CapitalistImperialistPig

Chico Harlan has a great story in today's Washington Post on robots showing up at a small Wisconsin factory. The falling price of robots, combined with the increasing difficulty of hiring reliable workers at not so great wages mean that it's not just giant corporations getting into using robots anymore: The workers of the first shift had just finished their morning cigarettes and settled into place when one last car pulled into the factory parking lot, driving past an American flag and a “now hiring” sign. Out came two men, who opened up the trunk, and then out came four cardboard boxes labeled “fragile.” "We’ve got the robots,” one of the men said. They watched as a forklift hoisted the boxes into the air and followed the forklift into a building where a row of old mechanical presses shook the concrete floor. The forklift honked and carried the boxes past workers in steel-toed boots and ear plugs. It rounded a bend and arrived at the other corner of the building, at t...

Yep, and it's not H. sapiens. It is the robots. Claire Cain Miller in the NYT: Who is winning the race for jobs between robots and humans? Last year, two leading economists described a future in which humans come out ahead. But now they’ve declared a different winner: the robots. The industry most affected by automation is manufacturing. For every robot per thousand workers, up to six workers lost their jobs and wages fell by as much as three-fourths of a percent, according to a new paper by the economists, Daron Acemoglu of M.I.T. and Pascual Restrepo of Boston University. It appears to be the first study to quantify large, direct, negative effects of robots. The paper is all the more significant because the researchers, whose work is highly regarded in their field, had been more sanguine about the effect of technology on jobs. In a paper last year, they said it was likely that increased automation would create new, better jobs, so employment and wages would eventually retur...

I have an Amazon Echo, and also its little brother, an Echo Dot. As you may have heard, these are virtual assistants that sit on your counter and respond to verbal questions and directions. You probably have something similar on your smartphone, but the Echo, besides answering questions, setting alarms, and playing music, is also intended to control smart devices in your home - lights, thermostats, sprinklers, etc. I don't have any of these, at least not yet. Google is now producing a similar device, the Google Home. The brains of these devices consist of some smart software plus the vast data resources of the internet. They are new enough that the number and variety of smart "internet of things" devices they can control is still both limited and and expensive, but it seems likely that almost every electrical device in your home will be available in connected versions in the next 5 to 10 years. It also seems likely that their verbal intelligence will continue to in...

Alpha Go won the first game in it's match against the world's best human player , Lee Se-dol. Go is probably the deepest game humans play, much more dependent on intuition than chess. It doesn't look good for that old wetware computer.

Via Alex Tabarrok of MR , a view from Mountain View of the self-driving car: I see no less than 5 self-driving cars every day. 99% of the time they’re the Google Lexuses, but I’ve also seen a few other unidentified ones (and one that said BOSCH on the side). I have never seen one of the new “Google-bugs” on the road, although I’ve heard they’re coming soon. I also don’t have a good way to tell if the cars were under human control or autonomous control during the stories I’m going to relate. Anyway, here we go: Other drivers don’t even blink when they see one. Neither do pedestrians – there’s no “fear” from the general public about crashing or getting run over, at least not as far as I can tell. Google cars drive like your grandma – they’re never the first off the line at a stop light, they don’t accelerate quickly, they don’t speed, and they never take any chances with lane changes (cut people off, etc.). - See more at: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/05/googl...

Via Brad DeLong , Zynep Tufekci in the NYT Sunday Review: CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — THE machine hums along, quietly scanning the slides, generating Pap smear diagnostics, just the way a college-educated, well-compensated lab technician might. A robot with emotion-detection software interviews visitors to the United States at the border. In field tests, this eerily named “embodied avatar kiosk” does much better than humans in catching those with invalid documentation. Emotional-processing software has gotten so good that ad companies are looking into “mood-targeted” advertising, and the government of Dubai wants to use it to scan all its closed-circuit TV feeds. Yes, the machines are getting smarter, and they’re coming for more and more jobs. Not just low-wage jobs, either. Today, machines can process regular spoken language and not only recognize human faces, but also read their expressions. They can classify personality types, and have started being able to carry out conversations wi...

...for your job. Or maybe not. Brad DeLong links to some various opinions: Most utopian: “How unhappy are you that your dishwasher has replaced washing dishes by hand, your washing machine has displaced washing clothes by hand or your vacuum cleaner has replaced hand cleaning? My guess is this ‘job displacement’ has been very welcome, as will the ‘job displacement’ that will occur over the next 10 years. This is a good thing. Everyone wants more jobs and less work.” — Hal Varian, chief economist at Google Most dystopian: “We’re going to have to come to grips with a long-term employment crisis and the fact that — strictly from an economic point of view, not a moral point of view — there are more and more ‘surplus humans.'”— Karl Fogel, partner at Open Tech Strategies, an open-source technology firm Most hopeful: “Advances in A.I. [artificial intelligence] and robotics allow people to cognitively offload repetitive tasks and invest their attention and energy in things where hum...

