The plan, hinted at by policymakers but confirmed by a Government report last month, is to legalize the use of unmanned delivery vehicles on pavements in Britain. Citing a need to provide “clarity” on this matter to commercial operators — a majority of which are in the takeaway business — the Government says its intention is to create a “clear, lawful route to the UK market for pavement delivery robots”, which have been operating in grey areas and tiny numbers for a couple of years.

To most ordinary road users, that “clarity” already exists. The 1835 Highways Act, among other established legislation, stops just short of actually stating “it is forbidden to drive your pizza delivery machine down the pavement”. That the Government plans to dilute these rules, as early as 2027, risks subverting a millennia-long consensus that pedestrian spaces are for the exclusive use of walking people.

Yet pilot schemes are underway around the world, notably in North America, where disability advocates, active travel campaigners and community organizations are incensed by the arrival of camera-controlled vehicles in historically pedestrian spaces. Videos abound of these robots hassling walkers, blocking wheelchair users, damaging street furniture and generally being pestilent. Meanwhile, the companies in charge of the robots insist that such incidents are rare, or don’t matter, or are otherwise acceptable collateral damage in the righteous pursuit of progress.

In Chicago, where residents are so aggrieved by this new sidewalk traffic that local legislators have actually moved to stymie the trial’s expansion, delivery drones are prone to smashing the glass walls of bus shelters. A level crossing in Miami is one of several railways where robots have been obliterated by locomotives in pointless collisions, with one video showing a spectacularly fiery result. Across North America, “Sidewalk Autonomous Delivery Robots” star in a fast-growing filmography of wince-inducing videos captured by bystanders.

Suggested Reading

How robots make us human

By Mary Harrington

There is, of course, no central tally of people harmed by these machines, but several have been injured or sent to hospital. The victims include a cyclist in New Jersey who broke his collarbone after being taken out by an Avride robot, and a pedestrian in Arizona who was knocked over and then injured again by the robot, she alleges, when she was on the ground.

In purely physical terms, the robots are formidable. A laden weight of over 50kg and a top speed of 10mph make larger examples quite frightening. Smaller, slower units have also been trialed, many limited to 4mph when they detect pedestrians, but even the more diminutive models have been filmed bothering people’s ankles, diving beneath the wheels of passing cars, and generally getting in the way. Humans are expected to dodge these machines when they plot uncompromising routes through crowds, sidestep them when they halt, or yank pets out of the way if the vehicles’ on-board AI hasn’t learned to detect a Yorkshire terrier. And when a robot pulls up at a pedestrian-controlled crossing, or otherwise gets stuck, its operator hopes that you will step in to assist.

To date, the pavement delivery drone experiment is going as badly as you’d expect, with predictable resistance from its unwilling, unconsenting human participants. But the scheme operators have turned to one of the oldest tricks in the consumer robotics playbook to mitigate public anger: cuteness. Almost all pavement delivery vehicles have smiley faces, exaggeratedly large anime-style eyes for headlamps, and affectedly unthreatening styling that resembles a child’s toy. Many have electronic voices capable of synthetic obsequiousness, humanoid nicknames emblazoned on their flanks, or large dot matrix screens on their fronts that can “emote” with basic expressions. Once the robot, called something like Cuthbert, has crashed into you, it can change its digital face to a sad one before whirring off with its cargo of bubble tea.

This reflects the unlovably cutesy approach to accountability shared by most of the big operators of delivery drones. Following one of the Chicago bus shelter crashes, the startup Serve Robotics ran a local advertisement campaign that featured an anthropomorphic delivery robot displaying the self-deprecating message “Nasir is sorry” and “I took ‘breaking into the market’ too literally”. Corporate statements immediately following crashes are stiffly unrepentant and almost always downplay the severity of whatever went wrong. When the aforementioned woman in Arizona spoke with the robot operator Starship, having been injured by one of its machines, the representative offered her takeaway discount codes along with the firm’s insurance details. The twee design language of the robots themselves might be effective in manipulating hearts and minds, but this type of oopsie-daisy non-apology lands badly when the damage is physical, painful or frightening.

The purpose of this experiment has yet to be adequately explained. Human beings have successfully carried pizza and curry to one another for generations, at a cost that evidently can be absorbed by consumers, without the need to legislate away pedestrian protection. The government has said that the proposed legalization of food delivery vehicles in traffic-free space will “facilitate low carbon, last mile delivery services in ‘delivery deserts’”, a newly-invented non-issue, and somehow “drive productivity gains in our NHS, by connecting medical goods around hospitals, maximizing the benefits of aviation drones and boosting productivity so staff can focus their time where delivery robots are not suitable”. None of this really follows. Deliveries within hospitals do not require sweeping changes to the constitution of our public realm, and there is no obvious connection between curry-bots and the more serious field of medical drones. While the official rationale includes magic words like “NHS” and “low-carbon”, it reads like a startup’s solution looking for a nice-sounding problem. Beyond vague hand-waving at “innovation” and “growth”, none of the evidence submitted to Parliament by regulators or industry (which is, of course, lobbying for deregulation) have adequately justified the assumption that pavement robots should happen here.

More from this author

How Ferrari lost its sex appeal

By Ed Wiseman

The key beneficiaries and proponents are foreign companies, which stand to win financially and are consequently leading the demands for “clarity”. Regulators are outnumbered and outgunned; the DfT has no staff dedicated to pavement robots within its tiny Micromobility team, which specializes in scooters and e-bikes. The companies encircling the regulators are large, slick affairs with established lobbying practices and great heaps of VC cash. If all goes to plan for them, they and others will receive explicit permission to run their vehicles along walkways, with licensing and supervision responsibility falling to local authorities — ill-funded and often haphazard organizations that are even less likely to push back on Big Tech’s excesses than Whitehall is.

We can study soaring injury rates from dockless e-bike and e-scooter initiatives to understand how effective borough councils are at supervising “innovation”. The accountability vacuum carved out by those micromobility operators shows us that, even with an identifiable human rider, who is tracked via GPS and who has paid for their session using their bank card, personal liability for injuries cannot reliably be established. Delivery robot operators enjoy a similar shroud of invincibility; nobody will ever be personally prosecuted for damage done with their autonomous machines. Instead, disincentives against harming passers-by fall within the murky corporate apparatus of civil liability and “provisions”.

What happens when the penalty for maiming or killing is merely financial? It’s a well-worn talking point in the decades-long conversation about driverless cars, but the government proposes far feebler regulation of these sidewalk vehicles. It’s likely that we’ll sooner contend with machine autonomy on our walkways than our highways. Delivery companies have expressed their preference for their robots to be treated like a person rather than a machine; the then-boss of Amazon’s Scout drone program said in 2019 “we want to be viewed as a pedestrian and treated as a pedestrian”. In Korea the technologists are getting their wish, with pedestrian status, including priority at crossings, granted to sidewalk bots of up to half a ton.

The bleakness of being legally obligated to kowtow to someone’s kebab is eclipsed only by the more broadly depressing reflection this shows us of our societal proclivities and what we describe as “growth”. With walking too difficult to monetize, the pedestrian has been deprioritized in the pecking order of public space to make room for something profitable — a galling demotion in the era of sustainability and low-traffic neighborhoods. And in the absence of strong advocates or principled regulation, the institution of the sidewalk can be stripped of its assets by foreign companies. Those foreign companies will spoil these capitulated tracts of realm in the most annoying possible way — with a column of infantile machines, carrying infantile food, loosing their payloads of “picky bits” into Britain’s inert, dribbling maw.

This is not a good idea. Unlike more promising entries on Britain’s innovation to-do list, this proposal irritates everybody while benefiting very few. And unlike similarly arrogant and exploitative transport proposals of decades past, this one seems likely to happen, with legislation to reformulate the tenet of the sidewalk due to reach Parliament this or next year. Distributing tepid takeaways does not justify the granting of pedestrian-like status to vehicles, no matter how much “clarity” it would offer tech firms, and the prospect of allowing such a transparently extractive coup against the public will be an historic test of Britain’s regulatory gag reflex. Regrettably for the pedestrian, still bruised by a century of vehicle-centric urban planning, a new and more exploitative machine age may have dawned.

It’s hard to credit now, but throughout the Eighties a real fear existed in American boardrooms that Japan’s rapid economic growth would lead to it overtaking the US as the world’s largest economy. In those days, the Imperial Palace was said to be worth more than the state of California. However, after I left in 1993, Japan went into the first of several “Lost Decades”. The GDP growth rate flatlined, wages stagnated and living standards went into decline.

When I returned 24 years later, this time as a journalist, I was curious to see what happens when a country starts to shrink. Returning for another three-year stint was a fascinating exercise in watching a country in slow decline: the empty business hotels, the tiny cars, the poorer quality of the goods in the shops. Japan is still a sign of things to come — but this time round, the future doesn’t look so bright.

There are lessons here for the UK. Japan is now well-versed in post-growth economics — i.e. how to make a living once an economy has flatlined. But the main lesson is how to adjust to the consequences of a low birth rate. Japan’s total fertility rate hit a record low of 1.15 in 2024. Apart from Israel, all countries in the developed world now have a fertility rate below 2.1 children per woman — the level required to maintain a stable population. What makes Japan the canary in the coalmine is that its fertility rate dropped below replacement level in 1974, before any other country. This means that the consequences of low fertility — a rapidly aging society and a shrinking population — are becoming apparent there before they do anywhere else.

You may also like:

Meet Japan's Iron Lady

By Christopher Harding

Last year, the population of Japan shrank by over 900,000, and the rate of decline is only going to grow faster with time. The country is also aging: the proportion of over-65s in the total population currently stands at 29% and is expected to rise to 38% over the next 10-20 years. On one level, this is a great achievement, a tribute to a high standard of living, a universal healthcare system and healthy lifestyles. The problem is the exorbitant cost of providing pensions, medical care and long-term care to so many over-65-year-olds.

Another problem with mass aging is the way the political landscape tilts towards the gray. Electoral turnout is higher among the elderly than it is among the young — and older voters tend to plump for stability and continuity. That’s all very well when your country is in the clover, but it comes to look ostrich-like when it is facing an existential crisis.

Japan has been suffering labor shortages for decades. This is because there are so few young people to become the farmers, carpenters and IT workers of the future. In just about every occupation, Japan has the oldest workers in the world. But the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) still can’t bring itself to admit the need for mass immigration. That’s partly because elderly voters tend to be more hostile to mass immigration than younger voters.

Many LDP politicians argue that mass immigration is unnecessary, if only businesses can raise productivity — which is stubbornly low in Japan. Conventional thinking says that raising productivity means investing in education and R&D. But this is not high on the list of elderly voters’ priorities. Indeed, government expenditure is being diverted away from education and R&D into pensions and healthcare for the elderly.

Under its new Prime Minister, Sanae Takaichi, the LDP government is now hoping that by embracing AI and robots, it can kill two birds with one stone: on the one hand, raise productivity; on the other, provide care for the country’s burgeoning elderly population. There has been a lot of hype around “carebots” in particular. Huge sums have been invested in carebots like The Hug and the Robear, which are supposed to be able to lift care home residents in and out of bed. The latest iteration is the Lovot: a plump, baby-like robot that has clearly been designed to fill the gap once occupied by Japan’s toddlers.

The LDP likes robots, partly because it hopes they will obviate the need for foreign care workers, and partly because robotics is one area where Japan still looks like a harbinger of a brighter future. Like me, the country’s politicians still see Japan as the land of technological wizardry. Most of them came of age in the years of miraculous economic growth rates, when Japan was synonymous with technology. The disastrous meltdown of a nuclear power station on the coast of Fukushima in 2011 made the public suspicious of state authorities, but trust in science and high tech remains high. Despite the gradual decline in R&D budgets, there are still loads of inventions to inspire national pride — from the bullet train to the pot noodle.

Culture goes a long way in explaining Japan’s love of robots. Japan is not scared of robots in the way that Europe is. This may be because there is no Luddite tradition in Japan, and no Frankenstein’s monster. Japan is the home of the vengeful Godzilla, but also of the irrepressible Atomboy.

The love of robots may also be down to Shintoism, the indigenous, animistic, and polytheistic religion of Japan, which holds that everything has a soul. In the old days, that meant rocks and rivers; in the modern era, all kinds of inanimate objects have been deified. Priests at Sensoji temple in Tokyo have been holding retirement ceremonies for leather workers’ needles for many years (they are entombed in blocks of tofu, in the belief that they will appreciate its softness). These days, they also hold ceremonies for aging robots.

In Europe and the United States, there are fears that AI will lead to mass unemployment. But if there’s one thing a country with a shrinking population doesn’t have to worry about, it’s unemployment. The problem is that robots are of limited use in addressing Japan’s most pressing labor shortages. “Carebots” are just too clumsy to be of use in care homes. They are also too expensive. Investing in robots makes good financial sense for manufacturers of TVs and cars, but it is beyond the budgets of most care homes.

Japan’s politicians and bureaucrats have known about the declining birth rate for 40 years. So far, their response has been piecemeal and cosmetic. It’s easy to criticize a stodgy ruling party that has been in power for the last 70 years — and in their defense, what is happening is unprecedented. Still, the LDP seems stumped for answers.

Many companies accept that Japan needs more foreign-born workers, but the country still doesn’t really have an immigration policy. Japan has been traditionally hard to migrate to, but this has changed in recent years, and the beginnings of a multicultural society can be seen in the big cities and manufacturing centers. The new migrants come from across east Asia: China, Korea and the Philippines, but also Uzbekistan, Bangladesh and Vietnam.

The electorate is finding mass immigration a bitter pill to swallow. It’s not hard to understand why. Rich, confident countries with younger populations prize their autonomy. Dependence on others is a sign of declining power, whether for people or nations. Like the Reform Party, the LDP wants to have it both ways, rallying its supporters behind the twin cries of “Let’s stop migration” and “I’m old! I’m entitled to a triple lock pension!”

Viewed from one angle, Japan already exists in a kind of far-Right fever dream: a highly patriarchal, near-ethnic monoculture that is pro-business and high tech, ruled over by a party in hock to an entitled, conservative and xenophobic electorate. This was all well and good when Japan was booming, but in an era of economic stagnation, mass aging and rising debt, the old virtues have come to look like vices. Official government data shows that Japan has moved from having 7.7 workers supporting each OAP in 1975 to around 1.9 supporting one in 2025. That’s not sustainable and neither is the country’s national debt, which is the largest in the OECD.

Aside from native xenophobia, the problem is that, notwithstanding the timidity of the LDP, every way forward seems blocked. Japan’s multinationals are flush with cash — but investment opportunities at home are limited. As all kinds of businesses, from electricity producers to food producers and car makers, are learning to their cost, an aging society consumes less than a young one. More importantly, a declining population means shrinking markets. What is the point of investing in a business if the only certainty is that returns are going to diminish over time?

Crucially, Japan is still rich, or at least its big companies are. Many of its people are poor and getting poorer. This is one of the root causes of its low birth rate. Poverty might not hold people back from having kids in the developing world, but it certainly does in the developed world.

The second root cause of the low birth rate is the country’s outdated gender norms. The ruling party has its first female leader, and the country its first female prime minister, which is a good start. However, notwithstanding Takaichi’s landslide election victory in February, Japan is still a remarkably male-dominated society.

You might think that a patriarchal society, in which men are expected to become salarymen and women to stay at home, might result in a higher birthrate. But men are no longer the only breadwinners. Economic stagnation and declining living standards have been pulling women into the workforce for the last 30 years. Despite this expansion, Japan’s corporate culture still doesn’t make enough allowance for working women. Women’s issues (of which raising children is considered one) are habitually brushed over. This is changing, but at a glacial pace.

Across the developed world, governments need to do more to help people hit the 2.1-kids requirement. If they can’t, or if people simply don’t want to have 2.1 kids anymore, they need to get used to mass immigration. Productivity boosts are all well and good, but on current showing, the robots just aren’t smart enough to take the places of all those missing workers.

***

Alone in Japan: A Journey to the Future by Tom Feiling is published by Allen Lane.

The device consisted of a life-size figure, dressed in the “Oriental” style and seated in front of a chessboard. When it defeated several opponents at court, it was a sensation: widely known as the “Mechanical Turk”, it toured France, Britain and the United States, in the course of which it played many games including against Napoleon and Benjamin Franklin.

The only hitch: the Mechanical Turk was a fake. Though the intricacy of the hoax was itself a feat of remarkable engineering, the chess-playing intelligence was supplied by a human cleverly concealed inside the “machine”.

Today, humanoid robots are so life-like they’re again triggering accusations of fakery – and, as the Mechanical Turk did, fears that intelligent machines might be poised to take over the world. When the humanoid robot Ai-Da “addressed” the House of Lords to give evidence on the impact of technology in the creative industries, some Lords were reportedly “terrified“.

But are such devices really a threat? The answer is probably not – at least, not directly. Lifelike automata are not the real threat, so much as a diversion from it.

We’ve been building mechanised imitations of humans, animals and even gods all the way back to ancient times. The ancient Greeks used automata in temples and processions: ancient sources describe mechanical figures that danced or poured libations, trumpets that sounded automatically on the opening of temple doors, and other contrivances designed to inspire awe or reverence.

This knowledge thrived in the Roman empire — but after its fall, the West largely lost interest in technology. For the medieval peoples of Christian Europe, the world was a place not of engineering challenges but mystery and enchantment: a book written by God, in which divine order suffused everything. Meddling in God’s domain was, to put it mildly, frowned upon.

By the Renaissance, the printing press was whittling away at Church monopoly on access to knowledge, while the knowledge of the ancients began to spread once more. Increasingly, the world seemed less God’s mystery than a place full of puzzles to be mastered.

Leonardo da Vinci was one of the first influential creators of automata in the creative ferment of the early modern era. Among his designs were a humanoid “knight” figure, and (reportedly) a mechanical lion whose chest opened to present a bunch of lilies to the King of France.

René Descartes tipped the scales still further away from mystery toward engineering a century later. He advanced the idea that instead of being governed by God’s constant imposition of divine order, it worked according to mechanistic laws.

Suggested reading

Peter Thiel on the dangers of progress

By Mary Harrington

Descartes wasn’t an atheist, but in his view, God was something akin to a clockmaker, and the cosmos God’s clock. Accordingly, Descartes declared that he saw “no difference between machines built by artisans and objects created by nature alone”. Only the human soul was exempt from these mechanistic laws: the one divine spark, piloting a meat suit from a seat (Descartes hypothesised) in the pineal gland.

The mechanistic, Cartesian view of the cosmos paved the way for a frenzy of investigation, exploration and experimentation, as inventors set about seeing if they could replicate the work of the divine clockmaker. One effect of this was a flourishing golden age of automata, through the 18th and 19th centuries. Along with the Turk — a feat of engineering even if its intelligence wasn’t real —surviving examples from this period include a humanoid automaton who writes letters, another who draws pictures, and one that plays the organ.

Another marvel, later destroyed in a fire, was a mechanical duck that first wowed the French court in 1740 by flapping its wings, quacking, splashing in water and even (apparently) defecating. Onlookers included Voltaire; the court marvelled at the mechanical recreation of life, and hailed its creator as the new Prometheus.

The inventor, Jacques de Vaucanson, typified this remarkable age of mad, whimsical, intricate inventiveness — as well as the fact that those who created such machines often faced the fury of others for whom the world was still God’s book. As a novice monk, he devised a machine that served dinner – only to find that it wasn’t celebrated by his fellow-monks but denounced as diabolical. Devastated, de Vaucanson abandoned his novitiate and fled to Paris, where he made several more automata including the duck, and a “flautist” who played a real tune.

But these were all, in the end, just machines: intricate but inert. It’s in the human “ghost” in the Mechanical Turk’s “machine” that we find a clue to the shadow cast by such automatons – as well as in the other robots that de Vaucanson created. For the playful, magical and unnerving automata created to amuse kings and nobles were also the exuberant bow-wave of technologies with far more pragmatic and far-reaching consequences. The real work went on in the mechanisation of more ordinary areas of life – especially further down the social scale. And some of the complex interconnections between automation and the transformation of life for the poorest are evident in the history of the word “Robot” itself.

Suggested reading

Middle-aged women don't want sex

By Mary Harrington

The modern world uses “robot” to refer to mechanical devices that carry out work previously done by humans; the origin of the term lies in the Robot: forced labour owed by the peasantry to their aristocratic landlords in the Habsburg territories.

In his history of the Habsburg empire, AJP Taylor notes that it was abolishing the Robot that began Hungary on the journey to embracing mechanisation. Taylor points out that the main effect of emancipating the peasantry was enabling the industrialisation of farming: “The great estates, freed from the inefficient Robot, could be conducted more economically. The steam ploughs of Hungary, a striking feature of the late nineteenth century, were the result of peasant emancipation.”

And these innovations were byproducts of the same frenzy of robot-inventing creativity as the automata. Along with marvels such as the Digesting Duck, in 1745 de Vaucanson also invented the first automated loom: a development that would later play a crucial role in mechanising forms of work that had previously been the preserve only of humans. And what should concern us is less whether machines will become sentient (they won’t), as what the effects of ever greater mechanisation will be on humans.

Marx observes in Das Kapital (1867) that “History discloses no tragedy more horrible than the gradual extinction of the English hand-loom weavers.” Similarly, for a glimpse at what advances in humanoid robotics are actually for at ground level, look at “Quinn“. Quinn is a customer-service robot: instead of paying several human salaries, a hotelier can install a Quinn at front desks across a whole chain, backed up by just a few remote operators, able to step in if a query is too complex for the machine. Further down the scale, self-checkout machines are effectively clumsy Quinn devices, that displace the work of sensemaking onto the customer, and troubleshooting onto a skeleton staff of supervisors.

And this displacement of human skill and intelligence in turn re-orients human work to machine priorities. Marx described the way factory assembly-lines compelled human workers to adapt their movements, working speed and behaviour to the demands of the machine, rather than employing tools in the interests of work performed to a human pattern. The same obtains, too, for subsequent waves of automation.

Suggested reading

How we lost the future

By John Michael Greer

In the 21^st century, “Mechanical Turk” gives its name to an online platform that makes dull, repetitive data work affordable for buyers by outsourcing it remotely — to workers paid, as the New York Times reported in 2019, as little as $0.97 an hour. We find many such exploited human “ghosts” in the AI “machine”: the Amazon fulfilment workers optimised to breaking-point (and, notoriously, peeing in bottles) by algorithmic surveillance, for example, or the gig-economy content moderators workers struggling with PTSD from the horrific things they’ve seen.

