Science Ain't So Bad

                      Resentful robot asks “Why?”

Robots have more potential to “do wrong” than most people realize.

Scientists like Stephen Hawking have been warning robot makers lately (Stephen Hawking warns artificial intelligence could end mankind – BBC News ) . Hawking (and others) don’t think robotocists fully realize that their robots could become more self aware,  becoming unexpectedly conscious and unpredictable.

The concern is that they could turn against us, perhaps using the communications networks and the power grids to attack humanity.

Maybe  robots will decide we’re in the way or – worse – that we humans are trying to enslave the robot race. It’s not hard to see how a robot might react to that one.

Experts acknowledge that this is theoretically possible but they say we have time. Most of them don’t think we’re anywhere close to self aware “bots”; some don’t think it’s even possible.

Maybe.

But MisterScienceAintSoBad wonders if self awareness is the wrong thing to be worrying about.

Who says robots have to be self aware to be nasty?

What do we know about the inner lives of tarantulas? Or snakes? Is there a “me” in a snake? Does a snake know itself when it looks in a mirror? In fact, why should recognizing yourself (self awareness) matter? Aren’t the most dangerous humans, the ones that are the least self aware? Does a snake have to know about itself to be dangerous?

Robots are way past the point where everything has to be hard coded. Robot designers, like designers of other advanced software based systems, are always going “Damn! I didn’t know it could do that!”

Google Now isn’t even close to conscious.

Siri either.

Both Google Now and Siri  suck at facts like hungry babies. They gorge on facts. They get smarter every day.

So maybe we should be worrying about something else besides if robots can see themselves in a mirror. Maybe that’s missing the point. Maybe we should be worrying about  autonomous robots– the kind that don’t need humans.

Autonomous robots certainly aren’t science fiction. Every day, more robots “cut the umbilical” or, as they like to say when there’s nobody around but other robots, “cut the imbecile”.

Just kidding about the imbecile thing (I think).

We have drones and Mars Rovers that work independently – just occasionally checking in to make sure the boss is around. If a Rhoomba rug cleaner bumps into a chair, it decides on its own which way to go. It doesn’t look at you for guidance. Will some future Rhoomba – one that’s just an ordinary robot without any self awareness features –  decide it’s more logical to push the mess makers out the back door than to perpetually clean up after them?

No?

You’re sure?

Are Rhoomba’s designers sure?

What do you think?

– – – – –

The drawing is mine.

MAYBE WE GET A REPRIEVE?

REPLACED BY MACHINES?

Sooner or later, robots will win. They will get all the jobs.

What will be do for money? Will we get weekly checks? From whom?

I wouldn’t worry. Our ever so smart political leaders are probably working out the details.

Aren’t they?

We’ll get to all that in another post.

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Today’s article is about the possibility that robots, even the cute ones with big eyes, could muscle us out entirely. Take aways our jobs? Sure. But, even worse, they could take it all.

Robots one. Humans zero.

Stephen Hawking says we could screw the pooch because we didn’t think things through when we had the chance. He says robots could pass us right by in the brains department. Once they’re smarter than us, the ungrateful little clankers won’t mind chucking us into the excess baggage bin.

Silly?.

Bill Gates agrees with Hawking. Elon Musk agrees with both of them. Musk says artificial intelligence is “summoning the demon”. It’s potentially worse than nuclear weapons. Others who, supposedly, know what they’re talking about – experts in artificial intelligence and such – agree too.

Seriously?

MISTER Science AintSoBad thought he better look into this. So he read up on it – especially stuff by Nick Bostrom (Founding Director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford Martin School). Bostrom, well respected and influential in neuroscience, technology, physics, and philosophy, has written a book. SuperIntelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. Bostron’s book is serious and thoughtful.

Here’s the thing.

Bostron says we’re jaded.  There’s been so much crazy talk about computers taking over that we have tuned out.

I’m not sure.  He could be right. You don’t need proof that computers are getting smart, do you? Phones, robots, navigation systems, refrigerators, thermostats. It’s weird how they know what you’re thinking before you do.

They’re just contraptions. They don’t really think. That’s for sure.

For pretty sure, anyway.

Could they develop a “sense of self” and become conscious as these experts warn?

There’s room to worry because the way these things get programmed is changing. The traditional techniques have taken us a long way but AI (Artificial intelligence) researchers have caught on to the idea that you can’t program a machine to be be self aware. They’ve tried it and it hasn’t worked. If there’s any hope of truly cognitive machines, computers have to program themselves to get smarter.

That’s the corner that got turned.

