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WHAT HAPPENS WHEN BOTS TAKE OUR JOBS Melody Guan
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he press has recently been awash in stories of worker robots of ever-increasing ability making human labor obsolete. Is it true that we are approaching a future of a mechanized workforce where humans need not apply? Experts’ opinions on the future of technological development vary spectacularly, as do views on the nature and magnitude of robotics’ impact on society and mankind’s ability to adapt. But one thing is collectively agreed upon: robotics has begun and will continue to transform the workforce in profound and inevitable ways. Fears that automation will lead to unemployment have existed for centuries, but humans have shown a remarkable ability to adapt to modernization of work. While the percentage of Americans that plowed the fields dwindled from 33 percent to two percent over the last century, for instance, countless unforeseen occupations materialized. Some people believe the present situation to be no different: if robots eventually do some kinds of labor more efficiently than humans, people will simply move on to other work. As University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Science dean Vijay Kumar told the HPR, “The implication that jobs will disappear and not be replaced is, I think, completely false.” What makes this round of innovation potentially different is that robots have become smart. “Computers and other digital advances are doing for mental power … what the steam engine and its descendants did for muscle power,” write MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy co-directors Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson in The Second Machine Age. A 2013 paper by Oxford academics Carl B. Frey and Michael A. Osborne predicts that 47 percent of U.S. jobs are at risk of automation. Smart technologies already exist that demonstrate the vulnerability of white-collar service jobs to automation. There are computers that can make medical diagnoses with fewer errors than humans, and one venture capital firm has given a computer algorithm a voting position on its board of directors. Creative jobs are not immune, either. There are song-writing robots whose compositions are virtually indistinguishable from humans’, and, according to at March 7 op-ed in the New York Times by Shelley Podolny, robots are responsible for writing a “shocking” amount of news stories. All prompt the question: how will these technologies affect human employability?
FORECASTING MACHINE INTELLIGENCE Experts disagree immensely in both their outlook for future advances and their perception of the aptitude of present-day robots. On the one hand, some believe that technology will never be able to fully compete with the human mind. MIT economics professor David Autor told the HPR that the short- and medium-term consequences of robotics are over-hyped, because progress is “relatively close to a standstill. … Moreover, robotics and machinery are still extremely limited in terms of flexibility, adaptability, autonomy, and the ability to make independent decisions.” Autor cited recent stumbles at the DARPA Robotics Challenge 2015, which required robots to compete tasks that would have allowed them to enter nuclear reactors and prevent the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster. “These bots were incredibly slow and incredibly fragile. There’s a viral video of one falling down crashing,” he recalled. “All these headlines and articles saying robots are going to take your job tomorrow are ridiculous.” On the other side of the spectrum, a group of thinkers believes that it is simply a matter of time before robots surpass the intellectual capacity of humans—some even predict that this will happen in the foreseeable future. Proponents of the “technological singularity,” like futurist Ray Kurzweil in his book The Singularity is Near, believe that humans will design a machine smarter than themselves and launch a “cycle of machine intelligence’s iteratively improving its own design,” leaving mankind in the dust. Based on the reasoning that technological progress has been increasing at an exponential rather than linear rate, some in this school expect this event to unfold within this century. The theory is highly controversial, but it has the support of a substantial number of artificial intelligence (AI) researchers. Median estimates in a 2012-2013 survey of around 550 AI experts were that high-level machine intelligence will develop in the 2040s with a 50 percent chance, and that a superintelligence, or “any intellect that greatly exceeds the cognitive performance of humans in virtually all domains of interest,” would develop 30 years thereafter. Perhaps it would be an anthropocentric fallacy to set human intelligence as an upper limit.
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