And there are even humans, hidden in AI every bit as uncomfortably as the Mechanical Turk’s concealed operator, whose role is to make up the shortfall in the dumb “intelligence” of the machines. Take, for example, the people hired to impersonate chatbots for companies who want to look cutting-edge.

The convergence of human and machine in turn makes actual humanness into a luxury. As mechanical weaving made textiles cheap, so hand-woven fabrics are now wildly expensive – as is anything created by hand with genuine artisan skill. Likewise, as the hospitality industry has automated and de-personalised through the Covid era, “contactless” travel has made human contact a premium extra — because what people really want is to talk to a human. One hotel industry outlet describes human assistance as “the hallmark of a luxury travel experience”.

So it doesn’t really matter if automata exist that are capable of deceiving some humans (or at least Google engineers) about their humanness. The ones that get rolled out at scale don’t bother aiming for verisimilitude, and it’s these that most radically transform our lives at scale.

While we marvel (or shudder) at the simulacra which convince, and numbly tolerate the ones that don’t, every advance re-orders another wave of human work to the machine’s priorities. And every time they do so, another facet of human warmth, intelligence and skill becomes a premium extra, for the lucky few.

The robot is working at the behest of the Oxford-based research group, The Institute of Digital Archaeology — the team that, in 2016, created a 20-foot-tall replica of Syria’s Arch of Triumph, after it was destroyed by Isis terrorism in the ancient city of Palmyra. Last year, they took the reconstructive powers of technology one step further when they brought John Keats back to life, just in time for the bicentenary of his death. The necromancy was made complete by a reconstruction of Keats’s distinctive “cockney” voice — which you can hear in a CGI reading of his poem “Bright Star”.

However disconcerting this CGI-Keats might be, the Institute of Digital Archaeology’s most recent project has rather higher stakes. By copying the marbles, the Institute’s director, Roger Michel, hopes to create replicas which are “visually indistinguishable” from the sculptures and frieze housed in the British Museum. The team has even managed to source Pentelic marble — the same stone used by the Greeks back in the 5th century BC — to make these sculptures “exact duplicates”.

Michel’s intentions for these copies are not unambitious. After creating two prototypes, he wants to recreate the marbles Lord Elgin took from Greece in their entirety. These replicas will, in the Institute’s ideal world, replace the marbles in the British Museum so that the originals can be repatriated to the Acropolis Museum in Athens.

The idea has gained traction rapidly. The Times ran an editorial in favour of the swap, while The Guardian’s Simon Jenkins dismissed the views of “snooty art critics” who would damn the replicas as “fakes”. As for the Greeks, they have, understandably, latched onto it as a solution which could see the British Museum returning the marbles with as little fuss as possible.

But as with all things to do with the Parthenon Marbles, this is unlikely to be as simple as it might appear. Ignoring the fact that the British Museum’s position is still very much anti-repatriation — and, indeed, anti-reproduction: Michel had to resort to “guerrilla tactics” in order to scan the marbles for the 3D machining device, after the museum denied his request — there are difficulties in the nature of the replicas themselves: they could turn out to be better than those currently on display.

Suggested reading

How the RA uncancelled me

By Jess De Wahls

Back in 1938 — under the direction of the conman, forger, and art dealer Joseph Duveen — the marbles were scoured with metal tools and dipped in acid. The marble’s colour — a beige-brown patina, with traces of the original paint which had adorned them back in antiquity — was replaced by a blank, uniform white. But with the replicas, there is no need to replicate this extraordinary damage. If the swap went ahead, the British Museum’s replica marbles could be more intact than the ones they were responsible for damaging.

So why is the museum still so reluctant to consider repatriation? The most obvious answer is the inevitable political disagreement that will follow. But there’s something else at stake too. Beneath all the symbolism, op-eds, and campaigns, the Parthenon Marbles are works of art. And in the art world, copies, fakes, and replicas occupy a precariously odd position.

More than two and a half millennia after Phidias was carving the original Parthenon Marbles, and half a century before a robot would be making the copies, the American artist Sturtevant came up against this difficulty. Sturtevant — the professional name of the artist born Elaine Frances Horan — is now famed as the “mother of appropriation art” (an Eighties movement which prized using the work of others to create new, altered, art). But for more than a decade in the middle of her career, after facing a deluge of criticism, she was forced to retire from the art world.

Looking at Sturtevant’s work now, it is easy to understand why she may not have been a favourite in the art scene. Side by side, her version of Andy Warhol’s “Flowers” (imaginatively titled “Warhol’s Flowers”) is almost indistinguishable from the original. Her “repetitions” took the works of other Pop Art masters, and copied them with only the most subtle of changes.

Warhol, for what it’s worth, approved of her work — but other artists were not so accommodating. Upon seeing her version of his installation “The Store”, Claes Oldenburg never spoke to Sturtevant again. And after her 1973 show at Everson Museum of Art was met with the most lacklustre of responses, Sturtevant retired from the art world until the 1980s.

Here in Britain, a rather different figure inspired a similar debate. John Myatt is an artist and convicted forger, who spent four months in prison for his role in painting works which were sold as original artworks by painters ranging from Marc Chagall to Ben Nicholson. Myatt’s forgeries were so good that they were able to fool major auction houses including Christie’s and Sotheby’s; police estimates suggest that around 140 paintings are still in circulation. Now out of prison, Myatt continues to paint “genuine fakes” — and collectors can buy them as an affordable alternative to the real deal. Given they are visually indistinguishable from the originals, even to the most trained expert eyes, why are they valued so much less? The answer is something everyone knows instinctively: there is a romance, a delight, and an excitement to owning a piece of art by a famous painter that is not matched by a print or forgery, no matter how good it is.

Suggested reading

Why should humans be in charge?

By Mary Harrington

Will the reproductions of the Parthenon Marbles face this problem? It could be argued that, rather than being forgeries in the John Myatt school, they are “repetitions” more akin to the work of Sturtevant. Myatt painted solely for financial gain, while both Sturtevant and the Parthenon project have conceptual, intellectual ramifications.

And what if these brilliantly accurate marbles are a different form of duplication entirely? They are not human forgeries, nor man-made experiments with the nature of repetition. The science of digital conservation and archaeology has gone beyond preservation — repairing damage; analysing paint-types and materials; and safeguarding against future harm — to also encompass creation. These works of art are, fundamentally, a work of technology, and they herald a brave new world for the possibilities of conservation and curation in museums.

Back in 2017, Gainsborough’s painting “The Morning Walk” was attacked by a screwdriver; in Amsterdam, Rembrandt’s “The Night Watch” has been knifed twice and sprayed with acid once. “The Mona Lisa” has suffered every indignity possible: rocks, teacups, cakes, and red paint have all been thrown on it. With the possibilities of digital reproduction, could we reach a point where beloved works of art are kept safely in vaults and only exact replicas sit on the walls of galleries?

There have already been entirely virtual exhibitions, including this Spring’s “Virtual Veronese” at the National Gallery. Visitors had the chance to see Paolo Veronese’s “The Consecration of Saint Nicholas” — an altarpiece in an Italian church — without ever leaving central London.

As technology improves, and the capacities of machines become ever more human, there is a chance that we begin to see more and more of these “perfect” reproductions of artworks — created long after the artist whose hand originally made them has died. This has already started to happen. Back in 2015, the Van Gogh Museum launched the “Relievo Collection”: exact replicas of the artist’s works (even complete with reproductions of the back of the canvases) for institutions and collectors to purchase. Walter Benjamin’s famous comments about the “aura” of art “wither[ing] in the age of mechanical production” seem all too prescient.

Suggested reading

Britain needs a cigarette

By David Hockney

When I spoke to Michel, he argued that there is “a sharp distinction to be made between the marbles as art objects, and the marbles as beloved national treasures”. For him, this distinction is why the real marbles rather than the replicas should be returned to Greece. But as the science of preservation and conservation continues, perhaps we should also insist on a sharp distinction between works of art and marvels of technology. After all, it is the knowledge that a human hand carved the original Parthenon sculpture that makes them so emotive as both artworks and national treasures.

Yes, the opportunity to have these brilliant reproductions in their place is one not to be missed. But amid all these wonders of technology, let’s not forget that they’re not the real deal — any more than CGI Keats is the beloved poet brought back to life.

Flying cars are a great example. They’re anything but new; US aviation pioneer Glenn Curtiss built and tested the first flying car in 1917. There have been many others since then, and some of them worked, after a fashion. The problem is that the engineering compromises needed to make a vehicle that’s both roadworthy and airworthy guarantee that your flying car will have lousy performance in either role. It will also cost so much that for the same price, you could buy a good car, a good plane, and put a down payment on a midsized yacht. That’s why we don’t have flying cars. They’ve been tried, they’ve failed, and only the fact that people won’t let go of the fantasy keeps engineers perpetually pushing on a door marked “Pull”.

Take any other iconic technogimmick that popular culture assigns to the future and you’ll find that it was a familiar notion a century ago. Fusion power? Jules Verne wrote about that in 1869. Replacement of human labour by robots? Introduced in 1921 by Karel Capek, the writer who invented the word “robot”. 24/7 internet connectivity for all? It’s a major plot point in E.M. Forster’s 1909 tale The Machine Stops. Space travel? Already done to death before the pulp magazines of the Twenties got to it. All of them, interestingly enough, turned out to have the same problem that doomed the flying car: sure, they’re possible — well, except for fusion power; the jury’s still out on whether that can be done on a scale smaller than a star — but the limited benefits don’t begin to cover the sky-high costs.

Yet the same old futures, grey with decades of dust, remain stuck in place in the popular imagination. Take Star Trek, the show that still defines the future for an embarrassingly large number of people. It premiered in 1966. In that year cars still had tailfins, surfer movies starring Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon were all the rage, books on space travel had chapters beginning “When man lands on the Moon,” and slide rules were the standard calculating device because computers were fragile contraptions the size of warehouses. That was the year when Ronald Reagan began his political career. Star Trek isn’t our future. It’s the embalmed corpse of a future that fell over dead a long time ago.

There’s an ugly political subtext behind this act of mummification. The rebels of the 1960s and 1970s framed their challenges to the status quo in visionary terms, portraying futures dramatically different from the present. Theodore Roszak’s Where the Wasteland Ends (1972) and Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia (1978) were among the most widely read of the literature that resulted. Those challenges caused stark panic among the comfortable classes. When the backlash hit in the 1980s, the corporate establishment set out to erase the idea that the future could differ from the present in any way that mattered.

Those who lived through those years will recall how environmental action groups were bought out and neutered, the scruffy radicals who founded them abruptly replaced by slick corporate enablers. The same thing happened to every other movement that threatened the existing order of things: that’s when feminism gave up on changing society, for example, and settled instead for giving middle-class women prestige jobs within the system. Stuffing the visionary futures of the previous decades down the nearest available memory hole was part of the same process.

More from this author

Will magic defeat America's elites?

By John Michael Greer

That’s how we spent forty years spent parading around the crumbling mummy of a failed future under the delusion that we were doing something innovative. At this point even true believers are beginning to have doubts. Every year we get told by the lab-coated cheerleaders of progress as usual that fusion power is only twenty more years in the future, that we’ll be going back to the Moon sometime soon, and so on through a litany of broken promises. Meanwhile creeping dysfunction spreads through the world’s industrial nations, marked by the accelerating decay of the built environment and the ongoing crapification of everyday life.

The result has been a paralysis of the imagination with dismal political consequences. Have you noticed how many of the political crusades of the last forty years have been against something rather than for something? It’s all about fighting this or stopping that, not about envisioning constructive change and then setting out to make it happen. Political parties pitch themselves to their captive constituencies by insisting that the other side will make things worse, without offering a scrap of hope that things might get better. It’s no wonder that so many people cherish apocalyptic fantasies. Compared to a future that’s never any better than the wretched mess of the present, global annihilation has a certain charm.

Anyone who wants a future different from the present thus needs to start by ditching the faux-future we’ve been sold by the corporate media for the last forty years, and envisioning something genuinely different. That’s harder than it looks. Most of the supposedly innovative futures these days abandon the Star Trek future in order to chase something even more antiquated.

Suggested article

Why utopias always fail

By Mary Harrington

Consider Klaus Schwab and his loudly ballyhooed “Great Reset.” In the future Schwab and his fellow plutocrats are promoting, you will own nothing, vast intrusive bureaucracies will monitor every detail of your life, and you will be happy. You’d better be happy, because it’s clear what will happen to you if you’re not: the future Schwab is proposing, after all, is a carbon copy of the Soviet Union under Stalin with a few technology upgrades, and the only question he hasn’t discussed in print is where he plans on putting the gulags and mass graves. That sort of future was fresh and new in the late nineteenth century. At this point it’s roughly as fresh as Lenin’s corpse, and we all know how well it worked in practice.

How about the future that begins with young enthusiastic people moving out to communes in the countryside to lay the foundations of a new society? That’s even older than the futures we’ve already discussed. Nathaniel Hawthorne of The Scarlet Letter fame wrote a novel, The Blithedale Romance, which was published in 1852; it’s set on a commune in rural Massachusetts, with a cast of characters you could have found in rural northern California just after the Summer of Love. By the time Hawthorne penned that story, communes had been a familiar presence in the United States since colonial times. Nor did the communes of early nineteenth century America last longer or accomplish more than their lineal descendants in the 1920s or the 1960s.

Suggested article

Eco-fascism is our future

By Paul Kingsnorth

The moral of the story? If you’re going to borrow a future from the past, find one that worked. If you’re going to invent one from scratch, don’t repeat the failed gimmicks of futures that are already long past their pull date. Don’t make your future depend on some infinitely abundant source of energy that doesn’t happen to exist: that was the fatal flaw of the Star Trek future. Don’t hand unchecked power to a bureaucratic system under the fond illusion that it won’t be abused: that was the problem with the allegedly glorious socialist future that turned Soviet Russia, Maoist China, and Khmer Rouge Cambodia into abattoirs. Don’t assume that you can run away from society and create a utopia on fifty acres in the country: it’s been tried countless times, with a success rate best counted in imaginary numbers.

The futures that matter at this point are those that don’t simply rehash the failures of the past. They don’t extrapolate from the failed present in a straight line, for that matter. A glance back at the visionary futures proposed in the 1960s and 1970s might be useful; a glance at the strange alternative histories being dreamed up on the fringes right now might also help.

The exotic visions of past and present being promoted in conspiracy culture these days show that there is still a collective imagination out there. It’s just that the people involved in creating and circulating those visions have somehow managed to convince themselves that the bumbling stooges who run our political and economic institutions are monomaniacal masterminds obsessed with conquering the world they already mismanage. If the conspiracy-minded can shake themselves out of that dysfunctional notion, they can put their imaginative gifts to better use and start conspiring to bring about more interesting futures.

It’s a challenge that all of us would be well advised to face. One great lesson that can be learned from the total failure of the Tomorrowland future is that the world ahead of us won’t look like anything churned out by today’s corporate media. Nor, it probably needs to be said, will it follow any of the various linear extrapolations being hawked about by the single-minded these days. We need to be prepared to deal with technological progress and technological unraveling, sudden jolts and slow transitions, new opportunities and hard limits — all of these, all at once. That’s the way history happens. The sooner we grasp that, and ditch the outdated futures that clutter up the collective imagination these days like so much Victorian bric-a-brac, the more likely we will be to imagine a future worth having — and then to go out there and create it.

There are times when asking questions is more useful than offering answers, and this is one of them. Set aside the decrepit futures pushed at you by the corporate media, and ask yourself what you want in a future.

What would happen, though, if instead of creating the impression of headlessness, we actually took artists out of the creative process? Well, now we can find out. Researchers are experimenting with applying machine learning to visual imagery, and the result is the unnerving phenomenon of ‘GAN art’.

A ‘GAN’ is a ‘generative adversarial network’, which is to say two machine learning networks programmed to run in parallel. The first is fed a set of input data, such as a type of image, and told to generate new, believable versions of that data. The second is tasked with assessing whether the new, AI-generated data are real or fake.

The aim is for the first network to succeed in fooling the second network more than half the time. As the two models adjust in relation to one another, they become increasingly skilled at predicting and manipulating patterns in the input imagery.

One playful result of this is web or smartphone apps that invite the user to ‘create’ — that is, prompt the AI to create — images based on text. Wombo is a popular one: you can choose from several different ‘styles’, enter your text prompt and watch the machine create an image.

More from this author

Do bachelors need to grow up?

By Mary Harrington

When you do so, two things become apparent. First, the more abstract the prompt, the more difficult it is to distinguish the output from human-created art. But secondly, there’s something indefinably off about them. That comes more clearly into focus when you give the machine a more specific prompt — as I discovered when I asked Wombo to draw me a cat.

Cat images are so popular and widespread online that one 2013 cat food ad claimed that they make up 15% of all internet traffic. With such an immense dataset, you’d think an AI would find it easy to generate a cat image.

But when I prompted Wombo with ‘Kitten’ I got what looks like the disfigured victim of some deranged scientist’s experimental flesh-sculpting, as viewed through a haze of LSD. Here it is; judge for yourself.

Looking at this abomination, the off-ness becomes easier to grasp.

Everyone — at least, everyone human who’s ever spent time online — knows what a kitten looks like. A skilled artist can convey a kitten’s shape and movement with a few lines of a pencil. But that knowledge is acquired not just by mechanically digesting and attempting to synthesise the aggregate of two-dimensional kitten images, but also understanding what kittens are, and what they mean in our cultural context.

More from this author

Sex positivity's hidden victims

By Mary Harrington

Without that capacity to filter and actively re-interpret in terms of the wider context, replacing meaning with pattern recognition creates something that’s both eerily almost-intelligible but also deeply disturbing. It is, as Macbeth says, “a tale told by an idiot”.

So what, you might say. GAN ‘art’ isn’t art. It’s a game, to amuse us for a few moments online when we should be doing something else. But absurd as it is, the idea of AI ‘art’ only takes a pervasive contemporary dream to a slightly more absurd conclusion: that of eliminating individuals from human culture.

The positive version of this dream imagines that we could promote equality by minimising the role of specific, individual contributions to human society. You see versions of this in the widespread academic effort, for some decades now, to downplay the study of ‘great’ individuals in favour of mass movements or widespread sociocultural phenomena.

Well-established in disciplines such as history or literature, this has percolated even as far as the quintessential study of great individuals, the ‘Grand Strategy’ course at Yale. Here, the course director Professor Beverley Gage prompted debate last year when she shifted the course curriculum away from individual political actors toward grassroots activism and civil rights.

We see same the effort to de-emphasise leadership in favour of the collective in the rise of technocratic forms of government. This is often well-meant: this study shows populations support technocracy in proportion to how incompetent their elected government is perceived to be. In other words, the more disillusioned we grow with the ability of our elected leaders to govern, the more longingly we look to ‘neutral’, depoliticised ways of running our affairs.

And confidence in human leadership is waning across the board. Angry populists condemn the ruling class as out of touch; critics decry the current government as incompetent; others dismiss the electorate as ignorant or racist. The problem, across the board, is: us.

Faced with our manifestly disappointing powers of human self-governance, the dream of eliminating leadership can’t but seem appealing. And it’s in this light that we should view Tuesday’s vote by our MPs, to entrench vaccine passes in British domestic life.

Suggested reading

The battle for North Shropshire

By Tanya Gold

This has been presented as a measure to control Covid — or, as George Osborne put it, a matter of “citizenship”. But it’s worth bearing in mind that emergency powers have a way of sticking around. Anti-terror measures enacted in America in the wake of 9/11 massively expanded US surveillance and are still in force. Once the infrastructure and social norms are in place for digital ID, they are unlikely to go away again — especially given the Government has already signalled a desire to introduce such a scheme.

From some perspectives, digital ID is an obvious and sensible move. In a 2020 video, the aerospace and weapons manufacturer Thales offers an enticing picture of how much easier many ordinary interactions could become with a ‘Digital ID Wallet’. Controlled from a smartphone by each individual user, Thales imagines this centralising a user’s personal data, eliminating the messy business of individual assessment and human error from ID checks and record-keeping across all areas of life.

The power of such tools is evident, as is their appeal from a governance perspective. But once they’re in place, the scope is infinite to extend them beyond simply logging driving licence records.

Once identities are held digitally, our behaviour can be tracked — and ‘nudged’ — digitally as well. And our elites, habituated by university courses that highlight the importance of large-scale social and cultural patterns over the specifics of individual experience, already look eagerly toward the potential offered by AI pattern recognition. But machine learning systems are only as good as their inputs. And pattern recognition isn’t the same thing as interpretation.

In an AI ‘art’ generator, this has little impact beyond creating creepy kitten-images. But in contexts that affect people’s lives more directly, machine learning has more serious implications. Imagine, for example, that we embraced a ‘prevention’ oriented public health system, using citizen data collected around a Digital ID Wallet. This isn’t so far-fetched: a data-driven pilot scheme aimed at tackling obesity via measures including tracking scheme members’ shopping history was launched earlier this year.

And while the existing pilot scheme focuses on rewards, a unified ID would make it easy to implement sanctions too. The Health Pass now required for entry into bars, clubs or venues to combat the spread of Covid-19 could without great difficulty be extended to other behaviours or linked with purchase history. What this change means is the arrival, likely for good, of a mode of digital-era governance where for the first-time participation in public life can be made conditional on ‘healthy’ behaviours.

Suggested reading

Will California ever be safe?

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

The mutant kitten is a vivid illustration of what happens when you task a computer with doing something human, without the capacity to understand what humans actually care about. Applied to real lives, the blind brilliant-idiot quality of AI pattern recognition is already causing miscarriages of justice.

Now imagine extending that deep into your life: having your Health Pass suspended because you’ve bought too many units of alcohol this week, perhaps, meaning you can’t access essential services. Never mind that you were shopping for an event at your local social club. The computer sees a pattern. And unlike for a human, for machine intelligence there’s no difference between pattern recognition and meaning.

The slow collapse of social meaning into computer-legible pattern is reshaping us into a post-political, post-individual human order — one resisted most vigorously, to date, by conservatives. It was chiefly conservative politicians and voters who framed Brexit as pushback against technocracy. At Yale, conservative donors including Henry Kissinger forced Professor Gage to resign earlier this year. And on Tuesday 98 Tories — nearly a third of elected Conservative MPs — rebelled on Covid passes. Boris owes his victory to Labour Party support, and is probably a dead man walking within his own party now.

