R.U.R.

October 26, 2014 12:00 PM

Will Killer Robots Destroy Humanity? What The Future Of Robots Reveals About The Human Condition. Peter Thiel says 'Robots Are Our Saviours, Not the Enemy,' via. Brad DeLong reponds with The Rise of the Robots. Don't forget your 'Terrifying Robot Update,' especially when robots grow our food. Or maybe we'll get the Robots of Resistance, with human values.
New World Order: Labor, Capital, and Ideas in the Power Law Economy. AI, Robotics and the Future of Jobs.

Many more links at Omnivore and again
Are former digital prophets becoming the new luddites?

previously

posted by the man of twists and turns (28 comments total)

Given PayPal's reputation for screwing over innocent users by freezing their accounts, I'm not sure I buy into Thiel's credentials for giving an account of efficient human-machine harmony.

I thought he promised to fuck off and go and live on an oil rig or something, anyway.
posted by howfar at 12:12 PM on October 26, 2014 [2 favorites]

Just remember, the Space Pope says: Don't Date Robots!
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 12:12 PM on October 26, 2014 [1 favorite]

I'm sorry Dave I'm afraid I can't do that.
posted by bukvich at 12:16 PM on October 26, 2014

Will Killer Robots Destroy Humanity?

No. Robots programmed or operated by humans to kill other humans will do a pretty job though.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 12:37 PM on October 26, 2014 [4 favorites]

Old Lady #3: It's so hard nowadays, with all the gangs and rap music..
Old Lady #1: What about the robots?
Old Lady #4: Oh, they're everywhere!
Old Lady #1: I don't even know why the scientists make them.
posted by filthy light thief at 12:38 PM on October 26, 2014 [3 favorites]

If robots enslave humanity, it will be because we told them to.
posted by evil otto at 12:48 PM on October 26, 2014 [2 favorites]

Peter Theil says 'Robots Are Our Saviours, Not the Enemy

Peter Theil is a contrary indicator on .. everything.
posted by stbalbach at 12:59 PM on October 26, 2014 [3 favorites]

Will Killer Robots Destroy Humanity?

It would be nice if it wasn't just at our hands, wouldn't it?
posted by tiaz at 1:01 PM on October 26, 2014

More relevant than the question of whether robots will destroy humanity is: will corporations destroy humanity?
posted by JHarris at 1:04 PM on October 26, 2014 [5 favorites]

When robots begin to form corporations, that's when we're really and truly fucked.
posted by erlking at 1:17 PM on October 26, 2014 [2 favorites]

If robots enslave humanity, it will be because we Peter Theil told them to.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 1:32 PM on October 26, 2014 [3 favorites]

Kettering university has an interesting robotics forumn in it's FIRST Competition. It is pretty cool. What was slightly disconcerting was watching the robots and getting lost in the game. When the camera swings to the crew you just yell "BACK TO ROBOTS."
It is the only competition of it's kind I believe. Well,in the u.s.
posted by clavdivs at 1:35 PM on October 26, 2014

"The Roar Omega Roar fraternity's symbol resembles the logo R.U.R from the play "Rossum's Universal Robots" by Karl Capek. The play is a Sci-Fi/horror story where robots rise up and destroy humanity."
- Monsters University Triva page, IMDB

I don't know what this is supposed to mean.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 2:46 PM on October 26, 2014 [1 favorite]

Are former digital prophets becoming the new luddites?
Everybody makes mistakes; it's just refreshing to see somebody admitting theirs.
posted by oneswellfoop at 3:15 PM on October 26, 2014

It's Thiel, people. And his idea is way more swank than an oil rig, if even more improbable.
posted by Halloween Jack at 4:58 PM on October 26, 2014

I do see there being an impact on jobs as robots get smarter and cheaper. How far away are we from RFID-driven automated picking robots in amazon warehouses, with a token human presence to oversee them? Amazon and other internet based bulk distribution places have had a drastic impact on other retailers - bookstores in particular, but purchasing cheap stuff easily online is a big and growing sector. And of course, amazon manages such cutting edge prices by dodging taxes during its growth period, and putting the serious economic squeeze on its workforce and suppliers - they drive their staff to be as robotic as possible for as little money as possible, it's the next logical step to actually bring in robots.

Self-driving vehicles is another. We're already at the point where we have self-driving trains; Google's self-driving cars are already fully capable - and safer than a human driver. While chauffers might be safe for a while yet, I definitely see bulk long-haul transport lorries becoming robotically driven - at first with a human co-driver, and after some years of them proving safe, going to some sort of remote fleet oversight post, where a single controller oversees many vehicles.

