White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

My Poetic Quest to Understand Artificial Intelligence

by Leave a Comment

Myself when young did eagerly frequent
Doctor and Saint, and heard great Argument
About it and about; but evermore
Came out by the same Door as in I went.

I feel close to Omar Khayyam, the great 11th-century Persian poet and mathematician, not just because of his fondness for a drink but also because of his search for meaning, which took him in “The Rubaiyat” to “Doctor and Saint” and then out “by the same Door as in I went.”

I’ve been looking at artificial intelligence (AI) and I feel, like Omar, that I’m coming away from talking with leaders in the field as unenlightened as when I started this quest.

The question is simple: What will it do to us, our jobs and our freedom?

The answer isn’t clear: Even those who are enthusiastic about the progress they’re making with AI are privately alarmed about its consequences. And they worry about how far some corporations will push it too hard and too fast.

The first stages are already active, although surreptitiously. The financial technology (fintech) world has been quick to embrace AI. Up for a bank loan? Chances are you’ll be approved or turned down by a form of AI that checked your employment, credit score and some other criteria (unknown to you) and weighed your ability to repay. Some anomaly, maybe a police report, may have come into play. You’ll be told the ostensible reason for your rejection, if that’s the case, but you may never know it.

The two overriding concerns: what AI will do to our jobs and our privacy.

If jobs are the problem, governments can help by insisting that some work must be done by human beings: reserved occupations. Not a pretty concept but a possible one.

When it comes to privacy, governments are likely to be the problem. With surreptitious bio-identification surveillance, the government could know every move you make — your friends, your business associates, your lovers, your comings and goings — and then make judgments about your fitness for everything from work to liberty. No sin shall go unrecorded, as it were.

This one isn’t just a future worry, it’s nearly here. The Chinese, I’m told, have run an experiment on citizen fitness using AI.

Historically, at least in literature, we’ve been acculturated to the idea of man-made monsters out of control, whether it was Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” or Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” But the mythology probably has been around since man thought he could control life.

On jobs, the future is unclear. Until this point in time, automation has added jobs. British weaver Ned Ludd and his followers, who smashed up the looms of the Industrial Revolution, got it wrong. Nowadays cars are largely made by machines, as are many other things, and we have near full employment. Fields like health care have expanded, while adding technology at a fast pace. AI opens new vistas for treatment.

Notoriously difficult-to-diagnose diseases, like Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, might be easily identified and therapies suggested.

But think of a farm being run by AI. It knows how to run the tractor and plow, plant and harvest. It can assay the acidity of the soil and apply a corrective. If it can do all that, and maybe even decide what crops will sell each year, what will it do to other employment?

In the future AI will be taught sensitivity, even compassion, with the result that in many circumstances, like customer assistance, we may have no idea whether we’re dealing with a human or AI aping one of us. It could duplicate much human endeavor, except joining the unemployment line.

I’ve visited MIT, Harvard and Brown, and I’ve just attended a conference at NASA, where I heard some of the leading AI developers and critics talk about their expectations or fears. A few are borne along by enthusiasm, some are scared, and some don’t know, but most feel — as I do, after my AI tour — that the disruption AI will bring will be extreme. Not all at once, but over time.

Like Omar, I came away not knowing much more than when I began my quest. “The Rubaiyat” (which means quatrains) is a paean to drink. At least no one suggested machines will be taking to the bottle, but I may.

The King File: Future of Work, Euro Trains, the Grammys

by Leave a Comment

Work Is Not What It Was and It May Not Be Again

It used to be that when you left school or college, you sought to hook up with an employer who would offer you a whole bunch of goodies: things that were taken for granted then, like job security, health insurance and a defined pension.

You could work for, say, General Electric, AT&T or Marshall Field. And you’d be on a kind of employment plateau.

Those were the days when even well-paid union employees, like truck drivers, would reasonably count themselves as middle-class. They’d expect their children to do even better than they had.

But stagnant wages and disappearing benefits are booting millions out of the middle class. They can’t afford the genteel life anymore.

In today’s workplace, keep your resume burnished and your home in good repair, in case you need to downsize quickly. Damocles’ sword hangs over the head of every employee: It could fall in a merger, if production is moved to another state or offshore, or if your company tried for a leveraged buyout and sank under massive debt.

With just 10.7 percent of U.S. workers belonging to unions in 2017, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, things are not pretty for those who thought they would lead a life shielded from the buffets of the economy. Now no one is shielded — unless you are wealthy, in which case you’re likely to be one of those doing the buffeting. Or, you chose the security of government employment. That way you’re in a cocoon that private industry no longer offers.

At present, the enormity of this uncertainty in the workplace is concealed with the giddy stock market and full employment. But it’s there. When there’s a stock market correction or we have a recession (both of which history says are inevitable), the plight of working people will become more obvious. Also, the attendant plight of new retirees — more and more without pensions and relying, if they’re lucky, on 401(k) plans. They won’t have lifetime pensions, guaranteeing glitter in their golden years.

But worse may be to come. Meet the gig economy, where contract employment replaces formal employment: no employer medical plan, no paid vacation, no sick leave.

Hanging over all this gloom is the existential worry about artificial intelligence. One argument is that its predecessor, automation, always created more jobs than it cost. Mechanized woolen mills made cloth for the many. Production lines produced goods that more consumers could afford like cars and washing machines. Win-Win.

Artificial intelligence, though, threatens simply to replace workers not to make new products. Already, banks and some retailers are working to get people out of transactions, an indication of the workerless future.

 

Euro Trains Have Borrowed Pricing From Amtrak

While making a round-trip reservation from Brussels to London on the super-fast Eurostar, I find that it’s embraced one of the horrors of super-slow Amtrak: dynamic pricing. That’s the system where the cost of tickets is what the market will bear.

European trains, like Amtrak, have public subsidies. So the governments on both sides of the Atlantic are actually squeezing out people with limited budgets. Shame.

It seems to me if it’s the intent of government to subsidize transport, it should do so with an eye to the poor — with fixed pricing — not the rich.

 

This Was Not Your Grammy’s Grammys

Was I wrong in thinking the that the Grammys this year were strictly for the young? Bono and Sting looked decidedly uncomfortable.

There’s an age chasm between Bruno Mars listeners and, well, those of us who heretofore thought we were cool when we listened to Bono and Sting.

 

The Things They Say

“Before you judge a man, walk a mile in his shoes. After that who cares? He’s a mile away and you’ve got his shoes!” — Billy Connolly, Scottish comedian