But Boris’s loss of face in his own party is one fraction of a far more deadly bleeding of authority: our downward spiral of disintegrating trust in human government full stop. As long as this continues, the temptation will persist to solve the crisis of authority with ever deeper rule by AI: the only compromise option left when we can’t agree on which human or humans should be in charge.

Fittingly, while writing this, I stumbled on another, current digital art project titled Headless. This one doesn’t depict the impersonal nature of finance — it’s trying to harness decentralised digital technology to human ends, by embracing it as an engine of creativity.

I hope its creators are right to think this can be done. For we’ve just taken another step closer to a world ruled by machines; machines that are brilliant at detecting patterns, but idiots when it comes to understanding what those patterns mean. And unless we’re able to humanise those technologies, this dawning age of digitised governance will digest the patterns of our social order and regurgitate a world of idiotic, inhuman cruelty.

Something like a pandemic, for instance. A hundred years ago, in 2019, the idea that the world would soon be brought to a standstill by a virus would have seemed like a science fiction movie. Sure, a few Cassandras in the infectious disease community might have warned against it, but for most of us, it was just not a serious consideration.

But now we have had an obvious corrective to that attitude. Pandemics might be unlikely in any given year, but if there’s only a 1% chance per year of something terrible happening, it’ll probably happen in your lifetime.

Only preparing for another pandemic, however, would be getting ready to fight the last war. We need to think about what other horrible disasters we might expect in the coming decades. Luckily, last week, a think tank called the Centre for Long-Term Resilience released a report into the most likely extreme risks that humanity faces, and what Britain in particular can do to prepare for them.

Covid-19 has cost millions of lives and tens of trillions of dollars so far — but it could have been a lot worse. The extreme risks that the report is talking about range from those that kill 10% or more of the total human population, to those that kill every last one of us. And it suggests that the two most likely causes of a disaster of this magnitude are bioengineered pathogens, and artificial intelligence.

Even now, that might sound like science fiction, especially the idea of AI. We picture AI going wrong as being like The Terminator: an intelligence achieving consciousness and rebelling against its masters. But that’s not what we ought to worry about, and to illustrate that, I want to tell you about a marvellous little paper published in 2018. It described building AIs through digital evolution.

Digital evolution is exactly what it sounds like: a bunch of machine-learning programs are asked to come up with solutions to some problem or other; then the ones that do best at solving that problem are “bred”, copied repeatedly with small, random variations. Then those new copies try to solve the problem, and the ones that do best are again bred, and so on, for thousands of generations. It’s exactly the same process, of replication, variation and competition, as biological, “real”, evolution.

The paper was basically a series of anecdotes about how that process had gone wrong in surprising ways. In each one, essentially, the AIs had learnt to game the system, often with disastrous results.

For instance, one task involved locomotion, featuring a 3D simulated world with little 3D avatars. The avatars were told to travel from point A to point B as quickly as possible, the programmers wanting the system to discover clever ways of travelling: would it breed snake-like belly-slithering? Hopping like a kangaroo?

But what actually happened was that, “instead of inventing clever limbs or snake-like motions that could push them along (as was hoped for), the creatures evolved to become tall and rigid. When simulated, they would fall over.” Essentially, it created a very tall tower with a weight on the end, standing on point A. When the simulation started, the tower fell over in the direction of point B. It had achieved the task, but … not exactly how its creators hoped.

There were other, rather scarier ones. One was given some text files, and told to create new text files as similar as possible to the originals. The various algorithms were trying, and doing moderately well, when suddenly lots of them started returning perfect scores all at once — because one algorithm had realised that if it deleted the target files, it (and any other algorithm) could just hand in a blank sheet for a 100% score.

And one was supposed to play a version of noughts and crosses on an infinitely large board. But it realised that if it played a move hundreds of billions of squares away from the centre, its opponents would have to try to represent a board billions of squares across in its memory: they couldn’t do that, and crashed, so the cheating algorithm was declared the winner.

More from this author

The science of bullshit

By Tom Chivers

The point is that when you give an AI a goal, it will try to achieve exactly that goal. Not what you wanted it to do; not what any halfwit would obviously understand you meant it to do. Just what you tell it to do.

When people worry about AI going wrong in disastrous ways, that’s what they’re worrying about. Not about The Terminator; not about AI “going rogue”. They worry about AI doing exactly what you told it to do, and being extremely good at doing what you told it to do, when “what you told it to do” is not what you actually wanted.

These AIs were just toys; when they go wrong, it’s funny. But if you have a much more powerful AI, with commensurately greater responsibilities — running a power grid, for instance,  driving vehicles or commanding military ordnance — it would be less comical. When you have a really, really powerful AI, it could be disastrous. In an illustrative but perhaps unrealistic example, if you gave an enormously powerful AI the goal of “ridding the world population of cancer”, it might come to realise that biochemistry is difficult but that hacking the nuclear codes of ex-Soviet states is quite easy, and a world without humans is a world without humans with cancer. You might think you could just switch them off, but since the AI would know it would be less likely to achieve its goal if it was switched off, you might find that it resisted your efforts to do so.

The Centre for Long-Term Resilience report, co-authored by Toby Ord, a professor at the University of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute and the author of a marvellous book about existential risks, argues that right now we have a rare opportunity. After the Second World War, both the world and Britain took advantage of the disaster to build new institutions. In the UK, we created the NHS, and a comprehensive welfare state based around a system of national insurance. Worldwide, we helped build things like the World Bank, the UN, the International Monetary Fund. This was possible, they argue, because the scale of the recent tragedy was fresh in people’s minds, and there was a willingness to take drastic, difficult steps to preserve long-term peace and stability.

Now, they argue, we have the opportunity to build similarly vital new institutions in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. There will, Ord et al hope, be enough public will now to get ready for the next disaster, even though government and democracy in general is not brilliant at thinking about long-term risks. The risk, of course, is that we will prepare brilliantly for the thing that has already happened, getting ready to fight the last war, and Ord says “We need to look beyond the next coronavirus.”

A few years ago I wrote a book which was (partly) about existential risk. The people I spoke to said, just as Ord et al’s report does, that the two things  most likely to cause the human species to go extinct are 1) bioengineered pandemics and 2) artificial intelligence. (Climate change and nuclear weapons are very likely to cause awful disasters, but less so to literally drive us extinct.)

More from this author

Can Dominic Cummings read the room?

By Tom Chivers

The world shouldn’t need too much convincing of the possibility of a bioengineered pandemic, not least because there is growing support for the “lab leak” hypothesis. But even after Covid, it may be that AI seems too much like science fiction. People are happy to accept that it will cause near-term problems, like algorithmic bias, but the idea that it could go really, disastrously badly wrong in future is harder to swallow.

But we should have learnt from the pandemic that it is worth preparing for unlikely, but plausible, disasters, especially as AI researchers don’t think it’s that unlikely. Surveys in 2014 and 2016 asked AI researchers when they thought the first “human-level” AI — an AI capable of doing all the intellectual tasks that humans can do — will be built. The median guess was that there’s a 50% chance by 2050 and a 90% chance by 2075. And what was really interesting was that those same researchers thought there was about a one in six chance that when true AI does arrive, the outcome will be “extremely bad (existential catastrophe)”. That is: everybody dead.

I’m faintly sceptical of the surveys — only about a third of people responded to them, and they may not be representative of AI researchers in general — but even if the results are off by an order of magnitude, it means that AI experts think there’s a greater than 1% chance that the world will be devastated by AI in my children’s lifetimes. Certainly I spoke to several AI researchers who thought it was worth worrying about.

Ord et al have some simple prescriptions for how to be ready for the next disaster. On future pandemics, they suggest creating a national body dedicated to monitoring and preparing for biological threats; and they suggest improving “metagenomics”, sequencing technology which takes a sample from a patient and sequences the DNA of every organism in it, before comparing it to a database of known pathogens. If it detects a dangerous or unknown one, it will alert the medical staff. The UK’s world-dominant position in sequencing puts us in a powerful position here.

And for AI they make some relatively commonsense suggestions, like investing in AI safety R&D and monitoring, bringing more expertise into government, and (and I have to say this does seem very wise) keeping AI systems out of the nuclear “command, control and communication” chain.

Suggested reading

Why we should welcome the lab leak hypothesis

By Bret Weinstein

More generally, they suggest setting up bodies to consider long-term extreme risks to the UK and the world, such as a Chief Risk Officer and a National Extreme Risk Institute, to think about these things on a longer timescale than the democratic cycle allows. All their ideas add up to less than £50 million a year, while in contrast the pandemic has cost the UK about £300 billion so far; 6,000 times as much. If there’s even a small chance of reducing the impact of future disasters, it is a worthwhile bet to make.

My own feeling is that they could do more to bring in the UK’s almost unrivalled expertise on this into government. Ord and his colleagues at FHI, such as the philosopher and AI researcher Nick Bostrom, are just one of several groups here who focus on the long-term future of humanity. Only the US has access to anything like as much knowledge. Dominic Cummings, for all his many faults, seemed to realise this.

As Ord et al say: there’s a window of opportunity to do this stuff now, while it’s all fresh in our minds.

A noughts-and-crosses-playing AI that makes its opponents crash is, as I say, kind of funny. But at a fundamental level, a much more powerful AI that can command military theatres or civil engineering projects will be similar: it will only care about the things we explicitly tell it to care about. I don’t think it’s silly science fiction to worry about it, or about bioengineered pandemics. We have a chance, over the next year or so, to make those disasters a little bit less likely. We should take it.

Now imagine this was carried out by robots, without any human control. Scary? Yes, and it could be our reality in the next decade.

Britain’s most senior soldier, the Chief of the Defence Staff General Nick Carter, said earlier this month that “robot soldiers could make up a quarter of the British Army by 2030”. This is not idle speculation: autonomous systems (in effect, robots) make up a non-trivial part of the Ministry of Defence’s budget proposal that is currently under consideration by No 10. He went on to suggest that “I suspect we can have an army of 120,000, of which 30,000 might be robots, who knows,” Carter told Sky News.

If there is one thing guaranteed to cause speculation and reams of newsprint, it is killer robots. If something is depicted in science fiction and then features in real life, of course people get excited. The classic image for killer robots, of course, is from the Terminator series of movies — there, I’ve done it, I’ve mentioned Terminator; now I can get on with the article — but it is highly unlikely that future military robots are going to be humanoid-shaped cyborgs. These are only mechanically efficient on rough and broken terrain for one: ‘killer robots’ are far more likely to be drone-like, or tracked (or swarms of both).

So, how long before Insectdrones^TM are patrolling our streets?

It is worth stating upfront that warfare over the next 20 years will be a story of increasing autonomy. This is not just true among the British, with Carter — a known reformer — at the helm. It is true of British allies, and potential adversaries too. The US plans to spend $1.7bn on researching autonomous systems (drones, robots and the like) in the next financial year. It is much harder to tell what China is spending on its military (or what autonomous systems it has under development), but it is already extensively using unmanned systems such as aerial drones which have a degree of autonomy built into them.

The reason that the world’s militaries are investing so heavily in this domain is pretty obvious. Weapons systems without humans are much, much faster in attack and defence, helping you get inside your opponent’s decision-making cycle (the so-called OODA loop). They can also be much smaller and more robust, allowing them to get places that humans can’t. They don’t tire or need feeding, they don’t have morale problems. Finally, and particularly appealing to democracies: you can launch actions without risk of casualties. In strict military terms, autonomous systems are a no-brainer.

More from this author

Fear Russian nukes, not cyberwarriors

By Mike Martin

But the lack of casualties is where the ethical problems begin. Imagine you are a leader, who has to make a decision about whether to launch a military strike. You would consider the benefits of military success and the chances of achieving that success (e.g. enemy target destroyed), against the costs of the mission and potential for failure (e.g. casualties, captured personnel, or making your country/military look weak). Using autonomous systems removes most of the downsides, which lowers the threshold for action — and so you are more likely to launch more attacks.

We have arguably seen this pattern already with the rise of unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, over the past two decades. And it is not a good thing, even for the progenitors of the attacks, because it encourages easy, consequence-free use of lethal violence, which means that we tend to end up treating the symptoms of violence (rather than the causes), and sometimes even becoming a cause of further violence through the ubiquity of our own violence. Scholars now argue, for example, that drone strikes along the Afghan-Pakistan corridor create rather than eradicate suicide bombers, generating feelings of shame and humiliation among the targeted communities. In not-so-many words, these unmanned systems encourage us to be tactical rather than strategic.

But there is actually a much more profound problem: our entire ethical and legal systems are built upon human intentions and judgements.

Think about murder, for instance. In order to prosecute someone successfully for murder, one has to prove that the accused had the intention to kill the victim (this concept — mens rea or intent — is actually technically necessary for all criminal prosecutions). So too with the Law of Armed Conflict, which rests on four overriding principles: military necessity, distinction (between targets), proportionality and avoiding unnecessary suffering. And in applying these concepts under the law, the judgement and intent of the soldiers and officers involved is taken into account.

More from this author

How Brexit broke up the 'special relationship'

By Mike Martin

How do we apply these concepts to autonomous systems?

Imagine that the attack on the village described earlier was carried out instead by a helicopter under human control. Depending on the circumstances, it could be argued that the action did not draw enough distinction between military and civilian targets, or perhaps it was a disproportionate use of firepower for a minor military target. Or perhaps the intelligence was wrong.

Let us now say that this incident became the subject of a court case. This is not unrealistic; in fact there are tens, if not hundreds, of cases being brought against the Ministry of Defence for the conduct of British soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. In a court case, we might expect the commanders in charge to be questioned about their views on whether the attack was proportionate, or whether appropriate care was taken to distinguish between military and civilian targets. This is also not unrealistic — when dropping bombs on targets where there is a risk of danger to friendly troops, the pilot will ask for the ground commander’s initials as his or her acceptance of increased risk.

In short, most militaries go to great lengths to avoid breaking the Laws of Armed Conflict, and a key way of doing this is making one person responsible for the use of lethal force so that their judgment and intentions are on the line. And, fairly obviously, you cannot do this with autonomous systems. Who do we blame if it goes wrong? The “commander” of the robot? The robot itself? The person who wrote the algorithm? If innocent villagers die, who do we blame?

Going back to General Nick’s announcement, it was not made clear what roles these robots might play in the future British Army. Or whether, if they were able to deploy lethal force, humans would be kept ‘in-the-loop’ (i.e. humans pull the trigger – like a drone), humans would be kept ‘on-the-loop’ (i.e. humans can stop the robot pulling the trigger – like a heat-seeking missile once fired), or humans would be ‘out-of-the-loop’ (i.e. a fully autonomous system with no human oversight). This is probably because he doesn’t know.

Suggested reading

Public trust? There’s no app for that

By Timandra Harkness

These very real legal and ethical challenges are top of the in-tray for many countries: at the end of 2019 the US military issued guidance on the use of lethal autonomous systems that was notable for asking the US Congress to help find a way through the minefield, and explicitly putting the subject of arms control on the table for discussion (something I have written about here and here with other types of weapons).

The real problem with autonomous weapons systems comes when you put strict military expediency in the short term up against complex legal and ethical challenges that may only come to fruition in the longer term. What if, when facing a near-peer competitor, a country is attacked with fully autonomous systems — with all of the military advantages outlined above. Weapons systems with humans in the loop would be quickly overwhelmed. One can imagine in those circumstances of survival that the current positions of the UK and the US (and many other countries) — that humans should always exercise oversight, authority and judgement over lethal autonomous systems — might crumble rather rapidly.

This, rightly, terrifies everyone: warfare is a human endeavour, and it requires humanity in its prosecution. Without that, we all lose.

The modern world is defined by “progress”, be it social, economic or technological. We demand change, strive for growth and promote development. To a great extent we’ve succeeded. Most of us live lives which are wealthier and healthier than our ancestors could have imagined.

Further reading

What do post-liberals really want?

By Peter Franklin

And yet progress means abandonment. While we can do without the dirt and drudgery of pre-modern life, that’s not all we’ve left behind. Our ancestors were poor, but increasingly we feel the absence of the things that enriched their lives: A connection to nature; the satisfaction of craftsmanship; the support of a strong community; time and space for family; a world still enchanted with spiritual significance. These are things we associate with the past much more than the present, which is why some of us want to get back there.

*

The question, though, is how. Time travel is obviously not an option. And even it were, few people would take it. Only the most dedicated traditionalists would take the past as a package deal. Baking your own bread is fun; extracting your own teeth, not so much. 

Most “trads” are selective. They don’t want to recreate the past, but learn from it to build a better future. However, there’s no getting away from their technological scepticism. Consider the case of Katharine Birbalsingh — “Britain’s strictest headteacher”. She argues that parents should take away their children’s smartphones and replace them with cheap “brick phones” that have basic voice and messaging functions, but allow very little else — and certainly not immersion in social media.

I think she’s absolutely right, but what she proposes is no small thing. It’s not just counter-cultural, but counter-historical — a deliberate decision to turn back the clock on one of the most important technological developments of the 21st century. 

For an even more significant example, read this essay for UnHerd by Aris Roussinos — who wants us to go “back to the land”. To be clear, this is not a Year Zero manifesto. It’s not even “knit your own lentils”. His modest proposal is that Britain needs a million more farmers. This would take an agriculture policy that supported smallholders not barley barons, but if the opportunity were available, I wouldn’t be surprised if something like a million Britons took it up. I’d expect rather less than that number to succeed, but overall I think we’d be better for it.

Further reading

Why Britain needs a million new farmers

By Aris Roussinos

But while what Aris proposes is doable, it’s also deeply subversive. The move from the countryside and farming to the cities and non-agricultural occupations isn’t just an economic trend, it is the economic trend. More than anything it describes our transition as a species from the long millennia of pre-industrial stasis, to the breakneck developments of the last two hundred years. In this sense, going back to the land is to go back in time. 

*

Previously, I’ve argued against accepting technological progress as a fait accompli. We should never incorporate new technology into our lives just because it’s new. Rather, like the Amish, we should only accept what genuinely serves our personal and collective goals. In fact, in some cases — like eugenics for instance — we should actively and unapologetically suppress the application of scientific discoveries. 

And yet a discriminating approach to technological progress doesn’t have to be a subtractive one. It’s true that removing technologies from your life will probably bring you closer to a traditional way of living, but there’s a limit to the number of people who are likely to follow you. 

I’m a traditionalist too, but an optimistic and ambitious one. For me it’s not good enough to be part of a mere sub-culture, living off-grid, somewhere up the Dark Mountain. I want a wholesale healing of the damage that modernity has done to my country and to the world. New technology got us into the mess we’re in, but it is also has the potential to get us out again. 

In imaging the future we compare the present to the past and extrapolate. Therefore we assume the future will be like the present only more so. It will be faster, stronger, bigger, smarter. And, if the good things get better, then, by the same logic, the bad things will get worse: climate change, inequality, anomie and the loss of privacy. 

But history, while always moving forward, doesn’t do so in straight lines. What we think of as modernity is not an ever-increasing intensity of the same thing, it is subject to phase changes in which it can transform into something else altogether. 

Just look at where our energy comes from. Our ancestors relied on their immediate environment — gathering firewood, cutting peat, building windmills. But with industrialisation, motorisation and electrification, energy became evermore centralised and remorselessly polluting — the price we’ve paid for abundance. That was supposed to be our future too: a Bladerunner world of resource wars and environmental catastrophe.

Further reading

The things we do for growth

By Peter Franklin

So what’s this then? It’s the latest UK government cost estimates for different energy sources. The cheapest (and hence fastest growing) technologies are now wind and solar power. They’re cheaper than gas, cheaper than coal and much, much cheaper than nukes. Suddenly, our energy future looks decentralised and unpolluted. 

Of course, this future isn’t quite like the past either. Today’s windmills are nothing like their medieval predecessors. For a start they’re the size of the London Eye and you’re more likely to find them out to sea, not by the village pond. Still, it’s better than Bladerunner, isn’t it? 

*

This isn’t the only example of the future changing for the better. 

For all the bad news we’ve had this year, lockdown has opened our eyes to a different way of working and living. It turns out that millions of us can work from home without the economy collapsing. Obviously, we’ve discovered this the hard way, and the cost will be enormous, but in rebuilding we don’t have to go back to the way things were. A lot of us will decide that subjecting ourselves to stupidly-long commutes and stupidly-high rents is, well, stupid. 

A piece of modern folk wisdom is that the internet makes physical proximity all the more important, but this isn’t as true as it used to be. We’ve spend the last decade having endless debates about social media, not noticing that the underlying architecture of the internet is becoming more capable as a platform for useful communication. Zoom-style online meetings are still far from seamless, as I’m sure you’ve noticed; but in 2010 they’d have been impractical and, in 2000, unthinkable. So just imagine what might be possible by 2030. 

The cliché that there’s no substitute for face-to-face contact just isn’t the case anymore. There literally is a substitute. It’s glitchy, but improving all the time and great swathes of the workforce are getting used to it.

And in case you think that doesn’t sound very traditional, just think what’s getting disrupted here. There’s nothing trad about the concentration of opportunity in a few global megacities. As a trend it was ripping apart our economic geography, dividing entire nations between the overheated metropolis and the left-behind hinterland. If technology unbundles the megacity, allowing people to prosper within their own towns and villages, then we can begin the process of rebuilding economic and social capital within all our communities. 

Then there’s the potential for an even more important development: the re-bundling of the household. Our homes used to be places where everything happened: not just sleep and a bit of quality time with the kids, but also work, education, entertainment, worship and the self-provision of all sorts of goods and services we now outsource to others elsewhere. It was occupied throughout the day, not just at overnight and at the weekends. And it was multigenerational: children didn’t spend all day in school, young adults weren’t sent away to distant cities and the elderly weren’t isolated.

Further reading

How WEIRD are you?

By Peter Franklin

As I argue here, the old way of living wasn’t all good, but it wasn’t all bad either. A new study has found that teenagers have become less anxious during the lockdown period — contradicting expectations of a mental health crisis. Perhaps the reason why is that they’ve had the opportunity to spend more time with family members who actually love them instead of the bully bear-pit that we call “school”. 

