White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

The Question That Must Be Answered: How Dangerous Is AI?

by Leave a Comment

Races have winners and losers — at least so I have always thought. At some point, the competition ends and a winner is identified, whether it is first-past-the-post as in a horse race, or first in the marketplace as in a commercial race. Think about VHS and Betamax.

Similarly, we knew who won the space race and many other international races. However, the race we are engaged in with China over artificial intelligence isn’t defined — there are no winning posts, and we don’t even know what winning will look like.

Will we wake up one day and be told we have cleared the winning post and China is in the dust, or the other way round?

We don’t even seem to be engaged in the same race as China. Is it the one President Trump talks about where we are going to out-invest, out-talent, out-research and dominate AI?

Or is it the one China appears to be running, emphasizing using AI as it is now, with the construction of many thousands of deployable robots?

Is it a purely commercial race or a purely military one for both countries?

So far, it seems, we have taken the high road, with proprietary systems, and China has taken the low road with widely deployed, open-source, ready-now systems.

China is aggressively spreading AI across its commercial operations and developing families of robots. The United States is still nibbling at universal deployment. China is mass-producing droves of humanoids that dance, leap in the air, and perform complex duties like cooking.

They entertain and threaten. They are a new workforce, presenting a new level of competition.

Although the United States has reached new heights in invention and pushed the frontiers of AI discovery, it lags in deployment. It has been slower in harvesting the technology.

Now comes the unsettling — actually terrifying — warning from AI researchers that the human race may face extinction as soon as the end of this decade. Three AI bosses — Dario Amodei of Anthropic, Sam Altman of OpenAI and Elon Musk of Grok — have called for a slowdown and regulatory oversight.

This warning deserves to be treated as truth until proven otherwise.

Could, as the doomsters fear, no bells ring, no shouts of joy echo from the bleachers at the race’s end because AI has killed us all short of the winning post.

It is a strange race run not by the government but by corporations, with the government cheering from the sidelines. Bill Gates has said the thing about AI is that — unlike other dangerous technologies, such as nuclear — the government has no depth of knowledge, no deep bench. Where AI is concerned, the government is an outsider.

When my television crew and I covered the Upscale conference in Malaga, Spain, last year, we got insight into people from around the world surging ahead in the creative uses of AI, without regard to whether they were using Chinese or American AI. For this cohort, these were just off-the-shelf tools.

This was a new generation of creatives using AI with relish to create fine art, advertisements and designs for everything from a new shape for a car or a wild-patterned shoe to a more comfy living room couch.

I had to wonder whether they weren’t the real winners in the AI race: Those who use it without scaling the heights of its technical possibilities or using it to displace truck drivers.

Only two countries are in that race, the United States and China, but all have a stake. In AI deployment, the United States is far from dominant. Indeed, it is down the list of countries where AI is already incorporated into daily commercial operations. Estonia and the UAE stand out.

The United States is challenging the future before exploiting the present.

It is easy to declare the need for regulation and guardrails, but hard to do that when the subject is in constant transmutation, changing daily and likely to change again tomorrow.

I would propose that the Trump administration appoint a small, nimble, non-industry expert panel to answer just three questions: Is AI an existential threat to the human species? What should be done about that? And how much time do we have?

The threat has been debated academically since 1958 — the heftiest warning came from British astrophysicist Stephen Hawking in December 2014.

Warnings from within should be heeded. J. Robert Oppenheimer warned about nuclear weapons. His words still govern nuclear non-proliferation policy and security settings.

The creators of an even more dangerous technology are warning, much as Oppenheimer did.

The Robots Are Coming — Sooner Than You Think

by Leave a Comment

The next big thing is robots. They are, you might say, on the move.

Within five years, robots will be doing a lot of things that people now do. Simple repetitive work, for example, is doomed.

Already, robots weld, bolt and paint cars and trucks. The factory of the future will have very few human workers. Amazon distribution centers are almost entirely robot domains. Robots search the shelves, grab items, pack and send them to you — often seconds after you have placed your order.

Of course, these orders will be delivered in vans, which must be loaded carefully, even scientifically. The first out must be the last in; small items must nestle with large ones. Space is at a premium, so robotic brains will do the sorting and packing swiftly, efficiently and inexpensively.

Very soon, the van will be self-driving: a robot capable of navigating the traffic and finding your home. At first, it may not get further in the delivery chain than calling you to say that your package has arrived. Eventually, humanoid robots may ride in the vans and, yes, hand your package to you. No tipping, please.

When we think about robots, we tend to think of the robots that look like us. The internet is full of clips of them climbing stairs, playing sports and doing backflips.

There are reasons for humanoid robots: They are less intimidating with their humanlike heads, two arms with hands and two legs with feet than a machine with many arms or legs. Also, most of the tasks the robot is taking over are done by humans. The tasks are fitted to people, such as pumping gas, preparing vegetables or painting a wall.

The first big incursion may be robotaxis. Waymo taxis are already operating in five cities, and the company has plans to roll them out in 19 cities. Several cities are concerned about safety, including Houston and Seattle, and want to ban them. But there are state-city jurisdictional issues about implementing bans.

