Tag Archives for " robots "
Voices in AI – Episode 51: A Conversation with Tim O’Reilly
About this Episode
Sponsored by Dell and Intel, Episode 51 of Voices in AI podcast features host Byron Reese and Tim O’Reilly discussing autonomous vehicles, capitalism, the Internet, and the economy.
Tim is the founder of O’Reilly Media. He popularized the terms open source and Web 2.0.
Visit www.VoicesinAI.com to listen to this one-hour podcast or read the full transcript.
Transcript Excerpt
Byron Reese: This is Voices in AI brought to you by GigaOm, I’m Byron Reese. Today our guest is Tim O’Reilly.
He is, of course, the founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, Inc. In addition to his role at O’Reilly, he is a partner at an early-stage venture firm, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, and he is on the board of Maker Media, which was spun out from O’Reilly back in 2012.
He’s on the board of Code for America, PeerJ, Civis Analytics, and POPVOX. He is the person who popularized the terms “open source” and “web 2.0.”
He holds an undergraduate degree from Harvard in the classics. Welcome to the show, Tim.
Tim O’Reilly: Hi, thanks very much, I’m glad to be on it. I should add one other thing to my bio, which is that I’m also the author of a forthcoming book about technology and the economy, called WTF: What’s The Future, and Why It’s Up to Us, which in a lot of ways, it’s a memoir of what I’ve learned from studying computer platforms over the last 30 years, and reflections on the lessons of technology platforms for the broader economy, and the choices that we have to make as a society.
Well, I’ll start there. What is the future then? If you know, I want to know that right away.
Well, the point is not that there is one future. There are many possible futures, and we actually have a great role.
There’s a very scary narrative in which technology is seen as an inevitability. For example, “technology wants to eliminate jobs, that’s what it’s for.”
And I go through, for example, looking at algorithms, at Google, at Facebook, and the like and say, “Okay, what you really learn when you study it is, all of these algorithms have a fitness function that they’re being managed towards,” and this doesn’t actually change in the world of AI.
AI is simply new techniques that are still trying to go towards human goals. The thing we have to be afraid of is not AI becoming independent and going after its own goals.
It’s what I refer to as “the Mickey and the broomsticks problem,” which is, we’re creating these machines, we’re turning them loose, and we’re telling them to do the wrong things.
They do exactly what we tell them to do, but we haven’t thought through the consequences and a lot of what’s happening in the world today is the result of bad instructions to the machines that we have built.
In a lot of ways, our financial markets are a lot like Google and Facebook, they are increasingly automated, but they also have a fitness function.
If you look at Google; their fitness function on both the search and the advertising side is relevant. You look at Facebook; loosely it could be described as engagement.
We have increasingly, for the last 40 years, been managing our economy around, “make money for the stock market,” and we’ve seen, as a result, the hollowing out of the economy.
And to apply this very concretely to AI, I’ll bring up a conversation I had with an AI pioneer recently, where he told me he was investing in a company that would get rid of 30% of call center jobs, was his estimate.
And I said, “Have you used a call center?
Were you happy with the service?
Why are you talking about using AI to get rid of these jobs, rather than to make the service better?”
You know I wrote a piece—actually I wrote it after the book, so it’s not in the book—[that’s] analysis of Amazon.
In the same 3 years which they added 45,000 robots to their factories, they’ve added hundreds of thousands of human workers.
The reason is that they’re saying “Oh, our master design pattern isn’t ‘cut costs and reap greater profits,’ it’s ‘keep upping the ante, keep doing more.’”
I actually started off the article by talking about my broken tea kettle and how I got a new one the same day, so I could have my tea the next morning, with no interruption.
And it used to be that Amazon would give you free 2-day shipping, and then it was free 1-day shipping, and then in many cases, it’s free same-day shipping, and, this is why they have this incredible fanatical customer focus, and they’re using the technology to actually do more.
My case has been, that if we actually shift from the fitness function being efficiency and shareholder value through driving increases profits to instead actually creating value in society—which is something that we can quite easily do—we’re going to have a very different economy and a very, very different political conversation than we’re having right now.
Listen to this one-hour episode or read the full transcript at www.VoicesinAI.com
Byron explores issues around artificial intelligence and conscious computers in his new book The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity.
Source: gigaom.com
Use of Robots in War
The following is an excerpt from GigaOm publisher Byron Reese’s new book, The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity. You can purchase the book here.
The Fourth Age explores the implications of automation and AI on humanity, and has been described by Ethernet inventor and 3Com founder Bob Metcalfe as framing “the deepest questions of our time in clear language that invites the reader to make their own choices.
Using 100,000 years of human history as his guide, he explores the issues around artificial general intelligence, robots, consciousness, automation, the end of work, abundance, and immortality.”
One of those deep questions of our time:
Advancements in technology have always increased the destructive power of war. The development of AI will be no different.
In this excerpt from The Fourth Age, Byron Reese considers the ethical implications of the development of robots for warfare.
Most of the public discourse about automation relates to employment, which is why we spent so much time examining it. A second area where substantial debate happens is around the use of robots in war.
Technology has changed the face of warfare dozens of times in the past few thousand years.
