Page 10
Street Roots • July 14-20, 2017
Book Review
‘Thinking Machines’ warns of time when machines do everything
BY JOE MARTIN
C O N T R IB U T IN G C O L U M N I S T
his time is different. In the six
decades since the first colloquium on
artificial intelligence (AI) at
Dartmouth College, periodic predictions
about changes implied by AI often proved to
be enthusiastic speculation, more science
fiction than reality. No longer. Today fields
of AI, robotics and evolving technologies
permeate economies. There are immediate
implications for human beings regarding
employment, income, education and social
relations. There is a promise of material
abundance and an end to drudgery. But
certain urgent questions have not yet found
ethically and politically palatable answers.
How does a society that espouses
democracy ensure a just distribution of
wealth made available by increased
technical efficiency and machine
intelligence? Current social and economic
structures exacerbate inequities. Traditional
notions of work and workplace are in flux.
The gig economy is supplanting long-term
employment opportunities. Many
experience a sense of insecurity. Others,
outright despair. Meanwhile the obscenely
wealthy are becoming a planetary elite,
having little in common with average
citizens in their respective countries.
Not all is due to technological change, but
it is undoubtedly a factor. In his recent book
“Thinking Machines,” journalist Luke
Dormehl presents a crisp overview of the
history and ongoing challenges of AI and
robotics. Eniac (Electronic Numeric
Integrator and Calculator) was “the world’s
first programmable computer” which
weighed 30 tons and could perform “20,000
multiplications per minute.” This “giant
brain,” as it was called, arrived just after
World War II and was housed at the
University of Pennsylvania. It captured the
imagination of press and public. The era of
the computer had begun.
Dormehl provides sketches of brilliant
T
scientific pioneers such as John von
Neumann, Claude Shannon and Alan Turing
who made initial inroads in AI. Turing’s
story is especially poignant. A British
mathematician and cryptanalyst, Turing
cracked the secret codes of the German war
machine contributing to the defeat of
Nazism. This achievement offered little
protection when Turing, a gay man, was
prosecuted in 1952 for homosexuality, then
a crime in England. “Forced to choose
between prison and painful chemical
castration, Turing opted for the latter.” In
1954 he took his own life. He later received
a posthumous pardon. Dormehl’s narrative
is replete with other brilliant and sometimes
quirky characters.
The word “robot” entered the lexicon in
1921. “R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal
Robots),” a play by Karel Capek, introduced
the term derived from the Czech word
“robota” meaning “forced labor.” Industrial
robots are now used in a variety of
manufacturing. Their use will expand as the
ranks of human workers who once had such
critical roles in production will be thinned
out. It is not simply rote and repetitive tasks
that AI and robotics perform. A lot of
people earn their living driving a vehicle.
Self-driving cars and trucks are expected to
become ubiquitous and in the process a
significant sector for employment will be
severely curtailed. Even highly skilled and
well-educated professionals — once thought
safe from cybernetic threats — are no longer
guaranteed immunity from the
encroachment of machine intelligence.
“As we’ve seen, the past few years have
ushered in extraordinary advances
concerning what machines are capable of,”
writes Dormehl. “Machines have become
not simply tools to increase the productivity
of human workers, but the workers
themselves. Computers are still at their
best when it comes to dealing with routine
tasks in which they follow explicit rules.
However, advances in AI mean that the
scope of what is considered routine has
become far broader.” One recent study has
predicted that close to half of today’s jobs in
the U.S. are likely to be affected by
automation within the next 20 years. Not
just low-skilled workers but “high-cognition
professionals like doctors and lawyers” will
be impacted by AI. Will new kinds of paid
work replace the many jobs that will be
eliminated or drastically transformed by
technological change? There is no sure
answer.
As far back as 1930, the displacement of
human labor by machinery concerned
economist John Maynard Keynes, who
coined the phrase “technological
unemployment.” Indeed what happens to a
society when growing numbers of citizens
find themselves no
longer
needed for jobs
previously
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performed for pay?
Dormehl relates
the story of 16th
century inventor
William Lee, who
constructed a
“stocking frame
knitting
machine.”
Queen
Elizabeth I
witnessed the
machine in
action but
would not
grant Lee a
patent, stating,
“Consider thou
what the
invention could
do to my poor
subjects. It would
assuredly bring to them
ruin by depriving them
of employment, thus
making them beggars.”
A universal basic income
(UBI) is being explored in
Kenya, Canada, Finland, Scotland and the
Netherlands. The idea of providing those
without work a basic financial payment is
not a new concept. Over the centuries,
individuals such as Thomas More, Thomas
Paine, Bertrand Russell and Martin Luther
King Jr. pondered the matter. Presently a
program called Give Directly, which is
funded by wealthy Silicon Valley
entrepreneurs, is providing impoverished
places in rural Kenya with direct payments
to the local citizenry. In February, New York
Times Magazine writer Annie Lowrey asks:
“Is Silicon Valley about to put the world out
of work? And if so, do technologists owe the
world a solution?” With the abysmal
administration currently in power in
Washington, D.C., a conversation about a
basic income for all Americans is not going
to happen.
Dormehl packs a lot into his book. He
explores some of the more extraordinary
issues hovering about AI, like the quasi
religious concept of “singularity,” in
which intelligent machines surpass
human beings, making for a new
era that may or may not include
humanity. This volume is a
serious look at an important
L
topic.
“Whichever way you
slice it,” writes Dormehl,
“work as we know it is
about to change.”
Reprinted from Street
Roots’ sister paper,
Real Change News
in Seattle.
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