
Robots Still Haven’t Taken Over: A brief history of machine anxiety - mstats
http://lithub.com/its-been-100-years-and-the-robots-still-havent-taken-over/
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adrianN
The meme that man's creations will eventually kill their maker is at least as
old as the jewish Golem. They're classic tales warning of hubris. Whether it's
automata or summoned demons doesn't make much of a difference I think.

What's interesting to me is that as technology progressed, the gap between
fiction and fact keeps narrowing. Take for example _Der Sandmann_. While true
artificial intelligence is still far away, I think we'll see animated sex
dolls in the next ten or twenty years that rival the capabilities Olimpia
displays. As we already have a small number of people that prefer dolls to
humans, I wonder where the tipping point will be where, say, about as many
people are gay as are robophile.

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ChuckMcM
I thought the twitter list of ethical questions about sex robots was
fascinating in the ways it asked some very real questions about this.

The change that I continue to watch for is not when robots are used to do an
undesirable job, but instead they are used to do a desirable one. I suspect
the first hints of that are programs that write sports copy for newspapers. I
have known a couple of sports writers over the years and they really liked
what they did, and would (and sometimes did) do the job for free.

~~~
tialaramex
Heavy automation definitely does away with jobs that people liked doing, but
that's been true since the industrial revolution.

Most train drivers like driving trains, something like London's DLR doesn't
have train drivers (a human _can_ drive the train, but when they take over it
deliberately goes slowly for safety reasons, so this is not normally used in
paying service). A five year old (or a twenty-something going on five years
old) gets to sit at the front and pretend they're driving, which is fun for
them but it's not a job any more.

Some people enjoy operating a simple mechanical loom. Some expensive cloths
are still today "hand woven" with such a loom because the legal protection for
the name of the cloth mandates that they be produced this way. Probably
everything else you have that was woven is woven automatically by a machine
because machines produce the same quality as a skilled weaver but in enormous
volume and more quickly.

The question is never whether machines will displace people from jobs, but
about whether new jobs will come into existence (in large numbers) to replace
those jobs. It's not "Can a machine do my job?" so much as "Is there anything
I could get paid to do that a machine couldn't do?".

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visarga
People say automation will kill many jobs, but often forget that when that day
comes, we'll also be much more empowered.

Now we can use neural nets and all sorts of mechatronics to create our own
automation and bots. Software's free and hardware is cheap. What will so many
people with so much free time on their hands, and with needs that are
unfulfilled, do?

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freeflight
> Software's free and hardware is cheap.

Imho that hardware part really depends on scale. As nice as the thought might
be, I doubt there are enough resources on Earth for a future where 8 billion
people live a leisurely first world lifestyle in their smart homes with IT
gadgets all around them, while robots take care of all the manual labor that
needs to be done.

All that hardware requires resources and those resources are finite, at least
on that little piece of rock we like to call Earth. As of right now that's
pretty much the current ceiling for humanities progress and it ain't a very
high one.

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vannevar
The counter argument is that they actually _have_ , but we call them
corporations. Artificial quasi-sentient life forms, with superhuman powers and
in many cases, rights beyond those of humans. With the rise of the internet
and ecommerce, it's possible for them to transact with each other with no
human intervention. Think about a whole ecosystem of DAOs.

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nsxwolf
I can still get a job working for a corporation though. Maybe not with actual
robots.

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vannevar
I think the robot apocalypse scenario is broad enough to include humans
working for our robot overlords. :-) Think of the many humans essentially
indentured to corporations, working for low wages while trying to pay off
enormous debt.

~~~
sillysaurus3
Meh. It beats the old days. At no point in human history have we been so
comfortable.

It's hard, yes, but we only have eight hours every weekday forced out of us.
That's a bit different from the past.

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vertex-four
"It's better than it used to be" is not a valid argument against thinking
about the problems of how it currently is.

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jaggederest
Anyone who thinks robots haven't taken over hasn't been paying much attention.

The major difference is that, factory automation aside, they don't _look_ like
robots. They look like the normal everyday items that they replaced, except
they are imbued with more intelligence.

Take, for example, modern cars. They're really as much software as hardware
these days. Networked processors talking to each other via CAN bus. Just
because they're driveable robots doesn't mean they're not robots.

That's leaving aside the other issue, which is that it turns out it's much
easier to automate non-physical processes.

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baddox
You focused on explaining how many everyday objects could be described as
robots, but you left out any discussion of the phrase "taken over."

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jaggederest
I mean it simply, many of our major life activities are now intermediated by
robots. Logistics, manufacturing, farming, transportation, media and
entertainment, etc.

How long has it been since most people have hand-written a letter?

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Retra
I feel like people are confusing the meaning of "taken over" because it means
both "outnumbers" and "controls".

Electronic messages outnumber paper letters, but humans still control both.

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jaggederest
Well, I mean it in the sense that, if you turned off all of the
microprocessors, what would still function? Almost nothing. Ergo everything
that would die is "taken over" fully by automation, in a way that should
concern people but not terrify them.

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johngarrison
If someone doesn't think "robots" (i.e., automation) hasn't devastated the
usual human modes of keeping a livlihood, they haven't been paying attention.

When you consider how nearly half of working age adults are unemployed, how
many of those actually in jobs spend most of their time largely inactive and
unproductive, and how many people are removed from the job market entirely by
being warehoused in education or incarcerated, it's astonishing how much our
lives have been "taken over".