That’s what scares the crap out of Hawking and Gates and Musk.

After figuring out that we don’t know what kind of instructions would get computers/robots over the consciousness hump, researchers are trying out new approaches – things that might  lead to consciousness. These systems include genetic algorithms, neural nets, support vector machines, decision trees, and naive Bays.

Bostron says we probably won’t know there’s been a breakthrough until it’s too late. Once computers get close to human intelligence, they aren’t likely to stay at that level very long. They will quickly pass us. The danger is that they might not turn out to be sentimental types. If they don’t see a benefit in serving the human race, they may change course and become a nuisance. Or even worse.

With computers and robots controlling so much of what we depend on, those mischievous little devils could be a very big problem. We need to figure out exactly what we need to include in those computers so that we are reasonably protected against an emerging consciousness. We need to understand our responsibilities as owners of sentient things, as well as how we can insure that those sentient things are happy to work in our (and their) mutual interest.

This is a major undertaking as it requires worldwide cooperation – something that we aren’t very good at.

MISTER ScienceAintSoBad suggests that we get on it.

Now.

– – – – –

The drawing is mine.

WHO GETS TO DRIVE??

SELF DRIVING SHIPS

Self driving cars are already on the roads. In a few years, you’ll own one.  We’re scrambling to get the laws and insurance rules done.

What about ships?

I’m serious.

Remember the Costa Concordia?

It actually hit a rock?

Ships don’t GO that fast. And rocks? They don’t go at all.

Would a computerized pilot get lost in somebody’s baby blue eyes? Would it cruise dangerously close to shore to show off?

MISTER ScienceAintSoBad doesn’t think so.

Why can’t we at least do what several  car models already do – the ones that  “grab the wheel” to save you from killing yourself? If it works for cars at 65 mph, it should work for ships at 19 mph.

You would think.

Ship owners would like to go further. They really like the idea of self piloted “ghost” ships.

Without a crew, ships would be smaller and simpler and more fuel efficient. And what’s a ship worth to pirates if there’s no crew?  Would you pay a big ransom for a scow full of tires?

Oskar Levander, VP of Innovation, Marine Engineering, and Technology at Rolls Royce, says we’re ready to do this. Rolls Royce has a simulated system to show off to potential customers; the company (or at least Levander) sees this as inevitable.

Here’s the thing.

It’s a great idea. But ships don’t get smashed against rocks by foolish captains very often.

The big risks are bad weather and propulsion systems that explode, catch fire, or fail, leaving the vessel to founder in the waves. A ship without power is in extreme danger in the middle of the ocean. Robots still aren’t as fast and flexible and reliable as a human in an emergency.

Would an automated pilot be able to respond properly to an oncoming rogue wave? Would it know what to do if the windows got blown out on the side of the ship?

MISTER Science AintSoBad likes techno stuff. It should, in principle, be possible to replace the crew with well designed, redundant systems but labor unions and regulators will be hard to convince.

Maybe that’s a good thing.

GREAT ROBOTIC SUCKING SOUND

We have moved on from the last recession best we could. Companies are profitable. Stocks are back. even the housing market seems to be steadying.

But jobs? Peh!

Why is that?

In a word? Robots.

Nobody – not even a glib politician – is going to add jobs faster than the “robot revolution” scrapes them away. Cut taxes all you like. Stimulate till the top blows off. The fact is, technology’s outgunning us and we will keep losing jobs till we cry uncle.

Why WOULDN’T a company use the best available tools? Isn’t that what it is supposed to do? What’s wrong with that? Of course companies will buy “intelligent machines” to reduce labor costs. And why worry? Aren’t new jobs being created to replace the ones that were lost?

I have talked about this before. I’m still talking about it. Technology is zooming. Faster and faster. And jobs are being eaten alive.

Let’s look at how we shop. Consuming is a lonely chore now.  We cavort with machines at the store instead of clerks. No friendly smiles. Not even a nasty scowl.

And work? Well that’s been you and your best buddy,  the machine,  for a long time, right? Only now it’s more so. Flesh-and-blood workers aren’t valuable enough to waste a wall on. Just a cubicle. Soon humans will be so rare in the workplace, the computers will gawk when they see one. Wherever there are human workers, their computerish adversaries are crowding in.

Isn’t it time to examine our basic assumptions about why jobs aren’t rebounding along with the rest of the economy? The recovery has been slow. But that’s really not the whole story. There’s something else going on. The very technology that has the potential to free us from muckery is tossing us about like a rubber ducky in a hurricane. Unless we pay attention, there will be less rubber duckies.

