Abstract
At the dawn of civilization, in the forests of Siberia, a small tribe was engaged in discussion of great importance to themselves and mankind. It was winter. As the humans argued, wolf dogs ate scraps of discarded food. Smaller than wolves, they had been domesticated and were perfect for pulling heavy loads without overheating. But a few of the larger wolf dogs seemed able to pick up the scent of the large bears better than humans could. Some of the tribe wanted to breed and train these wolf dogs for hunting. Other hunters who were widely known for their olfactory skills might have been concerned that their specialty, their craft, was threatened by the more sensitive canine olfactory system.
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Notes
- 1.
However, there is evidence that early domesticated dogs in Siberia may have been bred for pulling heavy weights possibly before they were bred for hunting. See Pitulko, V. V. and Kasparov, A. K. (2017). “Archaeological dogs from the Early Holocene Zhokhov site in the Eastern Siberian Arctic.” Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports. 13: 491-515. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jasrep.2017.04.003.
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Artificial general intelligence, or “strong AI,” is a machine that can experience consciousness and autonomy and can perform any cognitive task that a human can.
- 5.
Rodney Wallace, personal communication based on a review of an early version of this chapter.
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Castells, M. (1996). The Rise of the Network Society. Volume I, The Information Age: Economy. Society and Culture. Oxford, Blackwell.
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Ibid, p. 248.
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Jones, S. E. (2013). Against technology: From the Luddites to neo-Luddism. Routledge. However, in modern usage, the terms Luddite and Neo-Luddite tend to mean opposed to innovation and progress.
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The Luddite rebellion is often associated with Jacquard looms. However, these machines were not imported into England until the 1820s.
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Jowett, B. (2005). Phaedrus by Plato. In his dialogue with Phaedrus, Socrates summarizes a meeting between Theuth, who according to myth invented writing and many other inventions, and Thamus, who ruled all of Egypt. Theuth wanted to introduce his inventions to the Egyptians, for their benefit. Thamus was cautious and inquired about each invention and approved or disapproved of each, in turn. As for writing, Theuth claimed that it will improve wisdom and memory. Thamus replied that Theuth is biased toward his invention and that writing will increase forgetfulness because people will not use their memories. It will give people a false sense of truth, and “they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing.”
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Castells, M. (1996). The Rise of the Network Society. Volume I, The Information Age: Economy. Society and Culture. Oxford, Blackwell. p241.
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See, for example, Ford, M. (2015). Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future. Basic Books.
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Castells presents these dimensions as orthogonal, but Figure 1-1 illustrates how two of these dimensions might be entangled. The decision-making roles, for example, can be played out at any level of management and control: there is a decider, participants in that decision, and those that carry the decisions. Thus, the same pattern can be repeated in the research, design, integrator, and operator tasks. But for this discussion, combining the two in a single illustration provides a useful characterization of work in an enterprise. Relation-making is essential in an information economy and will be considered in future chapters on collaborative robotics.
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The statistic, “Ratio of human-machine working hours,” can be difficult to interpret because the timescale that machines and humans operate under are so different, and it is not based on precise chronological measurements. However, the statistic is useful as a subjective measurement of the relative (expected) contribution of human and machine to various critical tasks.
- 20.
Adapted from Future of Jobs Survey 2018, World Economic Forum, Figure 5.
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Terms such as creativity, critical thinking, and social intelligence are difficult to precisely define, but the WEF report enumerates some of the characteristics associated with these terms. Creativity is associated with taking initiative, working with little or no supervision, developing original or unusual ideas about a topic or solution, and acting upon these ideas. Critical thinking is associated with “using logic and reasoning to identify the strengths and weaknesses of alternative solutions, conclusions or approaches to problems.” Emotional intelligence is associated with empathy, preferring to interact with others, cooperation, and social perceptiveness.
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http://reports.weforum.org/future-of-jobs-2018/shareable-infographics/ [accessed on April 9, 2020]. WEF Future of Jobs Report does not report numbers for “intelligent automation” or “software robotics” in this particular analysis of technology adoption; see the chapter on robotic process automation for more about those technologies.
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There is much confusion surrounding the Turing test. In his quest to understand the limits of computational logic and what we mean by intelligence, Alan Turing explored several variations of a thought experiment to measure the behavioral equivalence of human and machine intelligence. It is doubtful that Turing was proposing that a short conversation be used as a true test of intelligence or intentional behavior. Nonetheless, there are Turing test tournaments and the test has been extended to include other aspects of human behavior. In 2014, Eugene Goostman, a software program that simulates a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy, was said to have passed the Turing test. Hennessy, board chairperson of Alphabet, the parent company of Google, claims that “In the domain of making appointments, the chatbot, Google Duplex passes the Turing test,” according to a May 10, 2018, report by R. Nieva, www.cnet.com/news/alphabet-chairman-says-google-duplex-passes-turing-test-in-one-specific-way-io-2018/ [accessed on April 9, 2020]. A thoughtful discussion of Turing’s purpose in the thought experiment is provided by Harnad, S. (1992) in “The Turing Test is not a trick: Turing indistinguishability is a scientific criterion.” https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/141420.141422 [accessed on April 9, 2020].
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- 50.
Reinforcement learning is not supervised using input-output pairs (see previous footnote on supervised learning), and its behavior is adjusted to optimize an accumulative reward such as positive reinforcement following the conclusion of a well-played game.
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In all cases, ethics and bias are research challenges for the design and operation of these systems, and this has implications for work during the next decade. To ensure that robots do not discriminate against certain groups or show preferential treatment to some groups, the workforce of executive management, researchers, designers, integrators, and implementers must be diverse, reflecting the diversity of society.
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Matthews, P., Greenspan, S. (2020). Will Robots Replace You?. In: Automation and Collaborative Robotics. Apress, Berkeley, CA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-5964-1_1
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