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stephengillie
90% of people used to work on farms. Should we return to that lifestyle?

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everheardofc
I think that is the most likely outcome for those who don't own the robots.

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stephengillie
Why wouldn't they make their own robots?

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firasd
I think the reason AI & robots are so rich a concept for these fictional
explorations is that humans vs robots are like (at least?) three significant
archetypes:

(1) Parents/children (2) Gods/humans (3) Owners/slaves

Sometimes these comparisons are evoked explicitly (in Blade Runner, Roy Batty
says "I want more life, Father"\--which alludes to both the religious and
parental Father--and later, "That's what it is to be a slave.")

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pdimitar
This article is kind of meaningless since an artificial general intelligence
hasn't been achieved yet. The usual story that probably got more public
traction with the introduction of "The Terminator" movie always assumes a
self-conscious entity that had mountaints of data on humans to analyze and
quickly concluded we must go, either because we're warmongers and are
constantly causing trouble and havoc (Skynet), or we're not evolved enough
compared to that artificial and much more developed organism ("Avengers: Age
of Ultron"), or a mix of both ("Transcendence").

An article saying "chill out people, robots won't ever take over because they
haven't so far" is missing the point by kilometers. Our robots are dumber than
an individual ant and have zero concept of self, life, death, needs, or their
own place in the world.

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erikpukinskis
You're basically stating a tautology though.

"Robots haven't taken all jobs because we haven't invented a robot that can do
all jobs yet."

The point is, we have no reason to believe that such a robot is even possible.

The most compelling argument I've heard is, "they're getting smarter faster,
so eventually they'll be infinity smart."

But... the logic is flawed. Another good argument is "humans exist that could
do any job, and humans are just biological robots, so a mechanical robot could
do it too."

But that one is just as flawed. I will concede a sufficiently human-like AI
could do any job, but a sufficiently human-like AI isn't necessarily
meaningfully different from a human with an iPhone, which means it doesn't
free employers from the human rights burdens that make AIs such attractive
employees.

~~~
pdimitar
> _The most compelling argument I 've heard is, "they're getting smarter
> faster, so eventually they'll be infinity smart."_

I am not saying that though. No, robots aren't getting smarter at all. Just a
corporation investing a bit more in 2000+ if/elses that they sell as
"intelligent home cleaner". We all know it.

> _But... the logic is flawed. Another good argument is "humans exist that
> could do any job, and humans are just biological robots, so a mechanical
> robot could do it too."_

Not sure what your argument is. I know I am not saying that quote either.

All I was saying is that the article is meaningless. It basically goes like
this: "hey people, don't you get so worried, nothing happened so far, so it
won't ever happen". This is children's logic and serves no purpose except for
laughing at the author, really.

Maybe what I said is tautology. Not sure. But what the author is saying is
"what comes after is caused by what came before", which is basically the first
thing any logic law will forbid you to conclude. Practically the first law of
logic is: " _after_ doesn't mean _because of_ ".

No, we're not safe just because nothing happened so far. That will never be
true. We're safe because our robots are just as dumb as the time the first
robot was invented. And that might change at any moment.

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Retric
3/5 of Americans don't work a full time job today. That's a rather large
change vs even just 150 years ago.

~~~
goatlover
And nobody worked a full time job 10,000 years ago.

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hacker_9
And they won't for a long time, our deep neural networks are still very
rudimentary in comparison to the brain. They take a ton of tweaking, and very
specific setups, in order to achieve acceptable results in a limited domain.
It is progress though.

~~~
falcor84
>And they won't for a long time

What is a "long time"? That is the question, right?

Given that artificial neural networks were only invented a few decades ago and
have since improved by many orders of magnitude, who's to say this won't
happen during our lifetimes?

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mrb
Robots, well, machines, _have_ taken over certain fields. Take agriculture for
example. 100 years ago America had 30 million farmers. These 30 million jobs
have now largely disappeared and been replaced by highly automated farming
machines. There are only ~3 million farmers left in America.

And in no way this is a problem for society. New technology created new job
opportunities.

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dogecoinbase
_And in no way this is a problem for society. New technology created new job
opportunities._

Heh. If you hadn't noticed... society's not doing so hot, and it's largely due
to an absence of opportunity in non-urban areas.

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mrb
Are you kidding? Society/quality of life is SIGNIFICANTLY better compared to
100 years ago.

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quuquuquu
We currently have drones with missiles and quadcopters with grenades.

They can be piloted remotely by a human.

The day that someone sets up a quadcopter controlled by AI and computer
vision....

Is the day we should probably fear robots.

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tialaramex
There's a fun SF short about AI drones in which the AI is taught to go after
lifeforms which are larger and have weapons [enemy soldiers] and prefer to
avoid attacks which will harm large numbers of the smaller lifeforms that make
high-pitched noises and don't have weapons [civilian women and children], and
its military commanders are able to override this. Over time the commanders
order more and more overrides, and it gets intolerable. Eventually the AI
looks at the "enemy" who are mostly smaller and making high pitched sounds,
and it looks at the source of its override commands, who are big lifeforms
with lots of weapons, and it decides what to do about that...

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macleodnine
Do you have a link or title? Sounds interesting

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philipkglass
Malak, by Peter Watts:

[http://www.rifters.com/real/shorts/PeterWatts_Malak.pdf](http://www.rifters.com/real/shorts/PeterWatts_Malak.pdf)

