithms.  This is especially true, Lanier noted, as corporate managers increasingly make decisions based on computer algorithms.

Lanier warned against “premature mystery reduction”—the assumption that when we learn interesting and important new things, these are the key to understanding everything.

The Scheduled Crisis by Jeannette Cooperman for St. Louis magazine.

William Harmening, who was an Illinois state investigator for 34 years and now teaches forensic psychology, criminology and crisis intervention at Washington University in St. Louis, gave a wide-ranging interview on what to expect when a Grand Jury decides whether to indict Ferguson, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson in the killing of Michael Brown.

Harmening spoke of the process of “deindividuation” in which people in a crowd are so caught up by anger that they lose the capacity for thought and self-control and become caught up in something that seems like a group mind.

There is an opposite process, he said, in which people are so caught up by fear that they lose any sense of being a part of organized society and do whatever they think will make them safe, at whatever cost.

High Tide in Republicanland by John Pennington.

John Pennington collected photographs for his blog of water in the streets of American  coastal cities at high tide.   He said these photos weren’t taken in the aftermath of storms or anything like that, just after regular high tide.

This is something that will only get worse.  How much worse depends on what Americans and others do to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, which are making the climate change and the ocean rise.

Rise of the machines: Links & comments 8/19/14

The Internet’s Original Sin by Ethan Zuckerman for The Atlantic.

The basic problem with the commercial Internet, according to this writer, is the use of advertising to finance Internet services.

Because an individual advertisement on the Internet has little impact, the value of advertising is based on the ability of the firm to target individuals who are interested in this particular product.  And the only way to do this is to gather data and use it to profile individuals.

Invasion of privacy is not a bug.  It is a necessary feature.  The reason it is necessary is that most people would rather give up their privacy than pay for Internet services.

Zuckerman thinks this is the reason that NSA surveillance is no big deal for most Americans.  We’re already accustomed to giving up our privacy.

He doesn’t have a good answer as to what to do about all this, and neither do I.

How We Imprison the Poor for Crimes That Haven’t Happened Yet by Hamilton Nolan for Gawker.

The science-fiction movie Minority Report imagined a world in which it was possible to predict when people would commit crimes and to arrest them before the crime occurred.  A predictive science of human behavior does not exist, but that does not stop people in authority from acting as if it did.

American courts are increasingly using what’s called “evidence-based sentencing” on which the severity of the sentence is based on a computer algorithm’s determination of the likelihood that the person will commit another crime.

In practice, what this means that that poor youth who grew up in a family without a father will get a worse sentence than a middle-class youth with access to psychiatrists and good job opportunities.

This is contrary to the basic principle of equal justice under law.   If you commit a crime, you should be punished for what you did, not for what somebody thinks you may do.

The financial markets on automatic pilot

In a well-ordered economic system, financial markets provide a means for business enterprises to obtain financing and for investors to judge the worth of a business.

Flash Boys, the latest book by Michael Lewis, tells how far the financial markets have gotten away from that purpose.

His subject was high frequency trading, a method of skimming money from other peoples’ financial transactions.  Enormous expense and ingenuity has gone into perfecting high frequency trading.  But from the standpoint of social good, the only question is to what degree it is extremely dangerous, moderately harmful or  merely useless.

High frequency trading is done by computers, because human beings are too slow.  Computer trading accounts for about two-thirds of transactions on U.S. stock exchanges.  There is even a venture capital company that has a computer algorithm on its board of directors.

The science fiction writer Charles Stross wrote about futures in which artificial intelligences incorporate themselves in order to gain legal standing as persons, and in which computers and robots have created a fully functioning society while human beings die out or are sidelined.

I don’t expect this to happen, of course, but it is a good metaphor for what is going on.   Putting such a large part of the financial system on automatic pilot is reckless, especially in an economic recovery that is fragile to begin with.

§§§

Click on Scalpers Inc. for a review of Flash Boys by John Lancaster in the London Review of Books.  Hat tip to Steve Badrich for the link.  I haven’t read the book myself.