“BUBBLES” ARE THE PRICE OF INTELLECTUAL LAZINESS

This last economic bubble was real estate. At least, that’s how it began. The next economic bubble is inflating under our noses – an unemployment crisis that is being confused with a slow economic recovery.

Here’s the thing. It used to be  that automation, though disruptive , was something we could adjust to.  Jobs got eclipsed but others took their place. And because we seemed to adjust, we came to assume that we always would. No matter how powerful our computers, no matter how capable  our robots, no matter how fast the rate of innovation, we would adjust. Jobs would show up when others were destroyed. How did we know we could adjust? It’s simple. We always do.

True.

Till it isn’t.

Look around you kids. The high unemployment is only being MASKED by the “recession” which, by the way, has been over since June of 2009. Those high unemployment numbers are your beloved technological revolution peeping at you over the walls of your complacency. While you were focused on the last set of problems, there’s a whole new set arising.

That’s bad, right?

No. It shouldn’t be.

MISTER ScienceAintSoBad is just a science guy. He shouldn’t write tirades like this. It’s not his cup. Not his tea.  Techies like me? We’re THRILLED when our intelligent machines work right. Rare as it is. We shouldn’t be the ones to worry about the social implications. That’s the other guy.  Advanced robotics and computing is good stuff. It should be helping us, not hurting. It shouldn’t be ME who points out that science has consequences. That’s for the philosophers and the social engineers and the political types. Who are slouched around the TV, watching each other making speeches.

Guys! Wake up! Too many people. Too few jobs.

Get it?

What are the options? Okay, I can help  you with that.

Option A: We could make more stuff.  Create jobs that way. With all of our great technology, we could use it to increase the benefits for all. We haven’t run out of needs. Our knees and backs still hurt. More medical stuff please. The air’s too hot. Global warming solutions please. And I guess we can all agree we need lots more ringtones for our friggin’ smartphones.

There’s lots to do. It’s just a matter of finding the right way to encourage a bit more risk – taking by entrepreneurs. Maybe we need more government. Maybe we need less government. Maybe we need more leadership. Maybe we need more patent law suits.

Whatever!

Amping up sales could  increase employment. Can’t argue with that, right? However, maybe  things can only be pushed so fast. Maybe the public isn’t up for more innovation right now. Maybe there’s a limit too how much new stuff can be absorbed at any one time.

And that’s okay by me.

Option B: But if we can’t incentivize, brutalize, or hypnotize society into upping the need for stuff (and hence jobs) we may need to approach this differently. Maybe we need to find a better way to share out the existing jobs or, at least, the benefits of those jobs.

More, I will not say. There’s a limit to how far a technical guy is willing to debase himself. But you  – YOU know who I’m talkin’ to – you love this crap, right? You, who can’t wait till the next copy of The Journal Of Politics And Society shows up, you’re a social engineer, a political mover/shaker, one who dreams of changing the world, one dreary meeting at a time. Maybe you didn’t notice that there’s a burgeoning unemployment bubble that’s independent of the economic recovery until I said so. I helped you out, didn’t I? Now you know.

Get busy.

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STICK'EM UP!

THEY HATE US FOR OUR DRONES?

(Wait until they see what comes next!)

Remember how exciting war used to be? In World War II, for example, 60 million people were killed shooting, knifing, and bombing each other.

That was almost 3% of the entire population of the world! Back in the day, they really knew how to decimate themselves.

Now?

Afghanistan sounds awful (and thank you, thank you, for your service). But this is an army? 150,000 soldiers? It used to take twice that many to run the mess halls.The amazing reality of modern warfare is that it’s becoming a robot thing. As the number of robots goes up, the number of people goes down.

Just like at Walmart.

Our robot warrior drones aren’t particularly admired in the countries we have decided to save from themselves. In Afghanistan, for example,  the drones are accused of bloody excess in the fog of war. Maybe that’s to be expected from the population of a country where we weren’t too popular to start with. And, let’s be honest, our drones could use a little work on their social skills. Good as they are, they have the unfortunate habit of sometimes bombing the neighbors.

Not only are the number of robots in our armed services increasing, but so is their degree of autonomy. Already there are roboticized weapons (Jonathan Moreno, Huffington Post) on US ships that operate “on their own” while humans just keep an eye on them and we recently deployed a robot sentry in the demilitarized zone (Korea) which has built in surveillance, tracking, firing, and voice recognition along with the ability to operate independently.  This is where things seem to be headed.

