The Sunday Reflection #89 - Something to look forward to?

What makes us human? We are living in the age of the rise of AI and there is much talk about AI achieving sentience. There are AI chatbots that appear to be human to those interacting with them. We already have the technology to make robots that have the physical appearance of a human being, can be programmed to act like a human and do many of the tasks that human beings do. Who knows, such andriods may already walk amongst us. If such a robot looks human, behaves like a human, talks like a human and no one can spot it's a robot, is it a human? Is it a sentient being. I used to work for a company called SPL International, a software company. They had a subsidiary called "British Robotics". It sounded very exciting, but the systems they manufactured were automation products for manufacturers such as British Leyland cars. The year was 1983 and we were living through the rise of Thatcherism. My boss told me that there was a bright future for British industry, as we were world leaders in industrial automation. This was the future. We'd have huge factories, where the only staff would be the security guard on the front gate and a few staff to service the robots and make sure they were oiled. 

I said "What will all the workers do?". He said "Every time there has been a technological revolution, the same question has been asked, people always find something to do". He explained that in 1800, the UK had an extensive network of Stage Coach routes.. There was a huge economy built around them, estimates of over 100,000 horses being used to run routes between cities, ports, etc. As railways started replacing the stagecoach routes, the stagecoach operators started campaigning against them, saying it would destroy the UK's economy, if all of those horses were made redundant. Instead we got the industrial revolution and the UK became the worlds wealthiest country. 

Sadly, he was wrong. Margaret Thatcher decided that the UK should not be making anything and rather than being automated, our factories shut down. The people that used to work making things largely moved to working in call centres, answering phones. Now we have AI to do that, we all know what a joy it is chatting to chatbots. Invariably, they waste ten minutes of your time and then you get put onto someone in  a call centre, usually offshore, where you get another hour of your time wasted. Eventually, if you are lucky, you get through to someone who can actually sort the problem out. Usually they are up in Scotland or somewhere. My business had some major issues with BT a couple of years ago, we ended up with our own "Incident manager". A real human being, who ensured we didn't have to go through hours of hell talking to AI chatbots and offshore people who have a script that doesn't cover your problems. 

The problem with AI is that it is superb at fixing problems that it has encountered before. However if it is a new problem, that isn't in its knowledge bank, it has no answer at all. But it is the future, so it seems. Which brings us to the question, what will we all be doing ,when AI is doing all of the clever stuff and robots are doing all of the menial stuff? I think the demise of the stagecoach network might give some clue. Before the steam engine was invented and the railway network mushroomed, no one really had a clue that it would usher in the industrial revolution. By 1885, Britian was different place to what it was in 1775. The steam engine facilitated all manner of industrial innovation, that would have been unimaginable a hundred years before. So the answer is that if AI really is going to be a revolution in the way that the steam engine launched the industrial revolution, we are simply not in a position to predict.

To give you an example, in the 1960's Gene Roddenberry created a futuristic world. The crew had communicators, there were automatic doors that went swish when they opened. The brigde of the USS Enterprise had all manner of knobs and buttons. It was a great stab at predicting the future. But it had not anticipated the fact that we'd be using touch screens. When the Internet was first devised, it was anticipated that its main use would be for sharing scientific papers and trade information. A relative of mine was working for Microsoft, when the general public first started getting into the online world. He suggested that they set up a system to monitor what people were using Microsoft's search engine to look up. To his and most other people's surprise, the most popular search term was "Fisting". It was the first clue that people were far more likely to share porn than scientific papers on the net. I was chatting to an expert in robotics and he said that he anticipates the two big markets for humanoid robots to be the military and the sex industry. He added that the conflict in Ukraine is actually redefining what military conflicts of the near future will be like. In effect, there are huge zones patrolled by unmanned zones, that it is unsafe for a human to enter. Hollywood predicted androids like the Terminator, but there is no real need to make a military robot humanoid in form. It is cheaper and more effective to build things that are suited to a single purpose. Which I suppose means that it will be the sex industry that will drive the development of humanoid style robots. What worries me is that if people start to prefer sex with sexbots to other humans, then that might end up finishing off the human race. It would be quite ironic if the robots that did for the human race were not ones like the Terminator, but ones built to facilitate the realisation of every fantasy we could have.

This week, I went to see Octogenarian American Jazz Pianist & Singer Ben Sidran at Ronnie Scotts. The show included a set of his rather thought provoking songs and some amazing improvisation. While we have musicians of such quality, who produce such wonderful music, but also provoke us with challenging lyrics, I think humanity will be alright. In just under two weeks, The False Dots release our new album "We don't live in America". It is the product of a team of musicians and an excellent producer working as a team. I hope you listen to it and enjoy it, but also I hope that it persuades you that humans can still do stuff that is pretty interesting. There is hope!

As I stated, predicting the future is almost impossible, but there are lessons and pointers. Perhaps the biggest is that there is no point trying to stand in the way of technology. The second is that the future rarely ends up looking like we think it will. The third, is perhaps the most disturbing. All empires come to an end and usually they collapse from the middle, when the people running them get too lazy and debauched to do the hard work of running them. The achillies heal of technology is that it needs huge amounts of electricity to run. AI is gobbling up ever more huge amounts of electricity. In some ways it is like a virus attacking a body, it multiplies continually, taking over cells. Eventually there are none left to take over and the host and the virus dies. I do wonder what happens when AI needs more energy than the world can produce? Will we all go back to pens and papers?  The trouble with distopian tales of the future and conspiracy theories, where all of the ordinary people get eliminated, is that it misses one simple fact. If you can't get a bloke to unblock your drain, your house will become uninhabitable. I suspect that if you want a future proof job, then being a plumber is not a bad option. Until people no longer need a toilet that works, you will have a well paid job.