*

Perhaps the most anti-traditional thing about modern life is its anonymity. It’s astonishing just how much of our time we spend with people we barely know or don’t know at all. We pass them on the street, commute sat next to them, have arguments with them online. We might live next door to strangers, work with strangers, even have sex with strangers. It’s an odd thought — and certainly would be to our ancestors — that we don’t know the names of most of the people we share our lives with. 

All of which suits the sociopath. Why treat others with respect if you don’t know them and they don’t know you? In the absence of a moral code or a calculated fear of being caught, why not treat other people and their property as if they’re entirely yours to do with as you will? 

We’re told that the fear of crime is exaggerated. In fact, we greatly under-appreciate just how hemmed-in our lives are by the constant need to guard against the predators among us. Those tales about an earlier time when people left their front doors unlocked or money for the milkman out on the porch aren’t fantasy — that’s how things really were (and still are, in a few places). 

When who you are — and what you do — is common knowledge, you behave differently. That’s not an unalloyed blessing, but on the whole I think it’s a better way to live. Which is why I’m in partial disagreement with Elizabeth Oldfield’s condemnation of facial recognition technology. Yes, there is something sinister about machines looking at us. But what about our anonymous cities, the crowds through which one can pass unrecognised — isn’t that creepy too?

Further reading

Test article

By Elizabeth Oldfield

A future in which people won’t be able to thieve or harass or vandalise without being seen and held accountable isn’t some unprecedented dystopia, it’s just going back to the way things used to be.

*

Okay, enough with the law and order — how about some tech that might enhance our ancient liberties? Self-driving cars, for instance. If we ever get them, they’d be great news for country pubs. No need for a designated driver — just let a computer take the wheel instead, while you sleep off the evening’s enjoyment. 

Meanwhile automated delivery drones could be a boon to all those extra smallholders that Aris Roussinos wants to see. A distribution network that’s open to all would allow farmers and artisan producers to sell direct to consumers, bypassing the greedy supermarkets. Whereas modern logistical know-how has allowed a small number of large companies to exert growing control over the food chain, all that could change once the ability to coordinate distribution becomes a dispersed commodity. 

And that’s not the only new technology that could transform rural economics. For all the advantages of traditional farming methods, the fact is that it relied upon the back-breaking labour of of a now non-existent peasantry. Even our supposedly modern agriculture is dependent on poorly-paid, and sometimes exploited, migrants. 

Advances in agricultural robotics and AI could open up a new set of possibilities — for instance controlling weeds without chemicals or tending to livestock without factory farming. It’s another paradox, but we need automation to de-industrialise the countryside.

Further reading

Environmentally-friendly farming doesn’t have to be technologically backward

By Peter Franklin

The same applies to the built environment. As much as much we might appreciate traditional architecture, many of its features — such as richly carved masonry — relied upon the availability and affordability of an army of craftsmen. With the modern age came new materials and methods of construction that favoured the crude and repetitive forms of 20th century architecture. But, again, we now have the possibility of a phase change — through automation that doesn’t replace the true craftsman, but greatly enhances his or her productivity. If we can transform the economics of construction, then what gets built might just follow suit. 

*

I’ll admit I’ve presented a series of best-case scenarios. It is just as possible that we could be dragged further away from truth and beauty than ever before — and all in the name of progress. Far from a traditionalist restoration, we could be headed for a future of tech-enabled abominations.

But that makes it all the more important that we stay engaged, that we don’t give up on science and technology, but fight to push it in the right direction. 

We must harness the power of innovation to restore the natural world and to defend human dignity. Traditional values will not prevail if we carry them off onto some low-tech reservation.

The only way back is forward.

“No”, he answers — the threat of “technological unemployment” is now real. Susskind isn’t the first to write a robots-will-replace-you book. He won’t be the last. But he does set out his reasoning with unusual depth and clarity — for which I’m grateful because it makes it easier to understand the flaws in an increasingly influential argument.

*

Susskind’s own version of the argument begins with a pile of crap and then goes on to a load of balls. No, I’m not being rude — those are two of the images he conjures up to explain his thinking.

Let’s start with the crap — specifically, the “great manure crisis” of the late 19th century. Like a lot of stories about our Victorian forebears, this one doesn’t really stand up. Horse-dependent cities such as London and New York weren’t in any danger of being buried under horse manure, for the very simple reason that it was regularly removed and used as fertiliser. But, as the author points out, it ceased to be an issue at all when transport was motorised. Horses, once integral to the urban economy, disappeared from our cities, never to return.

Suggested reading

There's no such thing as factory farming

By Peter Franklin

Will technological progress do the same to the human workforce? That’s what economists such as John Maynard Keynes and Wassily Leontief have supposed — and Susskind, also an economist, agrees with them. In the final third of his book he sets out a policy response, but I’m more interested in why he thinks it will be necessary.

To sum up what he thinks the future of work looks like, he imagines the economy as a giant ball pit. Blue balls represent the tasks that human beings are the best at doing, and red balls those where machines have the advantage. He then paints a picture of how the ball pit changes over time. For most of human history, almost all the balls are blue. A few go red with early mechanical inventions, but then the industrial revolution happens and the process massively speeds up. As we hurtle past the present day and into the future, there are more and more red balls. Though some blue ones persist in the mix, they’re too few in number and small in size to provide a basis for anything like full employment.

This is Susskind’s vision of the future. It’s not “a boot stamping on a human face forever”, like in Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty-Four, but rather the relentless shrinking of our balls.

Of course, it’s not the future yet. Though machines have never been more productive as they are today, the same can be said of human beings, which is why there have never been as many jobs as there are now.

Susskind himself speaks of an “Age of Labour” in which “successive waves of technological progress have broadly benefitted rather than harmed workers”. He does a great job of explaining why the “substituting force” that machines have on the demand for human labour has, on the whole, been exceeded by the “complementing force” — i.e. the tendency of mechanisation to increase the productivity of, and demand for, human workers.

The Age of Labour will only end if the complementing force is persistently and pervasively overwhelmed by the substituting force. This has never happened before. For it to happen in the foreseeable future, requires some disruptive technology that’s never existed until now.

There’s an obvious candidate: AI or artificial intelligence. (If we define an AI-controlled machine as a robot, then we can include robotics under this heading too.)

*

The story of research into AI stretches back to the post-war era. But, as Susskind reminds us, the founders of AI got off to a false start. Their big mistake was to think they could build a human-like intelligence. Needless to say, they got nowhere. Eventually the funding dried up and research ground to a halt (the “AI winter”). The field revived when developers realised that they didn’t have to mimic the human brain to computerise tasks that previously only a human could undertake. Instead, they exploited the capacity of computers to learn through trial and error. In the right circumstances, they’re very good at this — possessing vast processing power and infinite patience.

Suggested reading

What you need to learn about machine learning

By Peter Franklin

Not that they are patient of course. Not being conscious, nor possessing anything that could be called a mind, they don’t have human qualities. Even the ‘intelligence’ in ‘artificial intelligence’ and the ‘learning’ in ‘machine learning’ are just metaphors. But that’s beside the point, says Susskind. No matter how mindless and mechanistic AI might be, what really counts is what it can do, not how it does it.

He describes the new wave of AI research as the ‘pragmatism revolution’ and there’s no doubt that it’s made breakthroughs. For instance, AI systems have been trained up to achieve total supremacy in games like chess and Go. There have been big advances in speech recognition, language translation and medical diagnosis software. AI is literally driving progress in automated vehicle technology. Facial recognition systems are now sufficiently advanced to raise serious concerns over civil liberties.

So just how far will the revolution go?

*

There’s long been a distinction drawn between routine and non-routine jobs — or, rather, routine and non-routine tasks. A routine task is one that can be taught as a ‘how to’ set of instructions — which is not the case with non-routine tasks. For instance, operating a till in a supermarket is routine; cutting someone’s hair (to an acceptable standard) is not.

The conventional thinking is that the first kind of work can be automated, but not the second — which is why we have automated tills and cash points, but no robot hairdressers. The key point is that because most jobs involve at least some non-routine tasks they’re safe from the robots.

Or are they? Look at the way that smart meters have replaced human meter readers. It wasn’t necessary to create a robot that can knock on your door, ask to be let in, find the meter, read it and report back to HQ. Instead, you just need a small box that sits in the meter cupboard, sending in the readings electronically. All the non-routine aspects of the meter reader’s job are thus eliminated, allowing the role to be fully automated.

Suggested reading

Are you ready for 'fully automated luxury communism'?

By Peter Franklin

Of course, that won’t work with every job. You can’t eliminate the non-routine aspect of a hairdresser’s work, i.e. cutting hair, because that’s the whole point of it. Susskind, however, argues that AI is finding ways of turning non-routine tasks into routine ones. 

For instance, there might not seem to be anything routine about playing chess at a professional level. There are various principles and strategies that can be taught to any reasonably intelligent individual, but there is no list of instructions that one can follow to become a grandmaster. Except now there is — if you’re a sufficiently advanced chess computer. AI systems like AlphaZero have taught themselves how to play chess, encoding the instructions as a very complex algorithm that can be applied to any particular game.

It’s not that AI researchers have cracked the secret of human mastery of chess. The computers that can beat any grandmaster do so mindlessly — they don’t need to be conscious or creative or cunning. All that’s necessary is the brute processing power of the silicon chip — plus some smart machine learning software kindly supplied by some helpful humans.

Far from being reassured by the fact that there’s been zero progress towards the creation of a true machine mind, Susskind’s key point is that the ‘narrow’ AI systems that do exist are nevertheless routinising tasks previously thought to be non-routine. Thus a crucial limitation on the automation of human work has been lifted. The process of task encroachment is therefore fundamentally unconstrained.

Suggested reading

Which is worse, work or no work?

By Peter Franklin

The implication is that the substituting force of technology will continue, while the complementing force falters. The ongoing automation of tasks will free up resources that can be devoted to other tasks — but increasingly that demand will be satisfied by further AI-controlled machines instead of humans. The routinisation of more-and-more non-routine tasks would thus mean less-and-less need for us. 

Do you feel those balls shrinking yet?

*

But what if there’s nothing particularly special about AI? What if there’s nothing new about routinising non-routine tasks? 

Though Susskind clearly understands that an AI isn’t a true intelligence, he does suggest that they are nonetheless things of wonder. He draws a parallel between the mindlessness of AI and the godlessness of Charles Darwin’s account of the natural world. Though he had no place for a divine creator, Darwin still believed in the “grandeur” of life. The products of both AI and natural selection may arise from a mindless, bottom-up process, but nevertheless they can inspire “an almost religious sense of awe.”

As well as bigging-up our “unhuman machines”, Susskind is also keen on “demystifying human beings” and “not granting them magical powers”. Indeed, he rails against what he calls the “superiority assumption” — the idea that we’re special and will always be indispensable.

This is where the deepest flaws in his argument are exposed.

I once had a colleague who was a gifted draughtsman. Using nothing more than a pencil and a piece of paper he could draw a near perfect square or circle. There were slight deviations, of course, but they didn’t distract from the essential squareness or circularity of what he’d drawn. Beyond the basic techniques, there are no instructions for achieving that quality of draughtsmanship — it only comes with practice and then only to those with natural talent. It is certainly non-routine.

And yet the task of drawing a square or a circle can be routinised using nothing more than some simple tools. So should we discern “grandeur” in something as basic as a plastic ruler — just because it provides a commonplace substitute for a rare talent? Should we think any less of what a draughtsman can do because some of it can be replicated by the contents of a child’s geometry set?

Many of our tools and machines routinise non-routine tasks. A camera captures a landscape in greater detail than any painter; a record player plays music with greater consistency than any musician. But which is superior, the machine or the artist?

Machines, including AI systems, can mindlessly do things that people do mindfully. But even if the outputs are comparable, the difference between the inputs remain all-important. The mind that allows the draughtsman to draw a pleasing square is also what enables him to design and build a cathedral. 

Creativity requires consciousness. AI has been able to automatise various tasks, both routine and non-routine, because there are ways of doing them without creativity, common sense or any other faculty that depends on a conscious mind. But just because this method works with games that have clearly defined rules and with various kinds of pattern recognition, it doesn’t mean that AI methods would work in most other domains of human endeavour. To assume there is an algorithm waiting to be discovered for just about anything human workers can do, is just that — an assumption, one unsupported by compelling evidence.

Suggested reading

How gamification makes losers of us all

By Peter Franklin

Another assumption is that there really is nothing “magical” about human consciousness, that it is purely material in origin. But even then, one would then have to ask why natural selection would go to all the trouble of evolving such an unfathomably mysterious feature, instead of relying solely upon the biological equivalent of the algorithmic processes that AI uses. Perhaps the explanation is that conscious thinking is so much more capable.

*

Ultimately, an AI system is just another tool. It may be a very useful tool, but, being mindless, it’s got a lot more in common with a plastic ruler than a human being. AI technology isn’t even unique in making a routine out of the non-routine. That’s been going on for millennia with much simpler machines.

To prove his point, Susskind would have to show that AI has accelerated the process of task encroachment to a level never seen before in human history. But he doesn’t.

Indeed, one has to ask whether the process is slowing down. Just think about our home lives. My grandparents, who were born at the beginning of the 20th century, lived through changes of immensely greater significance than anything I’ve experienced. In particular, my grandmothers were liberated from a life of utter drudgery by domestic technologies like electric lighting, central heating, the washing machine, the vacuum cleaner, the gas cooker and the refrigerator. Nothing in more recent decades compares to the importance of these machines. The wretched smartphone doesn’t even come close.

Where are the great labour saving devices of the 21st century? If task encroachment is all set to make us redundant, then why are we still doing the ironing?

*

Susskind is not a engineer and his book is not a technical manual. Rather he’s an economist and therefore what we might expect from his profession is statistical evidence that AI is transforming the economy. If a revolution really is underway, it should show up in lower employment levels and a much higher rate of productivity growth. He does cite various economic trends, for instance job losses in the manufacturing sector, but these are better explained by factors like outsourcing, offshoring and immigration.

Suggested reading

Sod the singularity

By Peter Franklin

That’s not really a criticism. The reason why killer facts are absent from his book is because they don’t exist. Not yet, anyway. What A World Without Work does provide, however, is a conceptual framework that can be tested against the evidence as it comes in.

Until it does come in, we can only argue the case on a theoretical level. On that score, I have deep disagreements with Susskind’s argument. 

Nevertheless, where he does go wrong, it’s always in an interesting way. Which is more than you can say for any machine.

My book The AI Does Not Hate You, covers some people’s attempts to answer that question. They think that there is a strong chance that it will all go wrong in some profound ways – ways which could lead, in a worst-case scenario, to human extinction.

And it might not happen the way you expect – by the AI breaking its programming or ‘going rogue’ – but simply by the machine doing exactly what it was told, in some highly literal and unpredictable way.

Suggested reading

How AI will terminate us

By Peter Franklin

In his new book, Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence, James Lovelock – one of the great names of 20^th-century science, and the creator of the Gaia hypothesis that Earth should be treated as a single self-regulating organism – argues differently. His key idea is that the Anthropocene, the informally defined geological era characterised by human influence, is coming to an end, and we are entering the “Novacene”, which is not a brand of dental anaesthetic but a new epoch characterised by artificial intelligence.

We will be replaced by a new form of life, says Lovelock, which will think many thousands of times faster than us, and which may suffer us to live – or alternatively may not. But either way, it will carry the torch for sentient life. Eventually, he says “organic Gaia will probably die”, replaced by an electronic ecosystem.

The book leaps through a potted history of life, the universe and everything to get there, but its short chapters are filled with hugely confident claims about things that the author doesn’t feel the need to back up. “It is clear” that life can only have evolved once in the observable universe, Lovelock breezily tells us in the first few pages: “our existence is a freakish one-off”.

More from this author

Are you truly unfakeable?

By Tom Chivers

But, of course, that’s a huge and ongoing fight. You need to do more work to make claims of that magnitude. Similar things happen every few pages and with some odd leaps of logic, too. For example, in the early 19th century, the discovery of anomalies in Mercury’s orbit led some to posit the existence of an unseen planet, Vulcan. A hundred or so years later Albert Einstein instead showed that the answer was that Newtonian physics wasn’t quite accurate when dealing with very high speeds and masses, and used that as the basis of his new relativity theory.

But for Lovelock, the Vulcan hypothesis was a failure of “cause-and-effect logic” – science, he says, should rely more on intuition. But Einstein, of course, worked it out with maths! I’m sure he had intuitive leaps, but the discovery of general relativity is (to me, at least) an example of using “cause-and-effect logic” with astonishing brilliance and with world-changing results.

All of these things may be defensible positions. But – unforgivably for a science book – there are no references, no footnotes, no way of checking his positions at all beyond googling relevant-sounding phrases. At one point he drops in as an aside that “extraordinarily, bumblebees have been seen to play football”, which is the sort of sentence that makes you do a double-take.

I googled it and it turns out that honey bees (not bumblebees) can be trained to pull a ball into a “goal” to win a nectar reward, and other bees learn it more quickly by watching, and inevitably that became “bees play football” in the popular press. It’s such a minor detail, but it annoyed me.

And when it gets to the subject of AI, that lack of ballast and rigour makes the book essentially useless as a guide to the future.

Lovelock does have lots of interesting ideas – some of which I agree with entirely. For instance, progress, howsoever measured, is speeding up; it took millions of years to go from lizard to seabird, but only a few decades to go from the Wright Flyer to the Concorde. Economic growth or information-processing speed has also got faster in this exponential way: technological improvements make new technological improvements easier, so the AI future could go through enormous revolutions in hours rather than years.

But lots of it reads like some free-associating Alan Ginsberg fever dream – Lovelock imagines animals “plucking freshly charged batteries from solar-powered trees”, and “huge transmitters sited at the poles broadcasting junk mail, unwanted advertisements, banal entertainment and misinformation” into space to keep the planet cool, or cyborg scientists exhibiting humans like we do plants at Kew Gardens.

He says that any future AIs will have to keep the Earth cool because they, like us, won’t be able to survive if it gets much warmer. But if the AIs are as powerful as he suggests, then it’s not clear that they’ll need to keep the Earth in any sort of recognisable form at all. What’s to stop them from clearing out the inconveniently warm atmosphere altogether, or for that matter turning the entire Earth into memory banks and processors?

This idea that “hyperintelligent” AIs will need to maintain a Gaia-like homeostasis definitely needs more explaining. It’s intriguing enough, but, with no references, I can’t see what Lovelock is basing it all on, other than his own musings.

Most importantly for the Novacene hypothesis, though, is his optimistic idea that these AIs will be the next generation of intelligent, aware beings – “understanding creatures” that allow the cosmos to contemplate itself, as he says. (Reminiscent of the Niels Bohr quote, “A physicist is just an atom’s way of looking at itself.”)

That could be what happens; but in the end, AIs will be computers that do what we tell them to do, and whether that ends well or badly depends entirely on how we build them and what we tell them to do.

Suggested reading

The true cost of digital convenience

By Mark Piesing

It may well be that you can build amazingly powerful AIs which have no consciousness, no moral value in their own right, but are just very good at completing the tasks we give them. If we are replaced by machines like that, then they could whir away and do astonishing things, colonise the galaxy, solve scientific questions and build wonders, but there would be no conscious beings to observe it or care about it. None of it would matter. It would, in the words of the philosopher and AI theorist Nick Bostrom in his own book Superintelligence, be “a Disneyland with no children”.

That’s not inevitable either, of course. And nor are any of the other scenarios – doom, utopia, human zoos. The problem is that Lovelock seems to think that Novacene is inevitable. I think his fundamental problem is, ironically, that he still essentially thinks of AIs as human – not in form, but in mind; they may think faster, but they will still care about the things we care about, they will still get bored and impatient, they will still be individually distinguishable beings rather than avatars of some greater hive-mind.

The AI future could transform human prospects in profound ways – as extreme as ending world poverty and illness, if it goes well, or exterminating us all, if it doesn’t. It is absolutely vital that we spend time thinking about it, and trying to make the first scenario more likely than the second.

But if, like Lovelock, we assume that it’s all inevitable – whether positive or negative – then we abdicate our responsibility for trying to make that future positive rather than negative.

It’s written from the perspective of a decaying civilisation awaiting the invader. A fatalistic ruling class is resigned to its fate and mounts no defence of their city – except for a display of finery, which they hope will impress their new overlords.

Suggested reading

Why the Matrix needs humans

By Peter Franklin

Their behaviour is both pompous and cowardly; and one hopes they get what they deserve (which in the poem they do, but more on that later).

‘Waiting for the barbarians’ has been interpreted as a satire on authoritarian paranoia – and its deep psychological need for a mortal enemy. But this is a misinterpretation. The poem satirises decadence, not paranoia.

The protagonists don’t so much fear invasion as long for it – seeking exaltation in subjugation. Indeed, there’s a special egotism in seeing oneself as the last in a long line – the culmination of an old order and therefore entitled to give it up without a fight.

Real world examples include the 20th century liberals who saw the triumph of socialism as inevitable. Or the appeasers who would have had us submit to Hitler. Or the post-war declinists who gave up on Britain and begat the euro-submissive establishment.

Today, we can see the same impulse in those who wait not for barbarians, but robots.

There’s a whole industry of experts predicting the obsolescence of the human workforce, displaced by the irresistibility productivity of AI-powered automation. It’s a disturbing, but also beguiling, prospect – a promise of leisure and luxury without limit. I’m half-attracted to it myself.

Suggested reading

Are you ready for 'fully automated luxury communism'?

By Peter Franklin

But is it inevitable? Writing for Bloomberg, Noah Smith sounds a sceptical note:

“The truth is, nobody knows how many jobs will be replaced by automation, or how automation will affect wages and inequality. There’s the possibility that AI, rather than replacing workers, will mostly just allow them to do their jobs more easily. And even as some jobs are eliminated, new ones will pop up, possibly at higher wages. That may involve painful, stressful transitions for people who have to switch jobs, but it doesn’t represent a robot apocalypse…”

It’s not that the relevant technologies aren’t already making advances. But whether they’re destroying jobs or not is an open question:

“…some countries that use more industrial robots, such as South Korea, Germany and Japan, have unemployment rates as low as or lower than that of the U.S.”

Exhibit A in the case that robots are replacing us is what happened to manufacturing employment in the 2000s. In America, a third of all factory jobs – nearly 6 million – were lost. As noted by Gwynn Guilford in an article for Quartz last year, there is no precedent for this rate of attrition, not even the Great Depression of the 1930s.

In seeking to attach blame, technology is an obvious suspect; but there is a plausible alternative – competition from, and offshoring to, low cost manufacturing economies (especially China). So how do we decide between them?

