Four new laws of robotics

When “automation” first became a word back in the 1950s and 1960s, some of us had a hopeful vision of machines during all the dirty, backbreaking work, while human beings monitor and command the machines.

Nobody that I know of imagined places like customer service call centers or the Amazon warehouses or , where human beings are still doing high-stress and backbreaking work, and the supervision is done by machine intelligences.

Technology is not an autonomous force.  It is created to serve human purposes.  The question is which humans and which purposes.

I read an interesting interview with a writer named Frank Pasquale, author of a book called New Laws of Robotics.  He says the robots and artificial intelligences in our lives serve the interests of people with wealth and power.  It is time to take back control and make sure they serve us and not them.

He proposed new laws of robotics as follows.

1.  Robotics should complement professionals, not replace them.  As a general rule, management should not use technology to eliminate jobs or to reduce the need for skilled labor.  The purpose of technology should to add value to labor.
2. Robots and AI should not counterfeit humanity.  If robots send automated messages on social media, or evaluate your credit score or medical record, we have a right to know what they are and who owns them.
3. Robots and AI should not contribute to zero-sum arms races.  It isn’t just robotic warfare.  It is the construction of an $800 million fiber optics able between Chicago and New York so that speculators in Chicago can get in orders to the New York Stock Exchange a few fractions of a second earlier and thereby gain a competitive advantage.  There is a lack of money for crucial infrastructure, but seemingly unlimited funds to gain small marketing or financial advantages.
4. Any person or control group that puts a machine or AI into operation should be legally liable for the consequences of what it does.  AI algorithms can eliminate the human factor.  It is just pushed into the background.

Asking whether technology is good or bad is meaningless, because every society, including those we regard as primitive, has some technology.  The important question is always how a particular technology works, how controls it and whose interests it serves. 

Computer algorithms may be good or bad, just as laws can be good or bad, but both are products of human judgment.  Those judgments should be open to discussion and accountability.

LINKS

New Laws of Robotics with Frank Pasquale, an interview for Monthly Review Online.  The interview is long, but rich and thought-provoking.  I barely skimmed the surface of it in this post.  I ordered Pasquale’s book and plan to review it.

A Short Comment on a Big Danger by Jack Rasmus.

The coming of the robots

This video from Boston Dynamics shows the capability of robots to do human labor—not that they would necessarily be in humanoid form as in the video.

In theory, the use of robots could enable human beings to live lives of voluntary, meaningful, higher-level activity.  In practice, the results probably would be more like Kurt Vonnegut’s dystopian novel, Player Piano, with an elite of engineers and a mass of unemployed or under-employed former workers.

If robots do everything, there will be no high-wage, full-employment economy.  There would be no mass consumer market.  Economic activity would be mainly devoted to serving the needs of the owners of the robots and the engineers and technicians who keep the robots running.

A guaranteed annual income would not be a solution.  Human beings degenerate if they have nothing useful to do.

Maybe a new economy would arise—a robot economy serving the elite and a parallel human economy serving the majority of humanity.

Or maybe—in some way I can’t foresee—robotic technology would come under democratic control, and there would be a public debate as to how robotics could be used to benefit everyone and not just a few.

LINKS

New Rossum’s Universal Robots: Toward a Most Minimal Wage by Fred Reed for Fred on Everything.  Lots of interesting links.

Toyota in talks to acquire Boston Dynamics from Google by Danielle Muoio for Tech Insider.

When the Robots Rise by Lee Drutman and Yascha  Mounk for The National Interest [added 7/11/2016]

There’s a line between humanoid and human

Hiroshi Ishaguro with Erica, his latest humanoid robot

The following is from The Guardian:

Erica enjoys the theatre and animated films, would like to visit south-east Asia, and believes her ideal partner is a man with whom she can chat easily.

She is less forthcoming, however, when asked her age. “That’s a slightly rude question … I’d rather not say,” comes the answer.

As her embarrassed questioner shifts sideways and struggles to put the conversation on a friendlier footing, Erica turns her head, her eyes following his every move. It is all rather disconcerting, but if Japan’s new generation of intelligent robots are ever going to rival humans as conversation partners, perhaps that is as it should be.

