Are we now run by robots? According to the marketing hype the golden age of AI beckons, it will be a time when our lives will work in tandem with the technology and be immeasurably better, but will it?
Future Intelligence and the PassW0rd radio programme have examined the idea of Augmented Intelligence for several years now, principally to watch the blossoming of this symbiotic relationship.
In the latest PassW0rd programme, ‘Run by robots’, we decided to examine whether our lives are already run by robots?
And – are we working not with them but for them?
Two months ago, the Economist magazine pointed out that: “funds run by computers that follow rules set by humans account for 35% of America’s stock market, 60% of institutional equity assets and 60% of trading activity.
“Artificial-intelligence programs are writing their own investing rules, in ways that humans only partly understand. Industries from parcel and pizza-delivery to film-making are being changed by technology, but finance is unique because it can exert voting power over firms, redistribute wealth and cause mayhem in the economy,” it said.
The risks from an AI world
Some proponents of the technology may claim that it was forever thus, that since the start of the industrial revolution parodied by Charles Dickens in ‘Hard Times’ and vilified by Friedrich Engels in his book ‘The condition of the working class in England’, that financial institutions have made their decisions based on balance sheets but now for the first time the calculating machines are making decisions that effect peoples’ lives rather than just supplying data.
AI bots can also force companies to close. In a world of online ordering and instant consumer gratification, a bad reputation can get an employee sacked and force a company to lose a delivery contract.
It may seem efficient. In practice, being run by robots may be cold and deadly.
Ruth Lane’s husband Don was a franchised van driver. He died after collapsing in a diabetic coma while he was making deliveries in rural Dorset. Ruth had to make the heart-breaking decision to switch off his life support machine. She blames the automated system that organised his job for causing his untimely death. It tracked his movements, scanned his parcels and logged his deliveries through a handset, known as a “gun”.
The case of Don Lane stirs strong emotions. It has even become the subject of a film, ‘Sorry We missed You’ made by the acclaimed film-director Ken Loach. Yet there are counter arguments to be made. We must note that the only role that people now play in the new world order is that of a desire mechanism.
What ran Don Lane’s life was a computer. But it was a computer whose rules were dictated by the consumer culture that demands that delivery drivers meet delivery targets because people do not want to stay indoors to wait for delivery drivers. But they very much want their deliveries! Human desires and needs currently power the economic system.
Caught in a web and the web
Philosopher Professor Barry Smith of Edinburgh University pointed out when we interviewed him for the programme that Don Lane was caught in a web dictated by the terms of reference written by the lawyers.
These terms of reference are then written into the computer systems by the programmers. As Ruth Lane points out in our interview, her late husband’s life was dictated by a computerised device that he called ‘the gun’.
This adaption of our lives to technology is something that the futurist and author Jaron Lanier has warned about for over 30 years.
According to Lanier, author of a number of books including ‘Who Owns the Future’, the process started in the US when people started to live their lives in a particular way so that they could get a good credit rating.
As Lanier said at the time the computer programming was rules-based , meaning that it worked on the basis of: ‘if this criterion is met, if this box is ticked i.e. “Is their income between £20,000 – £30,000? if so go on to this box here,” as a result people were making sure that their behaviour fitted within the programme,” This conformity will certainly be exaggerated by the AI systems, which are heavily weighted to financial outcomes at the moment.
This increasingly integrated relationship with machines is vividly demonstrated in the PassW0rd programme by IBM’s ‘Debater’ system, an AI project developed by the company’s Noam Slonim in Tel Aviv, Israel.
AI debates its value at Cambridge University
At the Cambridge University Union last month the Debater system set out the reasons why it would be good for the future of humanity, though at the same time it also set out some of the reasons why it might also be bad for humanity, leaving the audience to vote on whether it thought that AI would be a force for good.
It was a clever deployment of the technology by IBM and one that showed the technology companies are becoming aware of a need to reassure the public about systems that are increasingly being seen as threats. Allowing the audience to vote was evidently provided as proof of the symbiotic relationship that humanity will develop with the technology.
So far so good, but as the PassW0rd programme went on to explore the boundaries between AI and people. Emil Eifrem founder of the San Francisco based AI company Neo4j.com claims soon we could become one with the machines literally run by robots. He claims we are simply the sum of our connections and the information that we accrete to those connections.
According to Eifrem, we are data. If that contention is true, it does throw up important concerns about who protects, interprets, manipulates and is in charge of that data.
That point was made by data scientist Dr Ben Lorica, of the AI conference company O’Reilly. For as IBM have evidently realised – if they get that wrong the public unease with robots and AI will spread and a ‘techlash’ will occur that will see people questioning the need for AI in their lives, particularly if it effects their employment.
An argument forcibly made by Don Lane’s widow Ruth. She is now taking Don’s former employers, the delivery company DPD, to court for imposing on him a regime that did not allow her diabetic husband to take proper meal breaks and deterred him from attending vital medical appointments for fear of being fined.
For the purposes of this programme we have been working with some robots to see what life is like to have machines looking after your home. One of them is a vacuum cleaner made by a company called Neato. It was particularly impressive. Interestingly, the vacuum provides an option to give it a name. That in itself is a contentious issue. Former MEP Mady Delvaux-Stehres, the then chair of European Parliament’s Working Group on Robotics, whose Civil Law on Robots recommendations stated that anthropomorphising machines should be discouraged.
Working with robots
In spite of the EU guidelines, we called it Bartholomew. The vacuum cleaner quickly established itself as an entity. The dog did not like it. Unlike the dog, a Jack Russell terrier called Sid, Bartholomew sent me messages. Sid is very needy but Bartholomew beat Sid hands down. Soon the messages poured in. “I’m stuck, free me.” “I’ve finished.” “Empty me.” “Clean my filter.”
The room though was very clean, and one other very interesting thing was happening: the vacuum cleaner was guilt-tripping me. was I being run by robots? I am a writer, so I have always left piles of papers and books on the floor. Spurred on by a carpet that was putting a hotel corridor to shame rather I picked up my books and put them on tables. Some books I have even put back on the shelves where they came from. As far the Edinburgh philosopher Barry Smith was concerned this was a step too far. He agrees with Lanier. Accommodating robots, Smith says, means that poor programming is creating boxes for us rather than setting us free.
O’Reilly’s Ben Lorica goes further. He says that not only do we need to have better programming, but now technology companies must employ more ethicists, more philosophers and more writers to solve the problems they are facing. Quite literally the technology industry has to do the thing its leaders always claim in their speeches: they have to think outside of the box
It’s ironic then that the roots of the concept of the robot come from an author, the Czech writer Karel Capek who based his idea of slave like mechanical beings explored in his play Rossum’s Universal Robots, on ‘robota’, a Slav word for serf labour his elder brother Josef’ suggested to him as a name slave workers
Ironic, because in Capek’s play, first performed 99 years ago, he argues for better and more humane treatment for the workers (robots) that Capek uses as a metaphor for humanity, pointing out that behind everything – as Barry Smith says – there is a human who wants to consume something.