Like it or not, the days of human combatants – at least from the industrialized nations – are coming to an end faster than you may think.

MisterScienceAintSoBad doesn’t understand the big picture here.

(Neither do you, right?)

Does (frightening thought) anyone?

What kind of world are we building? Will the rich guys fight with machines while the third world bleeds the old fashioned way? Is this a mere transition until everyone fights with machines? Will war become a bloodless chess match between robots? Is this good? Is this bad?

Yikes! Yikes! Can’t we have a moratorium on change just long enough for our brains to catch up with ourselves?

Pretty please?

– – – – – – – – – – –

Credits for above image to “Bandia Machine Robo Rescue, Evil Robot”, Victorian Science Fiction Previews, bagofmice.com 
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

The calvary are coming! (About time!)

EGGHEAD

MRSASB: You’re breaking my heart, man! Don’t Do this! You’re straying into political stuff where a real science guy has no business. Why is it YOUR concern which out-of-work losers get paid what? I wanna hear about which robots are smarter. Which robots are better dancers. Not INTERESTED in crying for society’s cast outs. That another blog. OK? FlintHeart00001

Yer TOUGH, FlintHeart. Even Einstein strayed into the dirty, dirty world of politics from time-to-time. Carl Sagan too.

It won’t happen again.

——————————————————————————-

Photo credit:
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic License.

No Humans?

Technology CREATES jobs, right?

Unemployment’s kinda high.

Slow economy.

To get through the rough spot, employers have been p-r-e-t-t-y creative. Every possible trick. Technology aplenty.

Not that I’m worried. In Business Week, I read that robots create more jobs than they destroy. Robots, kiosks, voice recognition system. All fruits of the labor of human designers, manufacturers, implementers of all kinds.

If anything, technology means more jobs and more interesting work.

Well.

Jeff Burnstein, the author of the Biz Week article I quote above,  is head of the Robotic Industries Association.

Tongue.

Cheek.

Here’s the thing. Some things’re true till they aren’t anymore.

Then, they’re not so true.

Robots have been around. We’re used to them. Nobody died. (I could research this. Maybe a robot ate somebody.)  And, at times, employment’s been just fine while “machine heads” were welding away at car companies.

In bad times, we target our rage at giant job sucking winds wafting Mexican spices our way. But technology is our friend. More jobs than it eliminates.

This is CERTAINLY what MISTERScienceAintSoBad likes to think. He is a HUGE proponent of techology and science (‘case you haven’t noticed). Huge.

But I got this day job, too. Where I’m sposed to be objective. Look at evidence. Scientific approach. (Science is an elaborate way of being honest with ourselves. You can quote me.)

So.

What’s WITH this sticky, sticky unemployment number that’s spooking investors? Maybe something new is happening. Maybe we’re slipping into the “robotic age” – the one where all our work’s done by machines? Where we live lives of leisure, living on I don’t know what?

Matthew Bleicher’s (Robots FTW) unsure. His “bet” is that us human’ll still get to flip a burger or two. But he admits he could be wrong.  Rosemary Black (NY Daily News)  describes the way that robots are now being deployed in the work place “side by side with humans”. She describes a hospital in Silicon Valley where “..Tug robots deliver meds, take out the trash and even speak politely to human workers and patients. Leasing the robots costs the hospital about $350,000 annually, while hiring that many people would have cost more than $1 million a year.”

Katharine Gammon (Wired Magazine) is less nuanced. She says robots are “stealing” American jobs in warehousing.

Larceny.

Where’s  this leading?

PUNCH LINE

The punch line? Marshall Brain, founder of How Stuff Works, talks about ordering food at a MacDonald’s kiosk.

Too good. Too easy. The kiosk was fun. Got him thinking. He sees a “seismic shift” in the American work force for which we aren’t prepared. He points to  five million jobs lost from the retail sector already. Just the beginning, he says. You wait.

MisterScienceAintSoBad has to let you down. Can’t give you the definitive answer here. Can’t boil down the evidence. There ISN’T “evidence” for future events. We don’t yet KNOW if technology’s starting to truly destroy the base of employment).  We DO know that vigilance is the price of living in this century. Can’t live yer life by cliches . Real estate CAN go down.  So can skyscrapers. So can economies.

Things change. Expect the unexpected.

In the past, technology HAS created more jobs than it has taken away. A truism.

We hope.

Note to investors. If, by some chance, we ARE in the middle of “the big one” where  technology crowds humans out of the workplace, this has implications. High unemployment may NOT mean recession anymore.  The “salaries” of the unhired workers wind up in balance sheets as “retained earnings”. Which isn’t very fair, is it?