- Metallurgy,
- The horse,
- The chariot,
- Gunpowder,
- The stirrup,
- Artillery,
- Planes,
- Atomic weapons,
- Now, computers.
—Each had a major impact on how we slaughter each other.
Robots and AI will change it again.
Should we build weapons that can make autonomous kill decisions based on factors programmed in the robots?
Proponents maintain that the robots may reduce the number of civilian deaths since the robots will follow protocols exactly.
In a split second, a soldier, subject to fatigue or fear, can make a literally fatal mistake. To a robot, however, a split second is all it ever needs.
This may well be true, but this is not the primary motivation of the militaries of the world to adopt robots with AI.
There are three reasons these weapons are compelling to them.
- First, they will be more effective at their missions than human soldiers.
- Second, there is a fear that potential adversaries are developing these technologies.
- And third, they will reduce the human casualties of the militaries that deploy them.
The last one has a chilling side effect: it could make warfare more common by lowering the political costs of it.
The central issue, at present, is whether or not a machine should be allowed to independently decide whom to kill and whom to spare.
I am not being overly dramatic when I say the decision at hand is whether or not we should build killer robots.
There is no “can we” involved. No one doubts that we can. The question is, “Should we?”
Many of those in AI research not working with the military believe we should not. Over a thousand scientists signed an open letter urging a ban on fully autonomous weapon systems.
Stephen Hawking, who also lent his name and prestige to the letter, wrote an editorial in 2014 suggesting that these weapons might end up destroying the species through an AI arms race.
Live Debate:
Although there appears to be a lively debate on whether to build these systems, it seems somewhat disingenuous. Should robots be allowed to make a kill decision? Well, in a sense, they have been for over a century.
Humans were perfectly willing to plant millions of land mines that blew the legs off a soldier or a child with equal effectiveness.
These weapons had a rudimentary form of AI: if something weighed more than fifty pounds, they detonated.
If a company had marketed a mine that could tell the difference between a child and soldier, perhaps by weight or length of stride, they would be used because of their increased effectiveness.
And that would be better, right? If a newer model could sniff for gunpowder before blowing up, they would be used as well for the same reason.
Pretty soon you work your way up to a robot making a kill decision with no human involved.
True, at present, land mines are banned by the treaty, but their widespread usage for such a long period suggests we are comfortable with a fair amount of collateral damage in our weapon systems.
Policy for AI-powered Weapon System:
Drone warfare, missiles, and bombs are all similarly unprecise. They are each a type of killer robot.
It is unlikely we would turn down more discriminating killing machines. I am eager to be proved wrong on this point, however.
Professor Mark Gubrud, a physicist and an adjunct professor in the Curriculum in Peace, War, and Defense at the University of North Carolina, says that with regards to autonomous weapons, the United States has
“a policy that pretends to be cautious and responsible but actually clears the way for vigorous development and early use of autonomous weapons.”
And yet, the threats that these weapon systems would be built to counter are real.
In 2014, the United Nations held a meeting on what it calls “Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems.”
“Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems.” Meeting:
The report that came out of that meeting maintains that these weapons are also being sought by terrorists, who will likely get their hands on them.
Additionally, there is no shortage of weapon systems currently in development around the world that utilize AI to varying degrees.
Russia is developing a robot that can detect and shoot a human from four miles away using a combination of radar, thermal imaging, and video cameras.
A South Korean company is already selling a $40,000,000 automatic turret which, in accordance with international law, shouts out a “turn around and leave or we will shoot” message to any potential target within two miles.
It requires a human to okay the kill decision, but this was a feature added only due to customer demand.
Virtually every country on the planet with a sizable military budget, probably about two dozen nations in all, is working on developing AI-powered weapons.
How would you prohibit such weapons even if there were a collective will to do so?
Part of the reason nuclear weapons were able to be contained is that they are straightforward. An explosion was either caused by a nuclear device or not.
There is no gray area. Robots with AI, on the other hand, are, as gray as gray gets. How much AI would need to be present before the weapon is deemed to be illegal?
The difference between a land mine and the Terminator is only a matter of degree.
GPS Technology:
GPS technology was designed with built-in limits. It won’t work on an object traveling faster than 1,200 miles per hour or higher than 60,000 feet. This is to keep it from being used to guide missiles.
But software is almost impossible to contain. So the AI to power a weapons system will probably be widely available.
The hardware for these systems is expensive compared with rudimentary terrorist weapons, but trivially inexpensive compared with larger conventional weapon systems.
Given all this, I suspect that attempts to ban these weapons will not work.
Even if the robot is programmed to identify a target and then to get approval from a human to destroy it, the approval step can obviously be turned off with the flip of a switch, which, eventually, would undoubtedly happen.
An AI robot may be perceived as such a compelling threat to national security that several countries will feel that they cannot risk not having them.
During the Cold War, the United States was frequently worried about perceived or possible gaps in military ability with potentially belligerent countries.
The bomber gap of the 1950s and the missile gap of the 1960s come to mind. An AI gap is even more fearsome for those whose job it is to worry about the plans of those who mean the world harm.
To read more of GigaOm publisher Byron Reese’s new book, The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity, you can purchase it here.
Source: gigaom.com