Erica, who, it turns out, is 23, is the most advanced humanoid to have come out of a collaborative effort between Osaka and Kyoto universities, and the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International (ATR).

At its heart is the group’s leader, Hiroshi Ishiguro, a professor at Osaka University’s Intelligent Robotics Laboratory, perhaps best known for creating Geminoid HI-1, an android in his likeness, right down to his trademark black leather jacket and a Beatles mop-top made with his own hair.  [snip]

Technology primarily benefits those who own it

I can remember 50 and 60 years ago when people worried about what Americans would do with all the affluence and leisure time that would result from automation.   Today that seems like a cruel joke.

Technology primarily benefits those who own it.  Applied science primarily benefits those who fund it, or at least reflects what the funders are interested in.  There can be spillover effects that benefit everyone, but these don’t necessarily happen of their own accord.

I came across a good article on this topic in Technology Review.  The lesson I draw from it is (1) technology is not a substitute for social and economic reform and (2) there is a need for scientific and technological research outside the domains of for-profit corporations and the military.

LINK

Who Will Own the Robots? in Technology Review.  (Hat tip to naked capitalism}

Technology and its discontents: Links 2/17/15

Socialize the Data Centers! an interview of Evgeny Morozov by New Left Review.

Knowledge really is power.   Information available on the Internet enables big organizations to know—or think they know—everything important about you.  Evgeny Morozov, a technology writer and critic, believes Big Data should be subject to democratic control and privacy safeguards, not monopolized by private companies such as Google.

One American City Enjoys a Hyperfast Internet—Any Surprise Corporations Don’t Control It? by Thom Hartmann for AlterNet.

Chattanooga, Tennessee’s publicly-owned fiber-optic Internet utility operates at a speed of 1,000 gigabits per second—about 50 times faster than in the average American city where Internet service is provided by for-profit companies.

New High-Tech Farm Equipment Is a Nightmare for Farmers by Kyle Wiens for Wired.

Tractlor manufacturers such as John Deere make it virtually impossible and maybe illegal for farmers to repair and reprogram their own tractors.

The invisible network that keeps the world running by Tim Maugham for the BBC.

Containerized shipping enables the global supply chain to function.  It requires complex coordination that can be done only by computer networks.  The author speculates that someday the process of sorting, loading and unloading cargo may be completely automated, with no human beings in the loop.  What, I ask ironically, could possibly go wrong?

South Korean woman’s hair ‘eaten’ by robot vacuum cleaner as she slept by Justin McCurry for The Guardian.

Technology is an extremely useful servant, but, as any rich person can tell you, people with servants need to keep an eye on them.

Tiny robot duplicates the flight of bees

When I was a boy, people used to say that according to known scientific principles, it was impossible for a bumblebee to fly.  I don’t know whether that was true or not.  But now Harvard scientists have created tiny flying robots that duplicate the flight of bees.  They call them RoboBees, although they look more like flying dragonflies or mosquitos to me.

The most obvious use for a flying insect-like robot is as a micro-drone, searching collapsed buildings for survivors, sampling chemicals or radioactivity in industrial disaster areas and spying out hidden enemy soldiers or terrorists.

A friend of mine e-mailed me several weeks ago about a report the Department of Homeland Security already had micro-drones in operation, conducting surveillance with tiny video cameras and taking DNA samples.   I wouldn’t put it past the Department of Homeland Security to do such things, but the technology has to go way beyond what the Harvard scientists did before such things are possible.

The RoboBee is attached to a tether, which provides an electric power source and enables the scientists to guide the device.  A true micro-drone would need its own power source, its own sensors and a radio-controlled guidance system if not a computer processing system.  If all these things were possible, you wouldn’t really need the ability to fly.  You could have spider-like miniature spy robots like those in the SF movie Minority Report.

One of the scientists said that RoboBees might someday serve as plant pollinators if the natural bee population is destroyed by Colony Collapse Syndrome.   What this implies is that it may not be feasible to save the world’s actual bees from destruction, but it would be possible to replace them with artificial bees.  The RoboBees wouldn’t make honey, though.

Robot soccer players in a RoboCup

To me there is something irresistibly funny about robots.  There is something childlike, innocent and comical about the way they move in discrete steps.