So.

In the interest of fairness, social justice, and, most important of all, social order, gotta figure out a proper way to get those resources back to the new leisure classes before they get too bony.

Should be a mere exercise in Democracy, right?

What do YOU think?

moonbot

JAPAN WINS MOON RACE.

Japan just revealed some of its plans for space exploration including the amazing hope of landing a robot explorer on the moon by 2015 and having an entire base of robots by 2020. – fastcompany.com

Email from OldTrekie5: Jesus! The friggin’ Space Shuttle’s shutting down and we don’t have squat to replace it. Are you kiddin’ me? What’s wrong with this country? PLEASE Mister ScienceAintSoBad, you gotta jump on this one.  Thanks. We’re counting on you, man!

MisterScienceAintSoBad answers:

It’s “get real” time, OldTrekie. The national debt is about 13 billion dollars (wanna see how it breaks down?) . Humans in spacesuits do look neat but it’s IRRATIONAL to send people off to Mars and to the moon when we can’t afford to buy ourselves a good oil cleanup.

ROBONAUTS NOT ASTRONAUTS

We humans had our chance to be heroes. It’s the turn of the robots now. Human space exploration isn’t too healthy for the humans doing the exploring (tendency to get nauseous,  irradiated, and, from time-to-time, blowed up) . It’s also super expensive.  And “human friendly” space systems dramatically stretch out the time it takes to get anything launched. So why not turn robots loose on the these projects? Worked on Mars, didn’t it?

A robonaut program would intensify our knowledge of sensors, communications, software systems and robotics, itself. That’s a bad thing?

Hey. It’s not like we have an alternative; we can’t AFFORD our “manned” programs. But I guess we’re gonna shuffle around fer awhile “studying it” till we admit the obvious. Meanwhile, as mentioned above, guess who’s going to the moon with a bevy of beautiful bots? Our Japanese comrades, that’s who.

Kadsuhiko Shirai, President of Waseda University, is the head of a government panel in charge of making us look silly while we’re scratching our butts debating the issue. “SHOULD we send humans to the moon? CAN we send humans to the moon? Whoops! Are those Japanese robots I see walking around on the moon?”

Credit for above photo:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

OTHER STUFF

Oil Spill

I SUPPOSE MisterScienceAintSoBad should have something more to say about the oil spill in the Gulf Of Mexico. But he’s as depressed about it as you are. We’re all riding this big wobbly planet together with nobody else to help us if we screw it up before we figure out how to drive it properly. Science is interesting and amusing. But it’s the competition that offers religious salvation. Don’t get TOO snooty. If we keep fouling things up, we may need them.

For this disaster, we’ll leave the blaming and the investigating to others, but if it makes you feel any better, we award the BP disaster in the Gulf Of Mexico a ScienceAintSoBadRating of ZERO .

Inventions

Our LectricLifter (TM) product’s coming along (slowly, I admit). We’ve actually had a  meeting with the testing lab (for the equivalent of UL listing) and we’re pretty sure we know who will be manufacturing it.

CORRECTION (Thanks, Alano)

The national debt should only BE 13 billion dollars. Make that 13 TRILLION big ones.

Party

CENTURY MARK

A hundred posts ago, in the first article on this blog, I said: Science has gotten beaten up in the past few years. It’s not just that it’s been starved for funds; there’s the feeling that it’s a crappy pursuit – opaque, dangerous, and inconsistent with the things that real people care about. I hope, with this blog, I can strike a small blow for the idea that science, though it most certainly CAN be complicated, is really a warm and lovely wind blowing us toward our destiny.

(My GOD I love my own writing!)

That was January, 2009. The Dow was crashing and The Nasdaq was evaporating. We were gonna have The Great(er) Depression.

George W Bush had just handed over the garage door opener and he was he glad to be rid of it. Couldn’t BELIEVE they found someone to take the job.

Since then, I’ve written articles about diseases and cures, earthquakes, animal behavior, pirates, inventions, astronomy, cosmology, robots, the search for intelligent non-earthians, alternative energy, headaches, backaches, runaway Toyotas and plenty more. Drew pictures too!

100 articles.

Not the bloody Wikipedia. But nobody gets paid here.

So 100 articles – that’s a lot.

Maybe you remember the  scary robots from Boston Dynamics.  I was trying to say  that robotics is quietly getting good. In the meantime, Jeremy Maitin – Shepherd (University of California, Berkeley) and team’s getting its towels folded.

FOLDING THE LAUNDRY