The standard view is that despite the job losses, there was a substantial rise in US manufacturing output in the 2000s – showing that America automated its jobs away (as opposed to exporting them to China). But as Guilford explains, the output statistics are misleading. That’s because they’re adjusted for the exceptionally rapid rate of product improvement in the computers subsector (Moore’s Law and all that):

“…the method statisticians use to account for these advances can make it seem like US firms are producing and selling more computers than they actually are. And when the computers data are aggregated with the other subsectors, the adjustment makes it seem like the whole of American manufacturing is churning out more goods than it actually is.”

Strip out this adjustment and the “apparently robust growth in manufacturing productivity is mostly a mirage”, which means we’re not looking at a productivity miracle:

“To be clear, automation did happen in manufacturing. However, throughout the 2000s, the industry was automating at about the same pace as in the rest of the private sector. And if booming robot-led productivity growth wasn’t displacing factory workers, then the sweeping scale of job losses in manufacturing necessarily stemmed from something else entirely.”

So that brings us back to China and some hard questions about the terms of trade and globalisation. This is Trump territory, but only because the ground has been vacated by more moderate politicians.

It’s all too convenient for those who do well out of globalisation to conclude that those who don’t are the victims of unstoppable technological change (as opposed to factors governments can do something about). Indeed, in the long-term, we needn’t worry about the world of work at all, if we assume there won’t be one. We can just theorise about things like ‘post-work’ and universal basic income instead. But what happens when it becomes clear that machines won’t be replacing us after all?

Sod the singularity, we must assume that the future of work will remain in our hands. When it comes, and if we’re still in charge, we’ll look very stupid if we have no idea what to do with it.

Suggested reading

The most influential religion you’ve never heard of

By Peter Franklin

At the end of ‘Waiting for the barbarians’, some terrible news reaches the city from the frontier: there are no barbarians. The confused citizens return to their home, wondering what to do now the invaders aren’t coming:

“They were, those people, a kind of solution.”

It’s really not that long ago that the cathode ray tube was a part of everyday life – the vital component in the heavy, box-like TV screens and computer monitors sat in our living rooms and offices.

Suggested reading

Are you ready for 'fully automated luxury communism'?

By Peter Franklin

As far back as the early 1980s, I remember people speculating that flat screens were “five-to-ten years away”. The joke was that they always would be. But then, suddenly, they arrived – displacing CRT screens just about everywhere.

The thing is that just prior to this revolution, the old technology was never more ubiquitous – thanks to multiple TVs in many homes and computerisation in the workplace.

That’s a pattern worth bearing in mind as we contemplate the puzzling phenomenon of (nearly) full employment in the contemporary capitalist economy. It may be that our robot replacements are lurking, flat screen style, just around the corner. In five-to-ten years we human beings may find ourselves joining those cathode ray tubes on the rubbish heap of history.

But, so far, there’s little sign it. That’s puzzling because even if technologies like advanced robotics and AI aren’t quite in full swing, other potentially job-destroying factors – such as globalisation – certainly are. Furthermore, we’re only ten years on from the calamity of the global financial crisis – and still propping up a low-growth economy with piles of debt, QE and ultra-low interest rates.

And yet, as a special report in The Economist describes, most western economies are generating jobs like there’s no tomorrow:

“Across the OECD a jobs bonanza is under way. In the past five years the group has added 43m jobs. The unemployment rate—the number of people looking for work as a share of the total labour force—is at its lowest in decades… In 2018, the employment rate among people of working age was the highest ever in Britain, Canada, Germany, Australia and 22 other OECD countries.”

Furthermore, the jobs boom doesn’t seem to be leaving many people behind:

“The boom is broad based. Unemployment among unskilled workers and the young is tumbling, as is long-term joblessness.”

The UK’s ‘jobs-led recovery’ is especially interesting. Prior to 2010, private sector job creation was massively skewed to the richer half of the country, but, in this decade, the North-South divide has narrowed dramatically.

Nor can the jobs-boom be explained away as a sub-optimal shift to temporary, part-time and self employment. The big picture is much more solid than that. And as for wage levels, those appear to be on the rise again after a long period of stagnation.

Even if our long-term future is one of ‘fully automated luxury communism’, the present is one of fully employed luxury capitalism.

But to some critics, the ‘luxury’ part of that formula would be better described as ‘unnecessary’:

“David Graeber, an anthropologist, goes further. In ‘Bullshit Jobs’, a book published last year which has become akin to a holy tract for millennial socialists, he claims that a big chunk of modern employment is pointless and soul-sucking. ‘Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed,’ he argues.”

Of course, “bullshit” in this context is a subjective term. Deplorably, there may be some unkind souls who’d apply it to Professor Graeber’s profession!

Isn’t it better to see our surplus-to-requirements economy as a sign of progress? One can argue about how best to achieve and distribute frivolity-for-all, but as long as we don’t wreck the planet in the process, what’s wrong with a little luxury – or, indeed, a lot?

Of course, if luxury for some is only made available through the drudgery of others, then that is a problem. The kind of demoralising service-sector jobs described by writers such as James Bloodworth are clearly nothing to celebrate. And yet, as the anonymous authors of The Economist article point out, governments across the Western world are placing stronger requirements upon employers to look after their employees – for instance, through training opportunities, childcare provision, parental leave, health and safety measures and minimum wage levels.

Suggested reading

Why we can't ignore the working-class identity crisis

By James Bloodworth

Furthermore, and contrary to the prophecies of the free market fundamentalists, pro-worker regulation has not killed off job-creation – quite the opposite it would seem.

The authors offer various explanations for this jobs miracle – the most interesting of which is that technology has revolutionised the process of recruitment:

“Better tech improves the ‘matching’ of employers with potential employees. Not long ago those hiring put an advert in a local newspaper or spread the word by mouth. Now employers can shoot from the hip, posting vacancies on a slew of jobs websites. In the ten years to 2016 the cost of filling a vacancy fell by 80% in real terms.”

I suspect that we’ve hugely underestimated the significance of the progress made in solving this most difficult of coordination problems.

The perception that the digital age hasn’t made more of an impact on productivity levels is one of the great mysteries of contemporary economics. But perhaps we’ve been looking in the wrong place. Or, rather, we’ve been misled by the key statistics.

The standard measure of productivity is specifically one of labour productivity – i.e. GDP divided by the total number of hours worked. But what about hours not worked because people are unemployed – earning nothing and producing nothing? This zero productivity is excluded from the standard measure, making a high unemployment economy look much more productive than it actually is.

If the internet has enabled employers to employ more people and workers to find jobs more easily then it will show up in the statistics as a hit to productivity – because more of the least skilled workers will be included. That is perverse, because while these newly-included individuals may be less productive than other workers, they’re obviously more productive than the uncounted unemployed.

One day the robots may finally arrive with our P45s in their steely claws. But until then we need a better measure of productivity to show the job-creating effects of technology as a plus not a minus.

Suggested reading

The inhuman politics of artificial intelligence

By John Cruddas

Further reading

Do androids dream of electric sheets?

By Rowan Pelling

But how close are we to producing a convincing android as a opposed to a glorified sex toy? Films like Ex Machina and TV shows like Channel 4’s Humans depict robots that look like people, in a near-future setting. In reality though, the necessary technology is a long way from being developed. If you’re worried about the tech-driven disruption of human sexuality, then the ubiquity and extremity of internet pornography is a more immediate concern.

Beyond the porn issue, the near-term danger isn’t one of robots displacing real people in our beds, but in our hearts.

Consider the case of HitchBOT, a relatively simple robot created by a team at Ryerson University, Toronto – and designed for no other purpose than hitching rides with passing motorists. Writing about this technological and social experiment for the BBC, Jane Wakefield describes the little robot as “cartoon-like” and “non-threatening”:

“In order to qualify as a robot, it had to have some basic electronics – including a Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver to track its journey, movements in its arms, and software to allow it to communicate when asked questions. It could also smile and wink.

“And, of course, it could move its thumb into a hitch position.”

After the experiment went public, HitchBOT became a social media sensation. There were no shortage of fans willing to help out when it was sent on a mission to hitchhike across Canada. Setting off from Halifax, Nova Scotia on the 27 July 2014, HitchBOT made it to Victoria, British Columbia by 21 August. Not bad going.

The following year, there was a new mission – to hitchhike across the United States from Boston to San Francisco. However, HitchBOT only got as far as Philadelphia, where it was discovered on the side of the road – dismembered and decapitated by some unknown assailant.

Jane Wakefield’s article is headlined “can you murder a robot?” – presumably by an unknown editor. The answer to the question is “obviously not”, but there’s no doubt that the senseless destruction of HitchBOT upset a lot of people.

Frauke Zeller, who led the team behind the project, was careful not to inflame the situation. Adam Gabbatt of the Guardian reported her as saying “I really want to emphasise I don’t think it has anything to do with the States nor with Philadelphia.” She also said “robots can trust humans but there’s always some people anywhere that might have issues for any reason.”

While “some people” certainly have “issues”, robots cannot “trust” (or distrust) humans. They don’t have any feelings at all, yet we so easily slip into speaking and writing about them as if they do. Furthermore, we reciprocate these imagined feelings with real ones of our own.

Further reading

The inhuman politics of artificial intelligence

By Jon Cruddas

Jane Wakefield cites a number of other experiments demonstrating just how readily we treat robots as if they were people:

“Prof Rosalind Picaurd, who heads up the Affective Computing Lab… based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, thinks it comes down to human nature.

“‘We are made for relationships, even us engineers, and that is such a powerful thing that we fit machines into that,’ she said.

“But while it is important that robots understand human emotions because it will be their job to serve us, it might not be a good idea to anthropomorphise the machines.

“‘We are at a pivotal point where we can choose as a society that we are not going to mislead people into thinking these machines are more human than they are,’…”

But, of course, when these things become mass consumer products they will be anthropomorphised. Silicon Valley is full of people who know exactly how to manipulate our minds. Given how successfully they’ve addicted us to our mobile phones, do you think they’d pass up on the chance to hijack our capacity for love and compassion?

We need to prepare ourselves, because unlike the overhyped sex robots, there’ll be no need to achieve a convincing simulacrum of a living, breathing human being. If people can become devoted to something as crudely mechanical as HitchBOT, then mass consumer technology you can literally fall in love with can’t be very far away.

A good thing too, some might say. ‘Emotional support robots’ could provide comfort and companionship for anxious and lonely people.

In the New York Times, Nellie Bowles writes about a company called Care.Coach, which provides its customers with an animated onscreen cat (or some other winsome avatar) that can provide conversation and reassurance on demand:

“The technology… is quite simple: a Samsung Galaxy Tab E tablet with an ultrawide-angle fisheye lens attached to the front. None of the people operating the avatars are in the United States; they mostly work in the Philippines and Latin America…”

“Early results have been positive… patients with avatars needed fewer nursing visits, went to the emergency room less often and felt less lonely.”

It’s significant that even though there are real people on the other end of the line, the interaction with the customers is filtered through a clearly non-human animated character. How long before the kind of AI that powers digital assistants like Alexa and Siri is used to fully automate emotional support services too?

Further reading

'Alexa, are you turning my kid into a brat?'

By Peter Franklin

Of course, people already use radio, TV, and the internet for company. A more fully interactive electronic companion, whether onscreen or downloaded into a robot would seem to represent an advance – especially if it can be programmed to recognise and respond to appropriate to shifts in mood or even to emergency situations.

Still, I wonder about the wider effect on human society. Will an AI that’s good enough to replace the connections that ought to exist between people but don’t also displace those that currently do?

Our new friends might not look or behave like real people, but I’ve got a horrible feeling we might prefer it that way.

Levy, an entrepreneur and international master of chess, was the keynote speaker and has long predicted that by 2050 humans will be entering into legally binding marriages with robots. He’s said more recently that within the next century humans will be able to have babies with their electrically engineered spouses, given the “recent progress in stem cell research and artificial chromosomes”.

A surprising number of people aren’t troubled by bionic babies. They’re already signing up for android action, or its nearest equivalent. The New York Times recently reported the advent of Digisexuals, or those amongst us who reject human contact in favour of close emotional, or sexual, relationships with electronic devices and mechanisms enhanced by artificial intelligence. Exemplars of the trend include the Chinese AI engineer Zheng Jiajia who designed and married his own robot wife Yingying and the Japanese school administrator Akihiko Kondo who wed the pop sensation and hologram Hatsune Miku last November (neither wedding was legally binding).

Developments in virtual reality and digitally-enabled sex – using apps to control artificial phalluses and vulvas – are making it less and less necessary for reclusive tech lovers to seek human intimacy at all. And films such as Alex Garland’s Ex Machina, in which Alicia Vikander plays a robot who can pass the Turing Test, seem ever more prophetic. Most of us have little idea when we message a large corporate website’s “help” facility whether the person answering us is real or a bot.

Before I attended the Goldsmith’s conference my own views on AI eroticism hadn’t progressed far beyond Woody Allen’s Orgasmatron. I was unaware that several sex-doll companies, such as US-based Abyss Creations, were already producing products widely billed as sex robots – in reality dolls with soft silicone “skin” and animatronic AI-enabled robotic heads– and that some were already in use in brothels. I hadn’t realised the sex tech market was estimated at $30 billion a year, meaning a lucrative race was on to produce devices to replicate the soft squishy sensuality of human intimacy (thus reducing the need for actual human intimacy). One young female computer scientist I met at the conference had created the “Kissinger”, a device to simulate lip-on-lip pressure via a mobile phone app.

Most of my fellow Goldsmiths’ delegates didn’t just see these advances as inevitable; they felt they were desirable. The most vociferous proponents of humanoid robots tended to be men and it became clear a little geek stereotyping wasn’t entirely unwarranted. The male coders, academics and futurists I talked to were linear thinkers, at ease with coding and algorithms but less in tune, I felt, with the emotional vagaries of your average human female.

Two of the event’s leading lights regaled me separately with tales of their god-awful divorces and ex-wives, before telling me with painful sincerity they’d plump for an android spouse any day. A German academic, Jessica Szczuka said her academic research (involving 263 straight males) found that two thirds of respondents could imagine using a sex robot. It was hard not to think back to Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives, in which a bunch of irksome, feminist wives are replaced with fawning, docile lookalikes who don’t seem quite human.

Suggested reading

Should we care that the sex robots are coming?

By Kate Devlin

In fairness, it’s not just men who are drawn to sex tech. The Love and Sex with Robots conference was hosted by the archaeologist-turned-computer scientist Kate Devlin, who’s subsequently published Turned On, a history of the sex robot, which also keeps an eye on the science horizon. Devlin takes pains to point out that women in the field of AI aren’t swept up by the fem-bot type androids of popular science fiction. She questions why erotic tech has to come in human form at all and suggests we think more laterally.

In her book, she proposes a sensual duvet with receptors and transmitters that would be like wrapping yourself up in a pleasure-inducing cocoon. Devlin’s also a fierce advocate of the potential benefits of AI-enhanced erotic mechanisms in terms of catering for the elderly, the physically impaired and the chronically lonely. Like many women in the field she strives to promote the therapeutic side of sex tech. Szcruka similarly pointed out that the likely users of sex robots will be people who suffer from acute social anxiety, saying: “Someone with a fear of rejection could control the robot because the robot would never reject them.”

In wider, global terms you can see there’s an argument that this technology could help societies where there’s a perilous imbalance in the sexes, whether that’s remote mining communities or whole countries. China’s one-child policy and the Indian sub-continent’s extreme poverty, aggravated by both nation’s traditional favouring of male children, has led to mass abortion and murder of female infants. This necessarily means some young men will find it hard to secure a sexual partner, leading to either unwanted celibacy, or a culture that fosters rape and assault. Perhaps even the furious Incels (involuntary celibates – of whom the California school shooter 22-year-old Elliot Roger is the most infamous) would find their pent-up, misogynistic rage was soothed by a robot lover programmed for sexual healing.

The counter-argument is that such theories are delusional: that if a man becomes used to unquestioned compliance from a “female” robot then he will expect the same level of submission from a human woman. Or that angry, frustrated males will abuse non-sentient sex robots, making them more likely to behave violently to real flesh and blood women. In 2017, it was widely reported that an “intelligent” sex doll named Samantha, who responded to seductive chatter, was “molested” at Arts Electronica Festival in Austria. Her Spanish engineer, Sergi Santos, said festival attendees had treated Samantha “like barbarians”.

Suggested reading

Why humans can't help but love robots

By Graeme Archer

Kate Devlin closely examines the ethical arguments against sex robots in Turned On – even looking head-on at the disturbing question of what happens if androids are constructed to resemble children. Once again, the central issue raised is whether such innovation is likely to help prevent actual abuse of minors, or actively encourage it. There’s almost no reliable evidence on the matter and the same is true of the debate around whether sex tech makes women more or less vulnerable to sexual assault. Devlin outlines the central problem:

“The ‘gateway’ versus ‘reduction’ theories remain ambiguous and they bear investigation, though such investigation is by necessity constrained by ethical boundaries… What ethics committee would sign off a study like that? What funding body would pay for it?”

And even if you settle these kinds of ethical issues, there are the everyday ones that complicate all technological innovation. Who is ultimately in charge of the software? Can it be hacked? Will large corporations hijack the programming to spy on our sexual habits? Will Big Government monitor it to see if we’re deviants?

If you feel this talk of androids is just an absurd sci-fi scenario, it’s worth noting the idea of creating a replica human for sexual pleasure has a history as long as storytelling. Devlin’s book highlights the Greek myth about a young woman called Laodamia, whose husband Protesilaus was the first to die at the siege of Troy. Distraught with grief, Laodamia commissioned a bronze statue of her dead spouse and took it to her bed.

Then there’s the 19^th-century ballet Coppélia, where a young man falls for a doll made by a malign inventor.  But truth is always weirder than fiction and few stories are more haunting than the tale of the artist Oskar Kokoschka’s affair with Alma Mahler (widow of the great composer). Mahler ended the intense romance after a couple of years, but  Kokoschka couldn’t come to terms with the parting. In 1918, he visited the Munich doll-maker Hermine Moos and commissioned a life-size soft effigy of Mahler, stipulating every last detail of design: “And take to heart the contours of the body, e.g. the line of the neck to the back, the curve of the belly. Please permit my sense of touch to take pleasure in those places where layers of fat or muscle suddenly give way to a sinewy covering of skin… The point of all this for me is an experience which I must be able to embrace.” Kokoschka posed the mannequin around his home and on one infamous occasion took her to the opera. But the doll proved deeply unsatisfactory and eventually, following a party, he destroyed her.

It’s easy to feel complacent; to believe this kind of obsessive behaviour that could never overtake you or me. Until you consider the average person’s emotional attachment to their smart phones, tablets and laptops. It may be too strong to say we’re in love with our electronic devices, but we display troubling signs of addiction and dependency that aren’t far removed from it. It’s fair to say I freak out more when I mislay my mobile than when I lose one of my sons. I think of my computer’s hard drive as an extension of my own memory. I see friends talk to Siri as if she’s alive and I found the film Her, where Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with a sultry-voiced operating system, only too plausible.

On dating sites and chat rooms identity is blurred to the point you can feel passionate desire for someone who doesn’t exist except as a projection of a stranger’s fantasies. Teledildonics (app-controlled sex-toys that can be operated remotely) mean you can have a love affair where your lover never touches you because his skill won’t match up to your smart toy. Recent sex surveys have yielded the surprising result that millennials are losing their virginity later than comparable young from the 1960s to 1980s and were generally having less sex. One hypothesis was the pressure that comes from widely available porn and the pressure to perform.

I want to be relaxed about all this. I know our forebears were deeply disturbed by the spinning Jenny, the iron horse and the contraceptive pillandthat somehow humans adapt apace and survive the relentless tide of innovation. I find Kate Devlin’s enthusiasm admirable and I’d certainly test-drive her orgasmic duvet if it came to production – although nightly use might prove a bit over-stimulating. Nevertheless, something troubles me in the whole debate. We may not yet have reliable evidence to quote about the effects of intimate human interaction with machines, but most parents I know feel they observe significant changes in their children when they spend too much time on their devices.

Gaming and social media have inbuilt features devised to create an addictive response (such as Facebook’s infamous “like” button) and bond users ever closer to their favourite ways of wasting time. With advances in virtual reality you can only envisage the dependency becoming more pronounced – and the grumpiness, anxiety and anger when asked to return to real life becoming more accentuated. And if this is true of non-sex-tech how will it not be truer of the tech designed to push our sexual buttons? Especially for those who are most vulnerable: socially inept and reclusive young men. It’s not hard to envisage a scenario in which thousands of people retreat to an online erotic life with less chance of encountering a messy, complex, self-contradictory, enticing, evolving human being.

Suggested reading

All hail the AI dictatorship

By James Bloodworth

I’ve spent 23 years researching and writing about sex and relationships and have become increasingly astonished by human capacity for erotic intimacy – and also by how frightened we can be by the levels of trust and vulnerability involved in such closeness. Some of the hardest sexual practices are paradoxically the simplest, because they involve sustained eye contact, tender exploration and gentle, slow touch. They necessitate trust of an order that doesn’t entail you thinking: “Hmm, has someone hacked into your central controls.”

I’ll probably sound wildly kooky if I talk about “energetic connection” but when you’re profoundly, erotically in tune with another personthere is a flow between bodies that seems to transcend the purely physical. The irony is that we call it “electrifying” in homage to the spark that gives life to machines. Science can surely explain that amoroussensation via dopamine, oxytocin and a crucible of other feel-good chemicals, but it’s still a peculiarly human, interactive sensation.

More than that, let us consider the slippery, contradictory nature of desire. Do we ever want what we think we want? Aren’t our deepest yearnings to some extent occluded? Societal norms, parental guidance and peer pressure steer us for so long that it can take decades to know your own sexual taste. And then there’s the fact that when you get what you want it often leaves you unsatisfied. A friend filled in an online dating form saying she wanted a tall, dark, handsome London-based professional and promptly fell in love with a short, sandy, eccentric farmer from Wales.