A likely scenario, as with other bans, is that the development will go elsewhere. Travelers tend to eschew places where Uber and Lyft aren’t allowed to operate in favor of those where they are.

You are already dealing with robots when you talk to a digital assistant at an airline, a bank, a credit card or insurance company, or any business where you call a helpline. That soothing, friendly voice that comes on immediately and asks practical questions may be a robot: the unseen voice of artificial intelligence.

In the years I have been writing about AI and its impact on society, I have consistently heard the AI revolution and its impact on jobs compared with the Industrial Revolution and automation. The one led to the other and in the end, many new jobs and whole new ecosystems flourished.

It isn’t clear that this will happen again and if so on what timetable. A lot of jobs are already in danger, from file clerks to delivery and taxi drivers, from warehouse workers to longshoremen.

AI is also changing the tech world. A whole new tier of companies is emerging to carry forward the AI-robot revolution. These are companies that make robots; companies that write software, which will give robots brainpower; and companies that will have a workforce that maintains robots.

These emerging companies will need a workforce with a different set of skills — skills that will keep the new AI economy humming.

What is missing is any sense that the political class has grasped the tsunami of change that is about to break over the nation. In just a few years, you may be riding in a robotaxi, watching a humanoid robot doing yard work or lying on a couch and chatting with your robot psychiatrist.

Our species is adaptable, and we have adapted everything from the wheel to the steam engine to electricity to the internet. And we have prospered.

Time to think about how to prosper with AI and its robots.

Skilled Jobs Go Begging Now, But Thinking Machines Are Coming

by Leave a Comment

Consider it as the work dichotomy.

There is a shortage in the millions for skilled labor jobs in the United States. The country is desperate for men and women who drive trucks, operate machines, weld, wield hammers — or can fill skilled jobs in dozens of categories from bulldozer operator to utility lineman.

Bill Hillman, chief executive officer of the National Utility Contractors Association, the organization that represents contractors (people who do everything, from replacing electricity poles to working down manholes to operating heavy equipment), says getting help is a major problem for his members. So they are setting up training programs and working with schools and community colleges.

But these also are some of the people who could be jobless due to artificial intelligence (AI) in the near future. Thomas Kochan, co-director of the MIT Sloan Institute for Work and Employment Research, told me this “middle of the labor market” is coming under attack by AI deployment.

John Savage, professor of computer science at Brown University, foresees a need for major retraining of workers with the spread of AI. But he told me he is “optimistic”: He sees major displacements but new opportunities.

Displacement is a worry for workers, but so is job quality deterioration in the so-named gig economy or freelance economy: a volatile labor pool where the employer holds most of the cards.

Gig workers are spread among diverse occupation groups: arts and design, computer and information technology, media and communication, transportation and material moving, construction and extraction. They are working here and there without permanence, medical insurance or pension provisions, like employer 401(k) contributions.

That is for starters and it is happening now. Then comes the apocalypse when millions of workers find themselves displaced by thinking machines. Think of what happened to elevator operators in cities when elevators were automated.

The first to go might be taxi drivers, some truck drivers, airline pilots and others in transportation. Already in Phoenix, you can ride in a robot taxi operated by Waymo, the Google self-driving car project. Truck makers, stirred on by potential competition from new entrants, like Tesla, are hard at perfecting autonomous intercity trucks.

To my mind, the issue is not whether but when. There are more than 3 million truck drivers on U.S. roads. Not all will be displaced by AI, but if 1 million go, there will be considerable downward pressure on wages.

Traditionally, and Savage points this out, automation has led to a surge in new, different jobs. Ned Ludd, who with his followers destroyed mechanical weaving machines in England in the early 1800s, was wrong. Mechanized weaving added far more related jobs than those lost.

But this time it could be different, warns John Raymont, chief strategy officer of Kurion, an advanced technology nuclear company. He says the difference is that automation heretofore has led to more products, and therefore more jobs. Artificial intelligence threatens to take away jobs without producing new products, which themselves produced new jobs.

Take the automobile production line: It led to more people being able to afford cars and more jobs maintaining and fueling those cars. It enhanced America’s growing prosperity.

So far, AI appears to be aimed directly at employment. In the way that cheap labor in Asia sucked manufacturing jobs out of the United States, so machines may take over skilled jobs from airline pilots to Uber drivers, Raymont says. Other jobs may still be safe, including plumbers, he says.

And it will not be just manual workers who will have their jobs taken over by wily computers. Accounting, tax preparing and auditing, money lending, loading and unloading ships and trucks will be done by machines guided by artificial intelligence. A ship, it is theorized, will be able to leave a U.S. port without the aid of seamen or dock workers and sail to Singapore, dock and unload autonomously.

Job displacement may have this opportunity: More leisure time in which people can play golf on greens maintained by thinking mowers, aerifiers and fertilizer spreaders. After they play, a machine may make them an extra dry martini at the club bar.

 

Photo: August 6, 2017 Mountain View/Ca/USA – Waymo self driving car cruising on a street, Silicon Valley. Editorial credit: Sundry Photography / Shutterstock.com