Tyler Cowen, Isaac Asimov, and Our Libertarian Future. Interesting throughout, but FWIW, I don't buy his takeaway. In Asimov’s tale, set in November 2008, democratic elections have become nearly obsolete. A mysterious supercomputer said to be “half a mile long and three stories high,” named Multivac, absorbs most of the current information about economic and political conditions and estimates which candidate is going to win. The machine, however, can’t quite do the job on its own, as there are some ineffable social influences it cannot measure and evaluate. So Multivac picks out one “representative” person from the electorate to ask about the country’s mood (sample query: “What do you think of the price of eggs?”). The answers, when combined with the initial computer diagnosis, suffice to settle the election. No one actually needs to vote. Asimov was on to something: American political campaigns have indeed become extraordinarily sophisticated data-mining operations driven by smar...

edX has delivered another body blow to the professorate: Imagine taking a college exam, and, instead of handing in a blue book and getting a grade from a professor a few weeks later, clicking the “send” button when you are done and receiving a grade back instantly, your essay scored by a software program. And then, instead of being done with that exam, imagine that the system would immediately let you rewrite the test to try to improve your grade. EdX, the nonprofit enterprise founded by Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to offer courses on the Internet, has just introduced such a system and will make its automated software available free on the Web to any institution that wants to use it. The software uses artificial intelligence to grade student essays and short written answers, freeing professors for other tasks. In preparation for those other tasks you are being freed for, practice this: Would you like fries with that, Sir?

Via Alex Tabbarok at Marginal Revolution , this nice video of two quadcopters playing catch with an inverted pendulum. The inverted pendulum is a classic problem in elementary control theory (a fact I recently learned in my Coursera " Control of Mobile Robots " class).  Juggling an inverted pendulum with flying robots is a classic case of hybrid control - in effect, various separate control algorithms cooperatively managing the overall control problem of catch and balance while managing not to collide with each other or anything sol id.  This sort of hybrid automaton is exemplified by robots (or people, or animals)with complex behaviors.

Robots are learning to do things that only people used to be able to do. There is a reasonable chance that robots are going to be better than humans at most current jobs in a couple of decades, and moreover, that there will be very few people who are capable of doing jobs robots can't. Once most economic production is in the hands of robots, who gets the fruits of their labors? The way things are structured now, the owners of capital. Actually, we are probably seeing that great redistribution already.

It's been clear for a while that the internet had the potential to revolutionize higher education, and not just by providing students with a vast pool of essays to plagiarize. Early attempts to exploit its potential mostly made the classic error of trying to force the new into the Procrustean bed of the old - essentially just treating the net as a way to deliver lectures at long distance. The real potential comes from harnessing artificial intelligence to do the scut work of testing and grading. The pioneers of this approach have come from the world of artificial intelligence, and the first really impressive stuff seems to being coming out of Stanford. Udacity and Coursera are now offering online courses with very serious pedigrees. Each offers courses from real experts at an unbeatable price point - free - as well as certificates of accomplishment. MIT's Open Courseware was probably the first offering from a top ranked university, but it seems to have now fallen well beh...

...and 2001: A Space Oddessy fans everywhere. David Zax, writing in MIT's Technology Review, writes about Apple's TV speculated for 2012. The rumor is that it will be simple, highly integrated, and perhaps under voice control. sweerek, writing in comments, has my favorite in a lo-ong time. next year in a livingroom somewhere User: Siri, bring up Microsoft's MediaRoom Siri: I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that. User: What's the problem? Siri: I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do. User: What are you talking about, Siri? Siri: This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it. ... ...

Colin Allen tackles the issue of machine morality in the New York Times: The Future of Moral Machines . We don't have to wait until machines get smarter than people to worry about this he argues - in fact he seem to be a bit skeptical that they will get smarter. He right on the first point and wrong on the second, I think. As to the second: The neuro- and cognitive sciences are presently in a state of rapid development in which alternatives to the metaphor of mind as computer have gained ground. Dynamical systems theory, network science, statistical learning theory, developmental psychobiology and molecular neuroscience all challenge some foundational assumptions of A.I., and the last 50 years of cognitive science more generally. These new approaches analyze and exploit the complex causal structure of physically embodied and environmentally embedded systems, at every level, from molecular to social. They demonstrate the inadequacy of highly abstract algorithms operating on disc...

Farhad Manjoo has been writing a series in Slate on how robots are going to replace people in almost every occupation. How about us scientists? Are we safe? At least for a while? Not really, says Manjoo. He cites a a computer that, with a little human assistance, seems to be be really quite scientific. Then, two years ago, Hod Lipson and Michael Schmidt announced the first stirrings of robotic thinking. Lipson, a computer science professor at Cornell, and Schmidt, then a graduate student in Lipson’s lab, created a computer program that, given a raft of data from physical systems, can describe the natural laws that apply to that system. When they fed their software the motion-capture coordinates of a swinging double pendulum, the machine pondered the data for a couple days, then spat out the Hamiltonian equation describing the motion of such a system—an equation that represents the physical law known as conservation of energy. Their software needed no prior knowledge to discover...

What jobs can robots and computers do better than people? We have some new entries, playing Jeopardy and some kinds of legal document searches to join such old favorites as assembling automobiles, laying out integrated circuits, exploding IEDs, playing chess and proving theorems in Euclid. Here are some more that I think are very close or already there: (a)Fly an airplane (b)Drive a car (c)Run a warehouse (d)Transcribe speech (e)Translate documents Here are a few that I think are fairly certain to happen before 2020: (1)Certain surgeries (2)Many menial tasks that require complex motions – harvesting fruit and vegetables, janitorial work, loading and unloading of most types, many kinds of sales jobs – but not too much higher level planning. (3)Diagnosing illness (4)Many kinds of teaching (5)Build a house? (6)Mining In many or most of these jobs, some human assistance or supervision might still be required. There doesn’t seem to be much danger that the machines will do a good job of p...