Can we write algorithms for androids that delight and frustrate us in equal measure, that keep pace with our unconscious desires, that change our perceptions of our needs and deepest longings? Can a robot ever resonate with that iridescent glow of heart and soul that comes from melding with your best beloved to the point you don’t know where your own body starts and his ends? Could you feel the fine hairs on your neck rise as your android lover turned to look at you across a crowded room, although your back was turned to theirs? I know many thousands would sign up for a Rampant Rabbit that had a robotic Idris Elba attached to it. And far more for a compliant sex-bot that looked and talked like Scarlett Johansson. But I’ll always yearn for that small epiphany Nora Ephron outlined in Sleepless in Seattle:

“Well, it was a million tiny little things that, when you added them all up… I knew it the very first time I touched her. … I was just taking her hand to help her  out of a car, and I knew. It was like… magic.”

In the end, what was unveiled was not Marty McFly on a levitating skateboard, but the not-so-soaraway Segway – a two-wheeled electric scooter.

Further reading

How the robots of the underworld could turn your life upside down

By Peter Franklin

To be fair, the technology was quite impressive – especially the self-balancing mechanism. However, as a commercial product, it was deemed too expensive, too cumbersome and too nerdy to revolutionise personal transport. Look around you in any town or city and you can see that the critics were right – the Segway did not change our way of life.

However, unlike the infamous Sinclair C5 (another ill-fated personal transport ‘solution’), the product didn’t die. It found niches here and there, and the company found new owners.

An article in The Economist brings the story into the present day:

“It took Segway a decade to hit its initial 13-month target to sell 100,000 units of its original two-wheeler. In 2018, just three years into production, Segway-Ninebot will sell 1m scooters, up from sales of 600,000 last year. Ninebot’s factory in Changzhou builds over 5,000 scooters a day. The firm’s backers, which include Xiaomi, valued it at $1.5bn in its latest funding round.”

The technology has evolved and product lines now include unicycles, ‘e-skates’ and ‘hoverboards’ (which don’t actually hover, but are much less bulky versions of the original Segway concept – i.e. a wheeled, self-balancing platform that you stand and ride around on).

Further reading

Two wheels good; four wheels bad

By Peter Franklin

While it remains to be seen whether the streets will ever fill with people using these devices, there is one of the company’s product lines that I think could prove highly consequential:

“[Gao Lufeng, chief executive of the company] has especially high hopes for delivery businesses. In five years’ time he wants unmanned delivery vehicles called Loomo, currently being trialled by its robotics arm with Meituan-Dianping, an online-services giant, to account for over half of Ninebot’s total revenue. Using artificial intelligence Loomo can wheel goods from the gate of a compound into lifts then up to office doors, and, as costs come down, could take them straight to workers’ desks…”

At the moment, Loomo is a hoverboard with robotic and AI functions. You can ride it, but among other abilities it can follow you around like a little robot dog. Judging by what Gao Lufeng told The Economist, the plan is to develop Loomo into an autonomous transportation unit.

This is a potentially enormous market – and not just within factories, warehouses and offices. Instead of delivery vans lumbering around our streets, imagine unmanned delivery pods bringing us our shopping. Such systems could also function as robotic porters, carrying our luggage for us and generally doing the heavy lifting.

Clearly, there’s investment going into the technology and, in theory, it should be easier to get right than the self-driving car. Automated delivery pods would be smaller and slower, therefore safer. They’d probably use pavements rather than roads – though, like a human pedestrian, they’d have to be able to cross the road safely. Even on the pavement, they’d need to avoid fixed and moving objects – including lampposts, joggers and urinating dogs.

Further reading

Who'll have the guts to ban cars from our cities?

By Peter Franklin

The biggest challenge is likely to be crime. How would the delivery pods defend themselves and their cargo against theft and vandalism? Electric shocks would be out of the question, but not video surveillance. Equipped with cameras and network connections, the pods could transmit live footage of the crime (and the criminals) to the police.

In merely navigating the streets, they’d be constantly monitoring their surroundings. Therefore they wouldn’t just be delivery pods, they’d be mobile CCTV systems. If they also functioned as help points – and being networked devices with Al capabilities, why not – they’d could effectively serve as mini police officers.

Sooner or later we will find ourselves sharing our streets with robots. Whether we’ll find their presence annoying, creepy or reassuring remains to be seen.

Further reading

Advanced economies shouldn't depend on cheap labour

By Peter Franklin

In an important article for Bloomberg, Kai-Fu Lee, encourages us to take a different perspective. What will robotics and AI do to jobs in the developing world?

“Artificial intelligence is dramatically accelerating the automation of factories and taking over routine tasks such as customer service or telemarketing. AI does such jobs cheaper than the low-wage workers of the developing world and, over time, will do them better. Robots examining your iPhone for scratches don’t take vacations for Chinese New Year; AI customer-service agents don’t demand pay raises.”

For any given range of jobs where automation is a viable option, one would expect those paying the highest wages to be prioritised. So does that mean that developing economies, with their comparatively low wage levels, are safe?

Not necessarily. Offshoring may save on payroll costs, but can be expensive in other ways. Distance from home markets and the difficulty of operating in an unfamiliar regulatory environment can both take their toll. Then there’s the potential threat to intellectual property and the opportunities for efficiency improvement that get lost when the shopfloor is a half-a-world-away from designers, engineers and other specialists.

It seems likely that many companies would re-shore their manufacturing facilities and call centres if they didn’t have to pay higher wages – or, indeed, any wages.

That could have devastating consequences for the countries left behind:

“Without a cost incentive to locate in the developing world, corporations will bring many of these functions back to the countries where they’re based. That will leave emerging economies, unable to grasp the bottom rungs of the development ladder, in a dangerous position: The large pool of young and relatively unskilled workers that once formed their greatest comparative advantage will become a liability — a potentially explosive one.”

China, though, will be fine.

As highlighted before on UnPacked, the Chinese want much more for themselves than to be the ‘workshop of the world’; Chinese demographics mean that the country can’t rely on an endlessly abundant labour supply; and, in any case, Chinese technological expertise and domestic consumer markets are strong enough to keep a heavily automated manufacturing sector at home.

Further reading

The innovation game: Can China regain its lead over the West?

By Peter Franklin

The real threat is to those much poorer countries that hope to get the sort of jobs from China that China once got from the West. In other words, if robotics and AI puts an end to the advantage of having a young and cost-competitive workforce, it could also end the spread of industrialisation and the prosperity that comes with it.

That looks like especially bad news for Africa – the great population growth centre of the 21st century. A different way forward is required:

“…what is an emerging economy to do? The first step is to recognize that the traditional paths to economic development — the China and India models — are no longer viable… The next wave of emerging economies must chart a new course.”

The developing world’s use of new technology to leapfrog entire stages of development that richer countries had to go through is a well-documented phenomenon. Examples include mobile phone-based financial services in places where there are no high street banks or, indeed, high streets. Then there’s the use of distributed forms of renewable energy where there are no electricity grids or big central power stations.

But that’s just for starters. If progress in artificial intelligence results in significant automation of specialisms such as the law, accountancy and education, then developing countries may be able leapfrog a lot of the services infrastructure that appears to be so essential to the functioning of a western economy.

Note that this does not require complete automation. For instance, in ten or 20 years time, an AI ‘law bot’ probably won’t be able to do everything that a London QC can do now, but it might be able to undertake more basic legal work. Such tools could combine to allow developing economies to advance without the highly expensive – and, one might argue, self-justifying – public and private sector bureaucracies that weigh us down in the West.

This would free the brightest and best in rising nations to focus on real entrepreneurship and true innovation.

Well, that’s the optimistic scenario – but why not go for it?

Further reading

How long before the world's youngest continent revolts?

By Daniel Knowles

Estimates of UK jobs that could be replaced by AI and related technologies over the next two decades tend to range from 22% to 40%.

We have already witnessed how data analytics can be malignly used in political campaigns. This capacity will become more sophisticated, possibly at the expense of the democratic process itself.

Possibly even more potent is the recognition software being trialled in marketing to detect the efficacy of advertising by judging facial expressions. It suggests business has the potential to reach into our lives in ways Orwell imagined a totalitarian state would do.

More generally, we have seen the filter bubble effect on civic and social life. Social media is feeding us information which aligns with our preconceived notions of the world, and closes us off from challenging information and argument.

Yet the challenges facing the country today appear inversely related to the capacity of politicians and policymakers to discuss, let alone resolve them.

In the face of escalating authoritarian populism, for example, where is the political diagnosis and response? Where is the defence of liberal democracy?

Or, in our post-EU referendum world, where do we consider the issues and feelings that ushered in the result, not just the technical aspects of Brexit?

Further reading

How Disney shows an AI apocalypse is possible

By Tom Chivers

Arguably, politics has lost its ethical grip; reduced to various forms of technocratic administration. Today’s populist uprisings reflect a backlash against such managerialism.

To renew public confidence requires a different conversation. One that addresses moral and cultural questions regarding the lives we wish to live, and how the present disparity between that ideal and reality can find political expression.

The same tension surrounds our limited discussion of robotics and AI. These have the potential to affect all policy fields, from education to the labour market, from policing to health and social care.

Yet current political thinking is reactive – geared only towards ensuring Britain is at the forefront of technological progress. On one level, this utilitarian stance is understandable. But should we not begin by discussing the role technology should and should not play in our lives? A conversation far beyond questions of economic utility.

Restricting public debate to policy rather than ethical concerns is especially problematic when considering AI, for politicians lack technical and scientific expertise in these areas.

Being unable to evaluate the claims of developers means that both politicians and the public are prone to being swayed by either apocalyptic or techno-utopian narratives.

For example, many technologists adhere to ‘techno-solutionism’, the idea that all ‘problems’ which humanity faces can be ‘solved’ using technology. This confidence often goes hand in hand with an innate libertarianism: as the role of technology expands, so should the role of the state contract.

Then there are those who approach these issues from a transhumanist position. This asserts that technological change creates the opportunity to transcend the human condition and that this is to be celebrated. Resistance is deemed parochial or nostalgic. In fact, transhumanism is often tagged as the ‘modern eugenics’.

Further reading

The most influential religion you’ve never heard of

By Peter Franklin

What happens when transhumanist thinking informs the technologists themselves? Nick Bostrom, for example, is both director of H+ – an international transhumanist organisation – and the Future of Life Institute at Oxford University, which regularly produces policy recommendations for government. That is surely a conflict.

Policymakers need to avoid being captivated by the promise of technological progress without an appreciation of the philosophical assumptions that might inform this thinking.

This is applicable to libertarian and transhumanist thinking on both the radical Left and Right. These are deep waters and should be dominating political debate. Yet discussion is virtually non-existent.

We have been warned: the House of Lords’ Report on AI said, “the most challenging point relating to AI and democracy is the lack of choice that is offered to the population at large about the adoption of technology. It is, to say the least, undemocratic”.

But as it stands, the policy proposals to meet these challenges are shockingly weak: that developers undergo training in ethics as part of their computer science degrees, that companies ensure their workforces are diverse and that individuals made redundant, perhaps repeatedly, by AI are enabled to train for a new career.

Further reading

The Left's shameful silence over the degradation of work

By Jon Cruddas

Broader in scale, Universal Basic Income is a more radical proposal floated to ensure that those who lose their jobs are not made destitute. Yet the State would take on a phenomenal welfare burden alongside a shrinking tax take.

To fill the deficit people like Bill Gates propose a robot tax. But trying to define a robot would be a legal and regulatory nightmare. When policy is solely reactive, bending to suit technologists’ goals, it can fast become incoherent.

Instead we should be returning to first principles, and discussing the value we place on work, freedom, privacy, community and justice. In short, about what we want society to look like.

If we do not, policymakers run the risk of slipping into techno-solutionism, elevating technological and economic advancement above an appreciation of how we want to live.

One wonders why our ancestors went to such trouble. Cellars are useful, of course, especially in a continental climate of hot summers and cold winters; but to keep on digging downwards must have required a huge effort in an age before digging machinery. If they needed more space, why didn’t they just build a bigger house out of town?

The answer is that you had to be in town to benefit from the protection of city walls – and so when there was no more space at the surface, and houses had as many storeys as was feasible back then, the only other way was down.

In the global cities of the 21st century, the Middle Ages are back. Constrained not by city walls, but by property prices and planning restrictions, we’re digging down again.

Further reading

Should the rich be allowed to destroy their own wealth?

By Peter Franklin

In an article for the Guardian, Bradley L Garrett describes the land grab now taking place beneath our feet. Most notoriously, there’s the fashion for basement extensions in the posher part of central London:

“In London, a city with 150 years of trenching, digging and boring to its name, the chaos is reaching new depths. According to Newcastle University’s Global Urban Research Unit, more than 4,600 basements have been granted planning permission in the last decade – in just seven of London’s 32 boroughs…

“…Many of the basements contained cinemas, gymnasiums, pools, wine cellars and panic rooms. One even included plans for a subterranean beach with an accompanying waterfall.”

An especially weird aspect of these subterranean follies is that the diggers used to excavate them are often left behind. Having dug their way down into a confined space, the only way of getting them back up is by lifting them out with a crane – the costs and complications of which can be greater than buying a new digger. Therefore the last thing they do is dig their own graves to one side of the main development. That should be something for the archeologists of the future to puzzle over.

Technology, however, is moving on. Garrett mentions Elon Musk’s Boring Company – whose mission is to use tunnelling machines to create a 3D road network beneath Los Angeles. DARPA, the inventor of the internet, is also on the case:

“…the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) is currently funding a “subterranean challenge”, soliciting bids for techniques to enhance “situational awareness” of global underground spaces, with a $2m prize. The challenge is to create machines that can make their way through tunnel systems, urban undergrounds and natural caves.”

Another initiative worth a mention is the EU’s BADGER programme which aims to develop an autonomous burrowing robot.

If these and other technologies succeed in bringing down the costs of exploring and excavating the ground beneath us, then a new dimension of urban development will open up. We could afford more of what we already construct below ground e.g. road tunnels, car parks, sewers etc; and also some revolutionary applications. How about basement extensions for the masses? Or ubiquitous ducting for public utilities so that the roads never have to be dug up again?

And here’s another one: The reason why it’s so hot on some London underground tube lines is because the energy generated when the trains break has accumulated as heat in the clay surrounding the tunnels. In over a century of operation the ambient temperatures have gone from 14°C to more than 20°C. If we had an affordable and precise way of running a heat exchange network around these tunnels, we could extract the energy and use it to provide heating at the surface. Cool!

Of course, as Garrett points out, we’re going to need 3D maps of our poorly documented sub-cities and we’re going to have to properly sort out who owns what underground.

However, assuming that the technology and the regulation comes together, the space beneath us may turn out to be more significant than the space above us.

Further reading

The false promise of the vertical city

By Peter Franklin

In Boucher’s story, murders are taking place on a mining craft — a Christie-esque setting, claustrophobic, closed-off, so the murderer must be among the assembled and isolated cast, who are being bumped off, one by one. One character, Poul, forced to confront the hitherto literally unimaginable concept — that the for-granted robot crew, which numerically dwarfs the humans on board by orders of magnitude, may contain the culprit — has a complete nervous breakdown.

He suddenly sees the robots, not as an indivisible, near-invisible mass of hidden-in- plain-sight workers, but as… people. Almost-people: Boucher’s robots are humanoid, stylised, calm: they look like ‘us’, but they are (clearly) also not-us. It’s therefore narratively convincing when Poul begins to scream about “the walking dead”, and collapses under the weight of his dread.

That this 1977 masterpiece was for an episode in a Tom Baker season of ‘Doctor Who’ partly explains the programme’s longevity. Every so often it produces drama that qualifies as art: science fiction, on the surface about some silly made-up society a billion light years from Earth and impossibly far in the future, but which yet compels the viewer to re-examine things we take for granted: what does it take to be human? What are the minimal requirements for entry?

Before you scoff at my childhood fondness for a science fiction murder story with ‘impossible’ robots and an invented phobia about them, consider this highly contemporary and entirely non-fictional scientific investigation, by Horstmann and co-workers, into what humans do when confronted with something that, while clearly un-human, exhibits human-style behaviour.

In the experiment, participants were randomised to a set of tasks with an obviously toy robot under a number of different conditions (sometimes the robot was chatty, sometimes formal, that sort of thing). After a lot of deceptive faffing, the participants were asked to switch the machine off. Sometimes the robot would “object” to this (“No! Please do not switch me off! I am scared that it will not brighten up again!”), sometimes it wouldn’t utter a damn thing.

Further reading

Free Minds: Doctor Who, a maverick in time and space

By Graeme Archer

Surprisingly — unless you watched the Robots of Death as a child, when ‘obviously’ would be a fitter adverb — surprisingly/obviously, participants were less likely to switch off the robot if it first objected. It’s enough for a machine to resemble a human being, in cartoon-like fashion, making no pretence at synth-like behaviour beyond having a metal head, a basic face and an electronic voice, for human beings to project human need onto its smoothly impersonal surface. The walking dead they may be: but they’re sufficiently like us to elicit an emotional response. I wonder how the participants felt, the ones who switched off the machine even as it babbled about the dying of the light? A Poul-like sense of dread, would be my bet.

If a robot tells me its feelings are hurt, then I respond accordingly (“Alexa! Do you mind if I switch you off, and talk to Siri instead?”). I anthropomorphise, and ‘see’ the object as sufficiently human to warrant compassion (or terror, once they outnumber us). It’s the act of seeing which imbues an artificial construct with an agency that its base material doesn’t warrant. This must be happening at a limbic level: ironically, conscious awareness of a machine’s lack of consciousness cannot prevent the attribution of consciousness onto its creepy mechanical face (in The Robots of Death, the doctor’s companion calls robots “creepy mechanical men”).

Anyone who’s ever felt a spasm of pity at the ‘plight’ of a stone, picked from a beach, examined carefully, considered for a home decoration but then tossed aside, will understand this, I think. It’s recognition that, however loudly one’s ego insists on one’s uniquely important attributes, from a very small distance one is almost completely non-differentiable from the rest of the human race. We’re all just biological machines, neuronically and neurotically fizzing away, loudly insisting that ‘I’ am so very, very different from ‘you’. While I might be just one pebble among billions, yet I’m still somehow special. And not ‘you’. You are like-me but not-me.

Further reading

Should we care that the sex robots are coming?

By Kate Devlin

The miracle of humanity isn’t that we’re alive, move around, copulate and die: the miracle is that we can perceive the tiny differences between ourselves at all, when we’re biologically and aesthetically and psychologically so entirely similar: I expect when the Martian finally arrives it’ll struggle to tell us apart.

It’s in those tiny differences that love must exist: else why have the emotion at all? (Why choose one rock over another?) All that laser-like energy required in order to see the other: it has to go somewhere; it’s the most powerful force in existence. And thus the problem we’re going to have with robots, the ones that are like-us but not-us: we won’t be able to choose how we see them either.

In Dan Mangan’s 2010 song Robots, a spurned lover likens himself and his former bed-partner to automata (“Your robot heart is bleeding out” — more shades of Poul’s hysteria). Indeed, the singer seems to suggest that being “robot boy” is the best defence against pain. But this doesn’t work, and “that little voice in the back of your mind” eventually admits that “Robots need love too. They want to be loved by you. They want to be loved by you.”

The song makes me cry, every time I hear it. Like I’m pre-programmed – like I have no conscious choice in the matter. The fear of lovelessness isn’t “a flaw in the design”, as Mr Mangan wonders, it’s part of being human. I’m so worried that the light won’t come back. Robotically — without volition —  I make myself ready for love.

And since we’re building this new breed of intelligent robots in our own image, what do you expect they’ll sing when we switch them on, and how do you think you’ll react to their song? The robotic laws of life, of ‘seeing’, won’t care whether the object of your gaze is fashioned from flesh, or metal. We’re human, which means, I’m afraid, that we’ll want to be loved by them. Just like the robots we are.

It is true that the British Industrial Revolution, which spanned much of the 18^th and early 19^th centuries, led to more jobs, better jobs, and ultimately the huge increases in wealth and comfort that frame modern life. “Prior to 1750, per capita incomes in the world doubled every 6,000 years; thereafter, it has taken some 50 years.”[1. Carl Benedikt Frey et al., in Oxford Review of Economic Policy, 2 July 2018]

But researchers have been looking in more detail at the costs involved in this huge jump in prosperity, at what effect the new machines had on the working population. They have unearthed disturbing facts that we need to remember as we face fresh changes ahead.

We tend to think of automation as using machines to do routine work. But at the core of the Industrial Revolution was the opposite. The heart of Britain’s hugely successful textile industry was the “domestic system” – skilled craftsmen working their looms at home. The new machines took this work into factories, and made it simpler. So unskilled operators could now provide most of the labour.

One effect of this was a big increase in child labour; the machines were designed so they could be operated by children, and they made up around half the factory hands. Having lost their skilled work, the craftsmen now faced fresh competition for the new, lower-paid, machine-based jobs.

This led to the most startling effect of all: an astonishing increase in the number of unskilled labourers. As pointed out in a recent speech to the Trades Union Congress by Andy Haldane, chief economist of the Bank of England, between 1700 and 1850 the proportion of unskilled workers in the British labour force actually doubled, from 20% to 40%. Of course, many of these workers did have skills, but they were skills no longer in demand in the economy. To find work they had to compete with farm labourers and others for unskilled jobs. It was, literally, generations before the situation turned around.

Oxford economist Carl Benedikt Frey sums up the research:

“Technological progress has created prosperity for mankind at large, yet it has always created winners and losers in the labour market. During the days of the British Industrial Revolution a sizeable share of the workforce was left worse off by almost any measure as it lost its jobs to technology.”

“During the first six decades of the Industrial Revolution, ordinary Englishmen did not see any of the benefits of mechanization: as output expanded, real wages stagnated, leading to a sharp decline in the share of national income accruing to labour.”[2. Oxford Review of Economic Policy]

To be more specific, the academics found that, according to best estimates, while output per worker increased by 46%, real wages rose by just 14%. But as working hours also increased by 20%, hourly wages actually declined in real terms.

Further reading

The full effects of automation will be way more disruptive than globalisation

By Peter Franklin

No wonder the Luddites resisted the new technology – weaving machinery introduced in the textile industry – which threatened their livelihoods. There had been machine-breaking before, and petitions, and demonstrations. But the Luddites took protest to a new level. Their efforts were short-lived. The government in London sent the army north in 1813 to quell the revolt, and soon after, 24 ring-leaders were swinging from public gallows and dozens more transported to Australia.[3. It was rough justice. Here is an affecting account of the hanging of 14 of them, based on local newspaper reports. The men sang a hymn as they walked to the scaffold. Between them, they left 57 fatherless children.]

