Artificial Warning

An article about Artificial Intelligence crossed my consciousness last week.  It's called "Tech companies should stop pretending AI won't destroy jobs" and is written by Kai-Fu Lee.  This is a thought that I embrace whole-heartedly.

In it, he argues that soon at least half of all jobs will be better and more safely handled by AI.  That we are not ready for the dramatic social upheaval that this transition will cause.  That we should not look to previous economic revolutions (industrial, computer or otherwise) because the same sets of conditions do not apply: things are moving faster than those did, and the transition may not give rise to new forms of work.

For the most part, I agree with him.  AI and automation are going to cause incredible changes.  My first quibble is with the speed: some sectors will be changed much more rapidly due to the economic advantages automation provides.  My second is that Mr. Lee offers no solutions.

Artificial Envy

I promised that last week's entry would be the last on this weird, never-to-see-the-light-of-day, novel I've been working on for NaNoWriMo.  Well, I lied.  There is one more (at least) topic about which I wish to share my rambling thoughts.

At least this one will not be about Universal Basic Income.  Instead, this week's topic is about gender identity and how it may change with the advent of Artificial Intelligence.  This is connected to my bogart-in-a-box because I decided that one of the characters, the teenage son of the protagonist, chooses not to identify as any gender.

Of course, all character traits have to have a motive and this one is no exception.  So, how does Artificial Intelligence connect to sloughing off gender as a personal identifier?  Read on.

Weapons of Doubt

Last week, Elon Musk again warned against Killer Robots.  This time, instead of just him on stage, he got 115 of his closest friends (really, leading experts in the field of AI and autonomous weapons) to publish a letter to the UN.  In it, he (and all the rest) warn against the use of these kinds of weapons that are not only unmanned, but also not directly controlled by a human being.

Is he wrong?  No.  There are terrific potentials for misuse around these things.  Think of mean ol' Mrs. Jenkins who always yells at you to pick up after your pooch.  If she sets up a Kalinshni-Bot(tm)  on her front yard, the neighborhood population of pups is going to take a sharp down turn.

What I find a bit disingenuous is that Mr. Musk is the person voicing these concerns.  After all, he is one of the leaders in autonomous vehicles with Tesla.  And the area awareness software and sensor suite that he is plunking into his cars could be easily modified to drive something more sinister.

But let's put that aside and think a bit about what those rules might be.

Passing On

A few weeks ago, the Emmy Award nominations were announced.  Normally, this is an event that I ignore with great abandon.  However, it appears that this will be a banner year for Man-Machine interaction.  Two futuristic properties got nods: Westworld and Black Mirror's episode 'San Junipero' both got multiple nominations.

I've watched all of Westworld Season 1 and thought it was some of the best discussion on the nature of consciousness and what it means to have self determination. (Did Maeve get back off the train to find her daughter because she wanted to or because she was programmed to?  Is there a difference?)  However, I had not watched San Junipero, though I have seen a few other Black Mirror episodes.  So, I thought to give it a watch.

[Spoilers after the break]

Artificial Risk

Over the past months, I've written quite a bit about how automation, driven by an Artificial Intelligence (or three), will take our jobs and that it is a good thing.  Then along comes Mr. High-and-Mighty Technocrat Elon Musk saying that AI is an existential threat to humanity and needs to be proactively regulated.

Well, crap.

What is a blogger with an audience of (maybe) dozens supposed to do against the loudest voice for Futurism on the planet?  I don't know what the others are doing, but I'm going to unpack his comments and do some on-page thinking.

Work is What You Make of AI

Last month I got all on a kick about how automation is going to take our jobs and that that is a good thing.  There has been some more press on this topic so I want to continue kicking it around.

The first article for my shouting-into-an-empty-house discussion is from the BBC: How long will it take for your job to be automated.  This is about an Oxford study that asked 352 scientists how long various jobs would take to be automated.  This is a better information than the one that the Will Robots Take My Job site used.  And it offers up a time frame that is more heartening for those that are hip deep in the status quo: 120 year before 50% of all jobs are automated.  Hold on to that thought.