I definitely forsee a future in my lifetime where things are made in factories by robots, shipped by robots, the whole purchasing and ordering system being automated, until literally the only step involving a person is the guy physically getting it off the truck and walking it to my door - and I can see even that being a robot eventually. Except by that point, I expect I'll be living in a cardboard box.

Nor are white collar jobs safe. We can already start to see the impact Big Data is having. You don't need good AI for a lot of things, you just throw sheer processing power at it. The best humans can't beat even a bog standard computer any more; it simply can calculate ahead so quickly, and draw from so many past games to find the best statistical moves, that it's basically unbeatable.

We've already seen computerized stock trading, computerized iterative artwork, and computerized picks for the music tracks most likely to be a hit. Look at advertising for example. Who needs ad designers, producers or actors when computers can draw on vast amounts of data to work out what is most likely to be effective, mix together examples from huge back catalogs and do some iterative work to get something that fits a maxima, then uses computer designed CGI to create, act out and voice the parts for the advert, and finally uses ever larger datasets about us to delivery it specifically to the group it's most likely to sway? We're not there yet, but you can see all the pieces right now.

So, as usual, it will be the blue collar and manual workers who suffer first and most as ever more of their jobs are eliminated by automation. But they won't be the only ones. How many jobs basically boil down to collating information, searching through it to find the important bits, and reformatting it to be useful to the next person along? Computers are getting much better at that, really, really fast.

I wouldn't say it's going to destroy western economies in 10 years, but 25? Yeah, I can see the impact being pretty damn huge by then. Combine that with the growing impact of climate change on fresh water, food and energy prices? I'd like to think we'll be smart enough to figure out ways to mitigate the costs and spread the advantages around, but with the way the current system is set up to funnel almost all the money and benefits upwards while leaving ever smaller crumbs for the 99%, I'm not convinced we will. And they'll have armies of automated weaponised drones guarding them, in case anyone is thinking revolution will be an option...
posted by ArkhanJG at 5:21 PM on October 26, 2014 [2 favorites]

Google's self-driving cars are already fully capable

Not quite.
posted by thomas j wise at 6:15 PM on October 26, 2014 [2 favorites]

ROBOTS! So 1950's.

The reality of pretty intelligent entities controlling some aspects of our lives is already here, and it is not making us happy.

The future could be a happy picture, but this utopian future in which we have all kinds of leisure time to wander amongst the water lilies does not seem to synch with what the robot Overlords have in mind for us. (Sorry: CORPORATE overlords with robot "employees.)
posted by kozad at 8:05 PM on October 26, 2014 [1 favorite]

We need robots to take our jobs. The problem lies not with robots but with our society and our economy. We need to figure out how to create not only a post-scarcity economy but also a post-manual labor and post-non-creative (since robots can't really do creative work) economy as those things are achievable within our lifetimes.
posted by I-baLL at 8:56 PM on October 26, 2014 [2 favorites]

I-baLL, I think you're right. The thought experiment I'm considering here is, if literally every task were automated, and human labor had zero value in a labor market, how would we allocate resources to individuals? If we can answer that, maybe we can work backward from there.
posted by univac at 11:28 PM on October 26, 2014 [1 favorite]

When robots begin to form corporations, that's when we're really and truly fucked.

Cyborgs are (partially) people, my friend.
posted by graphnerd at 7:18 AM on October 27, 2014

Arkhan, Amazon already has warehouse robots; I briefly met a dude who helped program them. They can't yet be seamlessly and safely integrated with the human workforce, but a big part of his job was figuring that out.

As for self-driving cars, Slate had an interesting piece recently shedding cold water on that idea: apparently the way the current Google cars work is that they're pre-loaded with extremely detailed 3-d renderings of an area X square miles around google's campus, down to every last stoplight and pothole. This enables them to use their processing power to focus on the shit that actually moves, e.g. surrounding traffic. Merely creating such detailed maps for the entire U.S. is not an insignificant problem with current tech, although I suppose moore's law might get you there eventually. But the real killer is keeping them updated --- right now, if an unmapped stationary object turns up the cars have a real blind spot about navigating them. A temporary stoplight or detour around road construction, say. I'm not saying it's insoluble, but might be a bit more like voice recognition --- that spent 30 years being just around the corner before we got to Siri, and she's far from perfect.

if literally every task were automated, and human labor had zero value in a labor market, how would we allocate resources to individuals?