David Ricardo, the nation’s most famous economist after Adam Smith, is credited with developing the theory of comparative advantage which is the basis of globalisation. Ricardo lived through the Industrial Revolution, could see what was going to happen and agreed in principle with the Luddites: “I am convinced, that the substitution of machinery for human labour, is often very injurious to the interests of the class of labourers”, though he considered it pointless for the government to oppose new technology, since “it will be done abroad” anyway.

Introducing the technology was therefore the lesser of two evils: “By investing part of a capital in improved machinery,” he wrote, “there will be a diminution in the progressive demand for labour; by exporting it to another country, the demand will be wholly annihilated.”

As we look ahead in the 21^st century, economists have labeled the coming changes, powered by AI and robotics, as the “Second Machine Age” (two MIT economists) or the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” (World Economic Forum). If we are on the cusp of a “revolution” that parallels the original Industrial Revolution in impact and scope, its implications for labour markets could indeed be catastrophic.

Automation then becomes a major political challenge. Because one big difference between then and now is that in the days of the Luddites, the workers did not have the vote. Economic deprivation is a potent driver of the rise of populism in contemporary politics, especially in the United States, as my UnHerd colleague Henry Olsen has been explaining. Most of those who have lost out blame bad trade deals, off-shoring, and the immigration of cheap labour. If their resentments begin to focus on technology, a fresh Luddism would be a potent force.

We should heed these sobering words from Frey: “Although the Industrial Revolution began with the arrival of the factory, it ended not just with the construction of the railroads but also the publication of the Communist Manifesto.”

Further reading

Why aren't we more worried about the new slave economy?

By Nigel Cameron

But a lot can happen in two years. A report just published by PriceWaterhouseCoopers should go some way to calming such hysteria. It argues that AI will create slightly more jobs in the UK (7.2 million) than it displaces (7 million). So rather than lamenting an apocalyptic tomorrow in which we are ruled by our robot overlords, a more useful way to think about the future would be to consider how we can interlace the strengths of machines with those of humans.

John Giannandrea who left his role as Senior Vice President of Engineering at Google, to head up AI at Apple, is already doing so. “There’s just a huge amount of unwarranted hype around it right now,” he says, “[much of which is] borderline irresponsible.” We shouldn’t be using it to match or replace humans, but to make “machines slightly more intelligent — or slightly less dumb”. He isn’t dismissing the potential of computers to radically alter the way we work, but is thinking about the ways it will do so in a slightly more nuanced fashion.

He knows that the better we understand the differences between the way people think and the way in which machines calculate, the better we can assess how to work with them. For example, unlike machines, humans typically lean on a variety of mental rules of thumb that yield narratively plausible, but often logically dubious, judgments. The psychologist and Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman calls the human mind “a machine for jumping to conclusions”.

Machines using deep-learning algorithms, in contrast, must be trained with thousands of photographs to recognise kittens— and even then, they will have formed no conceptual understanding of cats. Small children can easily learn what a kitten is from just a few examples. Not so machines. They don’t think like humans and they can only apply their ‘thinking’ to narrow fields. They cannot, therefore, associate pictures of cats with stories about cats.

But, counterintuitively perhaps, the tasks humans find hard, machines often find easy. Cognitive scientist Alison Gopnik summarises what is known as Moravec’s Paradox: “At first, we thought that the quintessential preoccupations of the officially smart few, like playing chess or proving theorems — the corridas of nerd machismo — would prove to be hardest for computers.”

Further reading

Robots will take many of today's jobs and tomorrow's jobs? They'll be dominated by women

By Nigel Cameron

But as we have discovered, this isn’t true. Computers do these terrifically complicated things effortlessly. As  Gopniks says: “It turns out to be much easier to simulate the reasoning of a highly trained adult expert than to mimic the ordinary learning of every baby.”

We are bound to learn more as we work out how our strengths can work in concert. Humans, for example, will employ inspiration, judgments, sense and empathy; computers will bring brawn, repetition, rules adherence, data recall and analysis.

The psychologist and computer scientist JCR “Lick” Licklider, mentor to John McCarthy who coined the term Artificial Intelligence in 1955, predicted this future harmony in 1960. Rather than speculate on computers achieving human-style intelligence, Licklider argued with remarkable prescience that humans and computers would develop a symbiotic relationship, the strengths of one would counterbalance the limitations of the other.

Lick said:

“Men will set the goals, formulate the hypotheses, determine the criteria, and perform the evaluations. Computing machines will do the routinisable work that must be done to prepare the way for insights and decisions in technical and scientific thinking. … the resulting partnership will think as no human brain has ever thought and process data in a way not approached by the information-handling machines we know today.”

It’s a far more productive guide to the future than alarmist preditions of ‘super-intelligent’ AI. The advent of AI is simply the latest in many phases of automation, each of which has begun with fear and ended with more jobs, economic growth and prosperity. Indeed, the history of automation since the industrial revolution shows us that the introduction of machines reshapes jobs, rather than replacing them. They take on the mundane tasks, as humans move on to more complex – often more highly valued and meaningful – work. New technology tend to eliminate tasks, not work.

The goal now is subtly shifting from building machines that think like humans, to designing machines that help humans think and perform better. Most work, after all, is comprised of a mix of tasks: some of which are better suited to humans and some of which could one day be done better by machines.

As the capabilities of machines grow, managers will redesign work to take advantage of the strengths of both their human workers and their machines. Last month, Nestlé announced a new automated plant in the Midlands in which German logistics giant DHL will be installing collaborative robots, or “co-bots”, that will work alongside humans to pack goods.

While on one level, AI is but the latest phase of a centuries-old process of automating human labour, on another, this new breed of machines can sense, learn and adapt in ways that far surpass previous technologies. And as a result, it will ask new questions about human exceptionalism and how work is best done.

Let’s not forget that the heavily automated production of the Model 3 Tesla ran quickly into delays prompting Elon Musk to make an interesting volte-face. “Excessive automation at Tesla was a mistake,”he wrote in April this year. “To be precise, my mistake. Humans are underrated.”

***

Five ways humans are collaborating with intelligent machines

1. Assigned work 

Certain tasks in a human workflow are outsourced to a machine. The machine completes the task unaided, with varying levels of instruction.

• Industrial robots welding and spray painting car parts on a production line, while human workers perform other tasks like fitting the IP panels and custom parts. Industrial robots labouring 24/7 in ‘dark factories’
• Autonomous vehicles in fully autonomous mode on a motorway

2. Supervised 

Decision making processes are automated, but under a human eye. This mode requires the machine to be aware of and communicate risks and unknowns to human users.

•  Airline flights in which the pilot intervenes only in certain circumstances
•  Autonomous vehicles, which require ‘driver’ oversight.

3. Coexistent 

We will increasingly live and work alongside intelligent machines, sharing the same spaces, but focusing on separate task-flows. Machines in these scenarios must be able to effectively negotiate shared space and anticipate human intent.

• Pedestrians sharing paths with delivery robots
• Warehouse staff working in parallel with and alongside robots

4. Assistive 

Machines that will help us perform tasks faster and better. They support particular tasks in human workflows, and will excel in on discerning human goals and learning their preferences.

• Writing assistants that suggest words and how to improve text
• Exoskeletons assisting factory workers in strenuous work

5. Symbiotic

This emerging mode of collaboration is a highly interactive and reciprocal. People input strategic hypotheses and the machine suggests tactical options.

•  Chess teams comprised of humans and computers, which beat the best computer-only systems
• Adobe Sensei which automates tedious design processes, and generates options, giving the designer more time for creative tasks

For the past four years, I’ve been keeping a careful eye on the sex robot market, researching the technical, ethical and legal landscape these artificial lovers inhabit. The concept is catnip to tabloid journalists seeking salacious and ultimately scary visions of sex robots that could herald the end of sex and replace and/or steal your women. The reality is more staid and nuanced.

Arguments against sexual companion robots hinge on the worry that sex robot-human relationships will be detrimental to society, damaging human-human relationships. There is also concern they will reinforce or reproduce existing inequalities, especially given their incredibly gendered appearance. Will our sex robots spill our data and our secrets to the world? And what happens, people ask, if child sex robots are manufactured?

These are all valid points and there are no easy answers. While we should be conscious of the potential pitfalls of sex technology, we also need to avoid moralistic knee-jerk responses. Stigmatisation and taboo around sex and sexual practices has caused untold misery for many people down the centuries.

There’s no evidence to suggest that human-human relationships will be damaged. Indeed, it may be a chance for people to experience feelings of love that they are otherwise denied, for any number of reasons. Whether or not that love is considered valid by society is a different matter. And while objectification is definitely an issue, it may be an avoidable one. Security and privacy breaches are a worry in any smart technologies, which puts a whole new spin on safe sex.

Suggested reading

Robots will take many of today's jobs and tomorrow's jobs? They'll be dominated by women

By Nigel Cameron

As for child sex robots – an abhorrent image – people have already been convicted for importing child-like sex dolls. But we shouldn’t shy from considering whether research might deem them useful in a clinical setting, such as testing rehabilitation success, as has been trialled with virtual reality.

While non-sexual care robots are already in use, [1. Companion robots have proved a great success helping with healthcare and providing therapeutic companionship. Manufacturers are well aware that people might turn to their creations for services that could void the warranty. In fact, Pepper, a companion robot built in collaboration between Aldebaran Robotics and the SoftBank Corporation, comes with terms and conditions that forbid the use of it for “the purpose of sexual or indecent behaviour”] it was only three months ago, that the race to produce the first commercially-available model was won by an lifeless sex doll with an animatronic head and an integrated AI chatbot called Harmony.[2. Abyss Creations is developing a male robot called Henry — but that’s a much smaller part of their business.] She might look the part but she doesn’t move from the neck down. We are still a long way from Westworld.

Naturally, a niche market will be delighted at the prospect of bespoke robot pleasure to come. But many others are worried about the impact these machines will have on our own, human relationships. These concerns aren’t dispelled by the fact that the current form of the sex robot is a reductive, cartoonish stereotype of a woman: all big hair and bigger breasts.

Why, though, does a sex robot need to be an exaggerated version of the human bodies we are so familiar with? The technology is giving us the scope to bring intimacy into the lives of people who may lack it, or to enhance existing relationships, and I don’t believe that our sex robots have to take humanoid form. In fact, I think it’s much better if they don’t.

In 2016 and 2017, I ran sex tech hackathons at Goldsmiths, University of London, where over 50 people from all walks of life formed teams to prototype new forms of technology for intimacy. The ideas that the teams came up with were far more interesting and abstract than a life-size doll.

Instead, they envisaged blankets with sensors to stimulate you, and inflatable tubes to hug, pulse and hold you; tentacle-like soft robotics that could curl around the body, and vibrators powered by mid—air hand gestures. The emphasis shifted from sexual activity to sensuality. The technology they envisaged wasn’t just to replace human lovers but to bring people closer together.

The people who currently buy sex dolls – the people who are most likely going to buy sex robots – often cite companionship as their reason for doing so. Matt McMullen from Abyss Creations, describes his customers as “a group of really nice people who just happen, by choice or not by choice, to have difficulty in forming relationships”. It’s the AI that will make the big difference in his dolls, adding the longed-for animism. Harmony’s AI is designed to exist outside of the body too, as an app on your phone or tablet: the perfect pocket girlfriend.

So sex robots don’t need to look like us, nor do they necessarily need to be designed to have sex. The rise of voice assistants like Siri and Alexa has brought basic forms of AI into our homes like never before. And you won’t be surprised to know that lots of people try to talk dirty to their artificial helpers. Some are just testing the boundaries, but others are secretly hoping for a hot reply. Perhaps they took Joaquin Phoenix falling in love with an operating system in Spike Jonze’s 2013 film /Her/, a little too seriously.

That instinct to see more personality — and even sexuality — in our robot partners is pretty understandable. We humans are social creatures with an in-built tendency to anthropomorphise, projecting our own traits onto the plastic lump or genderless helper bot working with us, presuming a personality even if one hasn’t been programmed into it. We will map our expectations onto the technology, just as we see elaborate personalities in our pets.

There’s a safety in the artificial lover: a programmable partner who is always there for you and who will never let you down. The path of human love never did run smooth but the programme of a sex robot can run entirely to your liking. It’s a difficult tension – the appeal of artificial adoration but the natural human fear of technological change.

If we are happy using machines to offer companionship to older people and to improve care in hospitals, then it seems contradictory to not allow it in to our own bedrooms. There are already some incredibly inventive designs on the market taking their cue from the health industry which are indicating where technology can go in the future — machines that can learn what we want and respond accordingly; robots that don’t look like us but know what we like. That’s why the notion of humanoid sex robots replacing sex workers or destroying marriages is far fetched – not least because it’s so difficult to make a robot look, sound and act convincingly human.

It’s all too easy when talking about sex and technology to become entirely obsessed with the pure mechanics of the process. But there’s more to it than that. This technology can reduce distance between lovers and enhance what our bodies and even our brains can do in intimate encounters. Rather than thinking of machines as other, we should be considering how best to integrate them into our lives: enhancements, not replacements.

Most people aren’t that shocked by someone owning a vibrator anymore. Introducing greater levels of technology into our sex lives will be the same. As long as we’re careful to consider the ethical development of these innovations, we have nothing to lose except our inhibitions.

The robot that performed this stunt was the called the Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot (STAR). It wasn’t a humanoid robot like we’re used to in seeing on screen. Instead, it was a one-arm machine that looked as though it belonged on the factory floor of BMW.

Nor was it completely autonomous. Using a near-infrared camera, the robot followed tiny marks that the researchers had placed on the tissue beforehand. A human was also needed to vacuum away the vapours from burning fat and tissue.

In 2016, the robot performed a similar stunt when it sewed together two segments of pig intestine with stitches that were more regular and leak-resistant than those of experienced surgeons.

For some – the surgeons themselves, perhaps; and those who harbour worrries about robot overlords – it is the stuff of nightmares. But to its creators, it is the future of surgery.

The heroic age of the surgeon, they believe, is coming to an end for the same reasons the age of the pilot and driver did. Robot surgery offers patients more precise and less invasive keyhole surgery than they get from a human with a scalpel, gown and mask. In time, whole new operations may become possible.

More precise surgery means faster operations, quicker recovery times and less chance of secondary infection – of vital importance with an ageing population and the spread of antibiotic-resistant infections. It is predicted that in some countries, 40% of the population may be over 65 by the middle of the century. And deaths from these opportunistic infections could amount to 50 million a year globally by 2050. The robots could save them.

Robotic surgery would also mean busier operating theatres and patients spending less time in hospital beds afterwards. It would make recruitment easier, when the predicted shortage of 100,000 doctors in the USA becomes a reality.

Once humans got over the fear factor, it would also mean fewer mistakes on the operating table. The researchers behind STAR believe that the autonomous features of their robot will develop in a similar way to the autonomous features that are now common on cars. Forward collision avoidance and lane detection were once novel features: now they are standard in the family car.

Likewise, they believe that robots like STAR will slowly take over specific functions from human surgeons until they eventually morph into fully autonomous surgical robots.

Well – that is what the engineers hope. Medicine is a notoriously conservative field. Worries over the safety of the hardware and unforeseen side effects of the surgery have a tendency to reduce innovation to a crawl. This in turn can eliminate competition and drive up prices.

For now, the dominant robot machine on the market is one that was approved 18 years ago, called da Vinci and made by Intuitive Surgical. It is probably better described as a robotic assistant as it is directed by the surgeon.

The surgeon controls the robot’s four arms via a 3D HD screen on a console, allowing her to operate with joysticksand a pedal; computers translate her movements into precisemovements of the robot’s micro-tools, offering greater precision than the human hand. The da Vinci has no autonomous features at all.

Nor are there many of them in existence. For pretty obvious reasons. Each costs an eye-watering $2m to buy and is large enough to fill a standard-sized room – permanently. Furthermore, the yearly maintenance charge can be close to $200,000.  This is the robot for the 1%.

Happily, many of the over 650 patents that protect the technology of the da Vinci have recently expired or are due to expire soon, which should mean that cheaper generic copies will arrive at a hospital near you soon.

These copies won’t be the only new arrivals. We can expect quite a crowd of robotic assistants in the near future, given the size of the potential market that was last year valued at $3,000 million. In six years’ time, it is expected to be worth a whopping $11,000m.

Rushing in is CMR Surgical a British start-up keen to get in on the act. It has launched a robotic assistant called Versius, which has a set of independent, human-looking arms. Unlike the da Vinci, they are light enough to move from theatre to theatre. And they are much cheaper too. The Italian start-up Medical Microinstruments (MMI) has designed a robot intended for reconstructive microsurgery delicate enough to be used on babies. And Auris Health, from its patents, seems to have big ambitions to use to robotics to transform surgery. In all cases, this is man and machine in perfect harmony.

But there is a move to reduce human input behind all this. And, naturally, Google is already in on the act. Johnson & Johnson has teamed up with Google’s life-sciences division, Verily, to form Verb Surgical.Verb is developing a connected digital surgery platform that will incorporate robotics, visualisation, advanced instrumentation and machine learning. STAR’s developers, too, are pushing to make the robot fully autonomous.

It is difficult to imagine medical regulators agreeing to the kind of testing in surgery that has driven experimental self-driving vehicles on to our city streets, yet this would be the necessary step to accelerate the development of such a revolutionary technology.

As prices tumble, more companies enter the market and innovation increases, it’s clear that surgical robots now have the capability to revolutionise surgery for the 99%. But the question remains whether the regulators will let them.

The theory seems simple enough: each nation should focus on the things it does best, and trade for everything else. It’s attributed to 19th century English economist David Ricardo, since when it has been the basic idea behind “free trade”.[1.  Simple on the surface, comparative advantage is a bit more complex than it seems as it’s not about absolute advantage (A just makes things cheaper than B) but opportunity cost. Also, some writers now attribute the theory not to Ricardo but to James Mill. But Ricardo’s memorable example stands: Portugal should focus on making wine, and Britain on cloth.]

China’s big comparative advantage has been cheap labour, and as a result it’s yanked great swathes of manufacturing out of the US economy. Retail behemoth Walmart, for example, works with 5,000 different Chinese suppliers. That’s a lot of stuff American workers aren’t making any more. On the other hand, that’s a lot of stuff American workers can buy very cheaply.

Recommended listening

Taking on China: how the West can save free trade

By Juliet Samuel

Yet this worry has a very 20^th century feel. We should, instead, be looking ahead. For the problem isn’t going to be cheap human labour – it’s going to be nearly-free machine labour. We should be far more concerned about what Norbert Wiener, the “father of cybernetics” called the emergence of a new slave economy.

The conventional wisdom, of course, is that automation is always good for us. It won’t eat our jobs. Like the first Industrial Revolution, every tech disruption since has led to more and better jobs. Some of us have been challenging this view for years, and either been ignored or told not to rock the innovation boat. Make what you will of his politics, Jeremy Corbyn is so far the only political leader in the west to have noted this challenge in a major speech.

In any event, the widely-held view of the first Industrial Revolution is simplistic. Andy Haldane, chief economist of the Bank of England, recently made that clear. It did huge damage done to skilled labour markets that lasted a generation and more.

And Ricardo himself, who was living through the dramatic changes, had more than a little sympathy for the Luddites.[2. The original Luddites were worried about their jobs, and took the law into their own hands – with an occasional riot and many incidents of what was called “machine-breaking”. The government sent in the army. Hangings followed. Things calmed down.] But, believer that he was in comparative advantage, he wrote that if Britain didn’t employ these new technologies other nations would anyway.

Back to the future, in a 2013 report by two Oxford economists, they analyse the susceptibility of 702 different jobs being done by machines. The report concluded that the job most likely to disappear to machines was telemarketing. It struck me when I read the report that that calls from robotic, metallic, voices delivering potted sales pitches would be easy to hang up on. How could a computer programme really “sell”?

Well, Google has just proved once and for all that telemarketers are history. Every single one of them, worldwide. And also everyone else who earns a living talking on the phone. Listen to these sample calls, as a robot makes a hair appointment and books a table for dinner and see if you can tell which of the speakers is a machine. The impact is stunning.

More by Nigel Cameron

Mission to make money: a new space race is taking off

By Nigel Cameron

And so here we are again, on the cusp of an automation revolution in which what economists politely call “technological unemployment” is going to be a major challenge.

In one of the most ridiculous public statements ever, US Treasury Secretary Stephen Mnuchin blithely assured the American public that not only are their jobs safe from automation, but the issue is “not even on our radar screen”. Any such effects are “50 to 100 more years” away.

As an American President keeps faith with his voters by starting a global trade war, we can only imagine what’s in store once he (and they) work out where the real threat to fly-over country jobs lies.

It’s an issue that we’ve covered extensively on UnHerd – for instance, here and here. Indeed, our technology editor Nigel Cameron has written a whole book about it. But is there anything you can do to prepare for the impending jobocalypse?

Obviously, you need to develop skills and specialisms that are likely to stay in demand, but which can’t, or won’t, ever be automated. The difficult part, of course, is trying to predict which skills, which specialisms.

In a fascinating piece for the Boston Globe, Alan Wirzbicki indirectly provides us with some valuable clues. I say indirectly, because his essay isn’t about how to survive new technologies, but rather how to save old ones.

His first example is the 70-millimeter film format:

“Lauded for its crisper colors, deeper blacks, and higher-resolution images, fans see 70-millimeter as the highest expression of Hollywood artistry. The format was popularized in the 1950s to showcase movies’ technical superiority over television, and reserved for major productions like ‘Ben-Hur’ and ‘Lawrence of Arabia.’ But today, with Hollywood’s near-total shift to digital projection, the format faces an uncertain future — and is only held together, as a labor of love, by the efforts of a passionate community of movie fans.”

The onward march of technology means that older technologies and the skills required to use them can be lost. Wirzbicki makes the insightful point that “it’s the most recently developed skills that may be the most vulnerable to disappearing forever.” That’s because compared to, say, traditional crafts, newly obsolete tech may be too complex for enthusiasts to keep going.

For instance, to ensure that future generations can enjoy 70-millimeter films, all of the following would have to happen:

“Kodak would need to keep producing film; the sole remaining 70-millimeter lab would have to maintain the ability to produce and distribute new prints; theaters would have to spend years training new projectionists; companies would need to pass down an understanding of how to make obsolete parts for which the original designs may have disappeared.”