The second article is about Eric Schmidt, Google Founder and Techno Spouter (of course I'm jealous, people ask his opinions instead of me trying to force them down any ear that will listen).  In it, Mr. Schmidt puts forth the idea that A.I. will create more jobs that can't be filled instead of destroying them.  His reasoning is that automation will make workers more efficient, more productive, but that humans will still need to be part of the process.  He cites a McKinsey study that says that 5% of current jobs can be automated with today's technology for his reasoning.  It's a very together-we-are-stronger statement, but it has a few holes.

The Techno Contract

A couple of weeks ago, I ran into the term "Techno-Feudalism," bare and all but devoid of context.  It was in this Reddit post on /r/Futurology.  Like all red blooded Reddit browsers, I did not actually read the post, just the headline.  But the term stuck with me.  What is it? What do I think it is and what is it actually?

Blog-O-Matic Automation

There were not many news items this last week that affected the Internet of Things.  A few, to be sure:

• New laws on how ISPs can sell browsing data
• A sale at Lowes on GE Z-Wave switches (most likely gone thanks to people like yours truly).

Of course, there was also the usual horde of investor articles that seem to rehash the same points: security, cost savings (or not) and how it will affect jobs.  I generally ignore most of those because they rarely say anything new and that bores me (and I write articles that are at least three times longer than the usual Buzzfeed crap, so I rank my attention span as better than the average internet goldfish).

But, as usual, something did catch my eye: another question on Reddit, in the /r/singularity section.  "Will Artificial Intelligence Replace Content Writers in the Future?"  Most of the comments are pro human: "Content for mindless dribble, 100% yes."  And that's a sentiment with which I mostly agree.  For ad copy and other boiler plate kinds of content (financial reports, etc), it may already have taken over.  Which is great, because most of us humans don't like writing that stuff (though we'll cash the check for the work).

What about 'real' content: long form, creative writing?  For the purposes of this article, we'll take 'creative' to mean fiction, opinion and in-depth reporting all of which require a creative use of language to keep the reader's attention.  What some of the articles on AI writing start calling 'soul' or 'heart'.  As someone who holds a BA in English, I want to dive into what that 'soul' is.

The current state of AI writing bots appear to be good at highly formulaic prose, hence the financial reports and legal briefs and other content that for whatever reason needs to stay within strict bounds.  Anywhere that a dropped comma can cost a company millions needs something with a superhuman attention to detail and legal exposure.  The current AI systems should be perfect for this.

However, to keep a reader's attention (and if you've made it this far, then I'm not too bad at it) requires not only following grammar rules, but also knowing when to break them.  I have a Greek chorus of writing instructors that scream in my ear every time that I start a sentence with 'And'.  And yet I do it often because it sounds 'right' to my inner ear.

In fact, most of us appreciate rule breaking in writing because it makes the writing more interesting.  It has to be done carefully and with intent, but that is what second and third (and fourth) drafts are for.  This is why it will be difficult for AI to 'own' content creation.  All artistic disciplines have these rules and all of them reward those artists that break them with intent.

Ultimately, this is because successful formulas become boring with repetition.  In our present pop culture zeitgeist, this is most obvious in summer tent pole blockbuster movies.  The current reigning champ is Disney/Marvel with their MCU which is going on nine years of movies since Iron Man was released in 2008.  Disney has also had success with family animation movies and princess movies and theme park rides.  Much is because they do have a formula, The Hero's Journey.  Yet, they do no slavishly follow all of its beats.  They mix it up, eventually pitting hero against hero in order to make the formula feel fresh (keep in mind that Civil War is really a Captain America movie, so all of the other Avengers in the film are there to distract us from the formula of Cap's journey).

Will AI be able to break the rules with intent?  No doubt some clever boffin will figure out the algorithm to make that happen.  Then Michael Bay will only need to enter a brief and a few actors' names, press a button and have another Transformers movie.  One that will make enough money to allow him to press the button again and again until the formula becomes old.  And there's the point.  New formulas require people to feed them into the AI.  New rules to implement and then break.

At least, they will as long as the AIs are writing for humans.  As soon as they start creating for themselves and their interests, then all of the rules are out the window.