I don't think the worrisome question is "how". The worrisome question is "whether". The current rule of thumb in Western Civ is he who sows, reaps, or in other words, ownership of the means of production entitles the owner to that production. As it stands now, whoever owns the robots will make bank. Will they decide to share? The creative economy will need to include some real genius-level whisperers of sweet nothings, some heart-rendering Harriet-Beecher-Stowe-esque conveyers of pathos, because making them share's going to be a hard damn lift this time around, when the scabs and the Pinkertons will be sheathed in titanium.
posted by Diablevert at 7:31 AM on October 27, 2014 [2 favorites]

Well, but if nobody's working, then eventually no one is buying, do I have that right? Basically the economy is jacked, when capital doesn't need labor any more.
posted by newdaddy at 7:43 AM on October 27, 2014

Well, but if nobody's working, then eventually no one is buying, do I have that right? Basically the economy is jacked, when capital doesn't need labor any more.

Possibly. On the other hand, we've had forty years of increasing GDP, skyrocketing productivity, and stagnant middle-class and blue collar wages. Some of that's globalisation, for sure; how much of it is automation instead is part of what all this robot talk is probing. Isabella Kaminska, a blogger at the Financial Times, writes about this quite a bit, actually, though at a fairly high level. One of her major points, though, is that the economics of abundance are quite different from the economics of scarcity, and nobody's quite sure how they work...she goes so far as to suggest that all the outsourcing we did in the 90s might have actually helped stave off the Japanification of the U.S. economy, eg that at least by giving the jobs to overseas factory workers you were giving them to someone that would actually consume more in their turn, boosting growth; simply automating the jobs away and you end up with a situation where you're just producing more and more using fewer and fewer people, and consumption falls.
I'm only a layperson at this stuff, though admittedly fascinated by it, but the sense I have is that the more and more automation you have, you're approaching a sort of event horizon for economics. Economic is the study of how scarce resources are distributed; if some combination of cheap renewable energy, 3-d printing and robots can get to a place where the basic necessities of life are no longer scarce, I don't think economics as a field has a real clear model on how that'll work. (Neither does literature, really; knowing what we know now about the kind of computer it would really take to run the Enterprise, why bother even having Picard & Co. on the damn thing? They'd be like Maggie driving the car in the Simpson's opener, to the computer's Marge.)
posted by Diablevert at 8:07 AM on October 27, 2014

(Neither does literature, really; knowing what we know now about the kind of computer it would really take to run the Enterprise, why bother even having Picard & Co. on the damn thing? They'd be like Maggie driving the car in the Simpson's opener, to the computer's Marge.)

General Systems Vehicle 'For Shits and Giggles' might have read a few books that offer something of a guide.
posted by howfar at 11:39 AM on October 27, 2014

Hunh, those sound interesting, how far. I realise now that was probably a tangent too far --- what I meant to allude to was that in theory, the economy of the Star Trek world is one of just such abundance, with replicators essentially able to provide for humanity's basic needs and nobody having to work and only a few very rare commodities that can't be replicated which need to be traded for/extracted in the usual sense. But in practice I think that almost every time the plot touches on economics it supposes an economic system essentially akin to the one we're familiar with in the 19th and 20th century --- merchants, trade routes, miners, collectors, jobs, bosses, currency, etc. My instinct is that conceiving an economy where nothing anyone needs to survive is rare will get weird in the way quantum physics gets weird, like once you're operating on that level what appears to us to be the fundamental laws don't operate in the same way.
posted by Diablevert at 12:53 PM on October 27, 2014

Elon Musk: "I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. If I had to guess at what our biggest existential threat is, it’s probably that. So we need to be very careful with artificial intelligence.

I’m increasingly inclined to think that there should be some regulatory oversight, maybe at the national and international level, just to make sure that we don’t do something very foolish. With artificial intelligence we’re summoning the demon. You know those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram, and the holy water, and he’s like — Yeah, he’s sure he can control the demon? Doesn’t work out."

I look forward to the eventual Musk-Thiel superpowered brawl.
posted by Apocryphon at 1:05 PM on October 27, 2014

what I meant to allude to was that in theory, the economy of the Star Trek world is one of just such abundance,

One Mefite, on a not too distant thread (which I can't find), suggested that the Federation is the stage before Banks's Culture. They have achieved post-scarcity and now don't know what to do with it, so they retreat into this platitudinous quasi-capitalist fascism. Banks's answer to the conundrum of those post-scarcity problems is to posit them as post-human problems. He suggests that we will solve the problems of humanity by outsourcing our decision making to beings better able to handle problems of that magnitude. Given that we don't even really have any sort of handle on scarcity based economics, let alone their successor, he might have a point.
posted by howfar at 4:03 PM on October 27, 2014