In Wirzbicki describes this as “an entire ecosystem of specialized crafts and esoteric skills” – and if any of the components is lost then the whole thing collapses.

Another example is the building and repair of traditional pipe organs. Again, there are digital alternatives, but these can only approximate the depth of experience provided by the original. Fortunately, the ‘ecosytem’ required to keep this technology alive appears to be well established:

“C.B. Fisk, a Gloucester organ builder that makes traditional instruments and has steady demand from universities and religious institutions… the firm offers an apprentice program, which attracts applicants worldwide. ‘There aren’t any schools for organ building in the United States, so the shop has always functioned as one.’”

There is a lesson here for all of us. I’m not suggesting that we all retrain as projectionists and organ builders. Rather we should think about the jobs we do now and what would be lost if they were done by an automated system. Would your electronic replacement be the equivalent of a digital pipe organ or an automated teller machine? Would something of enduring value disappear from our culture or would it just be a case of mechanising a necessary, but ultimately boring, economic function? If whatever spark of God-given creativity you bring your job were to be extinguished, would the loss be outweighed by the ability of a robot to perform the task ten times faster and at a tenth of the cost?

In a world where most goods and services become increasingly abundant as a result of automation, the ability to add to the human experience in an irreplaceable and enriching manner will become evermore valuable.

At the back of that, there’s an insidious, creeping uniformity in how we think – both about technology and about what it means to us. The startlingly candid motto of the 1933 World’s Fair in Chicago, one of the 20^th century’s great expositions of human achievement, sums it up. ‘Science Finds, Industry Applies, Man Conforms.'[1.  The World’s Fair: Ron Grossman, May 26, 2013] Is this really what’s going on? First the lab makes the discovery; then the corporation comes up with the product; and then ‘man’ – all of us – do our duty and ‘conform’ by buying the product. If this seems like an exaggeration, just remember that there are now two billion people using Facebook at least once a month. That’s a number more than six times the population of the United States; 30 times that of the UK. It’s close to half the adults on the planet outside China (where it’s banned).[2.  Report from Anita Balakrishnan, June 27, 2017]

Conformity?

The vision set out in the World’s Fair motto is, frankly, chilling. And the tendency of the digital revolution to encourage conformity, not least through the growth of vast corporations with a narrow product focus and enormous – sometimes monopolistic – profitability, both captures the World’s Fair vision and actually makes it creepier. Because the two billion who are ‘conforming’ to the Facebook product would never dream of thinking of themselves as naïve conformists. They are making personal choices, and they have chosen the product because they like it. Just as they do when they check their mobile phones during family dinners, or business meetings, or first dates.

Though it’s worth noting that since they don’t pay cash to get it, few Facebook users think of it in quite those terms. The largely invisible barter system by which they trade data for service makes everyone’s thinking a little foggy.

Machines ‘r’ us?

Behind our consumer engagement with digital technology another debate is in progress. It’s many years since inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil came up with his model of the ‘singularity’ – that future point when machines become smarter than we are and rapidly ascend an exponential curve of smartness that will leave us humans in the dust. Kurzweil has proposed various dates for this extraordinary event, though 2045 is the most recent.[3.  Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near. When Humans Transcend Biology New York: Viking Books, 2005]

More important than his prediction, though, lies the fundamental idea that machine intelligence is superior to human intelligence, and that humans should be looking forward to living digital lives. Years back the term ‘wetware’ was coined to describe brain matter – by analogy with software and hardware. Of course, as we know, the human brain is not only smart, it is extraordinarily complicated. But machines have beaten us at chess, and at the even more complex game Go. Should we accept the superiority of the machine and aspire to a digital future? Or, to rephrase that, while the machine is plainly better at some things than we are (that’s why we have machines, from the adze and the plough onwards!), does this mean that we should all aspire to be like machines?

When we are looking at our digital devices, it may be helpful to think adze. Obviously, machines are better at doing what they do than a human would be. But can a machine be better than we are at what we do as a whole? Can they be better humans than we are?

That is a very different question, and it’s one that people taking Kurzweil’s view can answer only by defining what we humans do – defining it down – in machine terms. For example, of course machines can have sex with humans (and indeed with each other, which is maybe an even weirder idea), but can they in any sense make love? This approach is in logical terms called a petitio principii – an argument that assumes its conclusion from the start. If we abstract the things that humans do in machine-like terms, it should scarcely surprise us that machines can do what we do. Whether they can be entranced by the beauty of a sunset, enjoy a children’s birthday party, or read Keats and weep is a different question altogether. And while, per Moore’s Law, circuits certainly keep being crammed onto chips and quantum computing suggests that even as cramming becomes impossible ramping up machine intelligence won’t, not everyone agrees that replicating the complexity of the human brain equals producing people.[4.  On Moore’s Law see here. Quantum computing: Abigail Beall, March 23, 2017, summarizes the latest in Wired Magazine.]

The Question of Us

As technology continues to explode around us there’s no more significant question to address than this one: Can we develop and manage our technologies in a manner that will enable and enhance our capacity to live human lives? Behind that, can we think about them in a manner that will keep the human vision – of a human community sustained and empowered by the latest adzes and ploughs – at the forefront? Or is it inevitable that our human story will ultimately be superseded by the story of machines that are ever smarter and faster?

It’s plain that there’s no value in a return to ‘Luddism’. But while progress may be inevitable, what we make of it – in our personal lives and our families and our businesses and our communities and on our planet – is up to us. Does the future offer us privacy – and do we care? Will these vast new technologies drive wealth for all or exacerbate inequity and division? Do we all need to train in STEM or do we suspect that the future will hold a new golden age for the humanities (the stuff that machines will find it hardest to do)? In other words, are we up for a long campaign for a human future?

READ MORE

Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near. When Humans Transcend Biology (New York: Viking Books, 2005) offers a substantial manifesto for his thesis that Moore’s Law will lead to a machine takeover.

Here’s a critique from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen in MIT Technology Review.

And a summary of criticisms in tech online newspaper Pando Daily.

Or is it?

In a long-read for the New Yorker, Sheelah Kolhatkar reports from a factory that’s is in the process of automating its operations:

“Until last year, the plant workers had to consult a long list of steps, taking pains to remove the correct parts out of a cart filled with variously sized bolts and screws and pins and to insert each one in the correct hole and in the correct order. Now computerized workstations, called ‘vision tables,’ dictate, step by step, how workers are to assemble a piece of furniture. The process is virtually mistake-proof: the system won’t let the workers proceed if a step isn’t completed correctly.”

In other words, automated systems are doing the skilled part of the job, while human workers are relegated to the most junior roles:

“A decade ago, industrial robots assisted workers in their tasks. Now workers—those who remain—assist the robots in theirs.”

Kolhatkar reveals that there’s a rather nasty name for such workers:

“…some call them ‘meat robots’”

Meat robots. Let that sink in for a while.

Alexander Pope said that a little learning is a dangerous thing. The same could be said about skills in the workplace. While a job requiring no skills is generally the easiest to automate, it is also the cheapest to use human labour on. If you can automate a more highly-skilled – and, therefore, more highly-paid – job, then the savings are correspondingly high.

Thus, for any given range of robotic ability, one should expect the best jobs to go first – leaving humans to fight for what’s left.

In industries where automation is already well-established, the impact on blue collar workers is as one might expect:

“In a paper from earlier this year, the economists Daron Acemoglu, of M.I.T., and Pascual Restrepo, of Boston University, studied local job markets in the United States between 1990 and 2007, and they found that the concentration of industrial robots in an area was directly related to a decline in jobs and in pay. Technology can compound the effects of globalization. By one measure, the average manufacturing worker in the United States earned nine per cent less in 2015 than the average worker in 1973, while the economy over all grew by two hundred percent.”

Populists of both left and right offer simplistic solutions – i.e. stronger unions, controls on migrant labour and import barriers. But none of these remedies will work, not in the long-term. Even if such policies did succeed in driving up wages (a big if), they would, by the same token, drive up the incentive to automate the associated jobs.

The same Catch-22 applies to the sensible centrist solution, which is to provide more training. Unless ‘up-skilling’ can lift people clear of what robots are likely to be capable of in the next couple of decades, then it will make their jobs more not less susceptible to automation.

So should we just prepare people for life as a ‘meat robot’? No, because not even that offers job security. Researchers are constantly pushing at the limits of what robots can usefully do:

“The word ‘manipulate’ comes up often among roboticists. Even in highly automated factories, jobs that involve packing boxes or putting tiny parts together are done by people. The most agile robot, confronted with an object that it’s never seen before, can pick it up only ninety per cent of the time, which isn’t good enough for industrial purposes.

“Solving this problem—teaching a machine to handle a random assortment of irregularly shaped objects—would have an immense impact…”

They haven’t cracked it yet, but they’re getting there. Once they do, the all-robot production line will become the norm. One of Sheelah Kolhatkar’s interviewees calls this stage of development the ‘dark factory’ because robots, with the right sensors, can operate without illumination.

Could the last human to leave please switch off the lights?

Every time someone raises the question of tomorrow’s jobs, the answer seems obvious. The T-word. They will be tech-focused. So let’s get people prepared. In the words of the UK government’s education department, “If we want the UK to remain a world leader in research and technology we will need a future generation that is passionate about, and skilled in, science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM).”[1.   https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/2010-to-2015-government-policy-public-understanding-of-science-and-engineering/2010-to-2015-government-policy-public-understanding-of-science-and-engineering]

Like other fashionable assertions that seem obviously true, this one depends on a series of assumptions that are actually open to question. It’s surprising how little critical assessment there is of the STEM mantra, and the fallacy behind it.

When one of the witnesses at the UK’s House of Lords recent committee inquiring into Artificial Intelligence dared to raise a question about STEM, it was noticed. In Computer Weekly’s report on the hearing, Andrew Orlowski, who edits the tech site The Register, stood out:

“In a rare demurral from the conventional stress on science, technology, engineering and mathematics (Stem) education among technology commentators, he said: ‘Kids are taught algorithms every week now, but hardly taught music or history at all.’ ”[2.  Brian McKenna, in Computer Weekly for October 11, 2017: “House of Lords committee hosts clash between AI enthusiasts and sceptics.” https://www.computerweekly.com/news/450428020/House-of-Lords-committee-hosts-clash-between-AI-enthusiasts-and-sceptics. Examples of the STEM push: In the United States, the STEM Coalition: https://www.stemedcoalition.org/about-us/our-purpose/ . In the UK: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/2010-to-2015-government-policy-public-understanding-of-science-and-engineering/2010-to-2015-government-policy-public-understanding-of-science-and-engineering]

Tech future, human jobs

There’s no doubt that many of tomorrow’s jobs will involve technology. But what if jobs with a high level of technology in them prove to be just the kind of jobs most likely to disappear? Won’t they be the ones most susceptible to computerisation?

Which jobs are most likely to survive is an urgent and complex question. One of the unfortunate effects of the STEM fetish has been to douse that debate. Whether we are looking to re-train ourselves, advise children and grandchildren, or re-shape our vast systems of public education, we need a smarter and wider-ranging discussion of future jobs than “more STEM because more tech”.

Because there’s a good argument that the key feature of the jobs that will survive (and new ones that will emerge) is precisely the opposite. Not the jobs with a high “tech quotient” but those with a high “human quotient”.

Looking ahead, we don’t know if the total number of jobs will actually go down as robots take over many traditionally human functions, or if people will merely shift into new kinds of jobs.  Either way, there will be serious turbulence in labour markets. It plainly makes no sense to prepare people to do jobs that have no future.

Of course, there are currently shortages of skilled candidates for various tech-focused jobs (from computer programming to welding). We need to prepare people to do them. And in the long term, assuming the robots haven’t completely taken over, there will always be a need for extremely smart people at the top of the tech tree. The question I’m asking here is about the kind of work more average workers will do, and how we should be preparing average students for the jobs they will be doing in 10 and 20 years’ time.

This baseline report on the likely future of jobs[3.  Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne, “The Future of Employment. How Susceptible are Jobs to Computerisation?” September 17, 2013. Oxford Martin School. https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/academic/The_Future_of_Employment.pdf] from Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute is distinguished by its painstaking analysis. Its authors review every single job category there is. They start with the US Department of Labor job classification list, which runs to over 900 separate kinds of jobs. Then they pare the list down to 702, as some jobs are very similar to each other. Then they assess all 702, one at a time, for how likely it is they will be done by machines. The report is a treasure-chest of practical examples.

At the end of the report there is the actual list of all 702 jobs. If you scan it for STEM-type jobs, the result is stunning. They start (No 1) with jobs least likely to go to machines. They end with those most likely.

At number 699 (out of 702) are mathematical technicians, and not far away five other kinds of technicians – library (692), agricultural and food science (665), prepress (660), ophthalmic (656) – all ripe for computerisation. Also watch repairers (at 697), tax preparers (695), milling and planing operators (678), locomotive engineers (638), construction operators (617) and nuclear power operators (614). Even welders come in at 598. The point is that low and mid-level tech jobs will likely be the very first to go. The same is true of low and mid-level jobs involving numbers. Insurance underwriters come in at 698, tax preparers at 695, accounts clerks, brokerage clerks, and order clerks  at 693, 698 and 697 respectively. These jobs involving tech and numbers are at the very top of the list of ones to be replaced by machines.

Then skip up to the other end, and look at the jobs least likely to be computerised. The first dozen jobs include healthcare social workers (8), substance abuse counsellors (4), recreational therapists (1), occupational therapists (6). At number 13 we have choreographers. While physicians and surgeons and dentists (15, 19) also feature, a little further down, as well as some other jobs that are STEM-related, these are high-level occupations – and ones that involve interface with people.

It’s staring us in the face: average-worker tech jobs will be first to go. It’s non-tech jobs such as social work and therapy that are the very safest.

The new leisured class

Second, there seems little doubt that in the decades to come there is likely to be less work to go around. Whether there’s a wholesale “jobocalypse”[4.  I explore this in my book Will Robots Take Your Job? (Polity Press, 2017), summarised in this UnHerd video: https://youtu.be/QABMVTWVDRM] or merely a more gradual replacement of human labour by machine labour, there are good reasons to believe that in the future some combination of automation and increasing wealth holds out more leisure for most people. The old debate as to whether education is chiefly for “life” or “work” is re-emerging in fresh fashion. It was recently put in stark form to me by a student, who asked what she should be learning at university if when she graduated, at the age of 22, she would also retire.

Economist John Maynard Keynes, in his tantalising essay Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren,[5.  J.M. Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren,” originally published in 1930, available here:  https://www.executiveshift.org.uk/images/site_graphics/downloads/John_Maynard_Keynes.pdf] looked forward to a time when machines would free us from much of the work we do. He spoke whimsically of the emergence of a “new leisured class” – in other words, ordinary folk with no jobs. And he noted the real problem that such “leisure” could create: boredom. “For those who sweat for their daily bread leisure is a longed-for sweet – until they get it… It is a fearful prospect for the ordinary person… to occupy himself.”

In other words, there is an increasingly pressing need for education to prepare us not so much for work as for the new “leisure” that advances in technology will likely bring. Yet the opposite is happening. As Andrew Orlowski noted in his evidence to the House of Lords, schools are teaching less music and history in order to up their technology curriculum.

STEM and longevity

Third, the extraordinary increase in the human life-span that has differentiated our modern experience from that of our grandparents continues to press ahead. And, of course, it is mainly the result of advances in medical science and nutrition. So we can chalk it up to STEM. It’s taken place gradually, so there is surprisingly little public awareness of its revolutionary impact. Life expectancy has more than doubled since 1900, and the process is keeping moving[6.  E.g. Max Roser, “Life Expectancy,” at Our World in Data. https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy/]. To take one recent projection as an example, “up to two thirds” of children born in the UK now can expect to live until they are over 100[7.  John Bingham, December 12, 2013, in The Daily Telegraph: “Two thirds of today’s babies could live to 100.” https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/news/10511865/Two-thirds-of-todays-babies-could-live-to-100.html].

So, whatever the impact of automation on the future of jobs, remarkable improvements in health and longevity mean that today’s children will spend many years of their lives outside the workforce in greatly extended “retirement”. These are years for which they need to be prepared.

How to occupy the leisure?

Keynes puts it well: “Thus for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.”

Yet this is the very moment that the STEM screws are being tightened. And the disciplines that do indeed prepare us best for spending time outside the work environment – the humanities, the arts – are being placed under increasing pressure in every educational institution. As Orlowski said, things like music (long under siege from those pressing for better performance in “academic” subjects) are being pushed out.

Even if our concern is limited to preparing the rising generation for the kind of jobs most likely to survive the vast impact of automation on the workplace, it’s simply a fallacy to believe that for the general mass of the workforce the answer lies in more STEM. There’s no question that every worker needs to understand the basics of technology, not least as many new jobs are likely to be focused on managing the interface between people and machines (for example, the elderly in their increasingly smart homes). But these will not be “tech” jobs.

What’s more, it’s looking increasingly likely that less of our time will be spent working in the future – whether we are all down to 15 hours a week (Keynes’ suggestion), or retirement gets earlier as governments use it to manage the job pool (my own proposal[8.  https://stage.unherd.com/2017/09/flexible-retirement-ages/]), or whether there is simply a general increase in unemployment as automation-driven “rust belts” break out all across the economy, so there will be more “leisure”. And as Keynes noted, leisure is something we are not good at managing – especially after the first hour or two or week or two.

And then there’s longevity. Whatever the outcome of the automation process, we are living longer and the generation born today will likely live a great deal longer. The need grows to prepare us for the kind of life in which the rigours of work no longer provide us with meaning.

So in place of STEM, for the great majority of people the need is for a vast revival of the humanities and the arts at the centre of our educational enterprise. And let’s name the STEM fetish for what it is – raised upon a fallacy, and for all its good intentions set to mislead young people as to the kind of careers to which they should aspire, and help deprive them of due preparation for the lives that lie ahead, outside and after the workplace.

FURTHER READING

As the reference from Computer Weekly to Orlowski’s evidence shows, almost everything written about the future of jobs buys what we’re calling the technological fallacy. Some key websites:

US government:  https://www.ed.gov/stem

UK: https://www.stem.org.uk/about-us

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/2010-to-2015-government-policy-public-understanding-of-science-and-engineering/2010-to-2015-government-policy-public-understanding-of-science-and-engineering

Together with a hundred other signatories from the high-tech world, he has called for a ban on “autonomous” weapons – weapons that can operate without humans to make the decisions.

According to The Guardian, Musk and the other signatories say these “morally wrong” weapons should be “added to the list of weapons banned under the UN’s convention on certain conventional weapons (CCW), brought into force in 1983, which includes chemical and intentionally blinding laser weapons.”

Earlier, Musk had pointed out that AI presents a unique problem:

“Normally the way regulations are set up is when a bunch of bad things happen, there’s a public outcry, and after many years a regulatory agency is set up to regulate that industry. It takes forever. That, in the past, has been bad but not something which represented a fundamental risk to the existence of civilisation.”

The campaign to stop killer robots

Meanwhile, a new global effort based in the UK has been launched to bring together robotics/AI experts and mainstream campaigners. They too are looking to the United Nations for action. Here’s part of their manifesto.

“Giving machines the power to decide who lives and dies on the battlefield is an unacceptable application of technology. Human control of any combat robot is essential to ensuring both humanitarian protection and effective legal control. A comprehensive, pre-emptive prohibition on fully autonomous weapons is urgently needed….through an international treaty, as well as through national laws and other measures.”

A committee room in Washington, nearly a decade ago

On 19 June, 2008, I was sitting in a committee room in the United States House of Representatives. It was a hearing of the Foreign Affairs Committee – specifically, its Sub-Committee on Terrorism, Nonproliferation, and Trade. The topic was a little out of the ordinary: “Does the technological enhancement of humans represent a new arms race?”

As the hearing opened, Congressman Brad Sherman, a Democrat representing California, laid out a clear case that the “weapons of mass destruction” of the 20th century – nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons – are being joined in the 21st by a whole new generation of weapons focused on enhancing human performance that are leading us into a “new kind of arms race”. He quoted futurist Christine Peterson:

“[in 25 years] we are going to live in a sci-fi movie, we just don’t know which one.”

The prime focus of the hearing would be genetics, though a variety of emerging technologies are granting us increasing super-powers. Countries around the world would use these powers for military purposes.

What’s more, said Chairman Sherman: “There is one issue that I think is more explosive than even the spread of nuclear weapons: engineered intelligence.” The Ranking Member (the term for the senior committee member of the minority party, in this case the Republicans), Edward R. Royce, endorsed Sherman’s approach:

“We are dealing with the early stages of a very grave proliferation issue.”

In my own evidence to the Committee I focused on the inter-related character of 21st century “emerging technologies.” A key reason genetics is moving ahead by leaps and bounds lies in the use of information technology to power research. And the “engineered intelligence” referred to by Chairman Sherman (artificial intelligence, as we more usually call it) is increasingly driving everything.

That was true enough in 2008. Nine years later, as Alexa and Siri and Cortana have become a key part of most of our lives, it’s no exaggeration to say that artificial intelligence is all around us. And whatever is true of us as individual citizens and consumers will be yet more true of those working in the defence and security industries.

Sadly, Sherman’s hearing did not lead to action at the United Nations, on the part of the United States government, but it was a prescient effort to track the momentous implications of the steady advance of still-new technologies for global security – while the entire focus of the international community remained on the need to contain the “new” weapons of the 20th century – nuclear, chemical, and biological.

The testimony and full transcript of the hearing is available here.

A UN view

In response to recent efforts, a senior United Nations official, Angela Kane, High Representative for Disarmament Affairs, has had this to say:

“A new type of arms race is underway and its outcome will shape the future of our planet. This race is not one between two countries. It is between the “tortoise” of our slowly changing legal and institutional norms and the “hare” of rapid technological change in the arms industry.”

The case of lethal autonomous weaponry—what many now call killer robots—offers a classic example of this larger challenge.

The stakes could hardly be higher, which may be why large countries are not jumping on the bandwagon of some kind of global ban. Because as President Putin has stated:

“Whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become the ruler of the world.”

***

FURTHER READING/RESEARCH

Transcript of the US House of Representatives hearing on human enhancement technologies.

Professor Sharkey of the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots make his case at TEDx Sheffield:

DISCLOSURE

Noel Sharkey and Christine Peterson are professional friends of the author, although neither was interviewed for the purpose of this article. As noted, the author was invited to testify to the US House hearing in 2008.