Robots4Us: DARPA's Response To Mounting Robophobia

malachiorion writes DARPA knows that people are afraid of robots. Even Steve Wozniak has joined the growing chorus of household names (Musk, Hawking, Gates) who are terrified of bots and AI. And the agency's response--a video contest for kids--is equal parts silly and insightful. It's called Robots4Us, and it asks high schoolers to describe their hopes for a robot-assisted future. Five winners will be flown to the DARPA Robotics Competition Finals this June, where they'll participate in a day-after discussion with experts in the field. But this isn't quite as useless as it sounds. As DRC program manager Gill Pratt points out, it's kids who will be impacted by the major changes to come, moreso than people his age.

Comments

The Problem with Robots

[tnk1]

The problem with robots is that they are replacing humans in a world where humans often define their own value by the things that they do. Once they are no longer seen as tools, but instead as creators or self actuated, they become competition for the things that make life worth living for some.

That's not an easy problem to fix, even if your AI's don't go mad and kill us all (purposefully or accidentally), they could cause a descent into unrest or ennui.

What I don't believe is that AIs will be somehow alien to humans, as they'd be created with the only template for intelligence that we have: our own.

Granted, the idea of providing immense capabilities to an AI is scary, but probably no more scary than providing immense capabilities to stock humans.

Re:The Problem with Robots

[Fire_Wraith]

The rate at which unskilled and low-skilled labor will be made redundant by, or replaced by, automation, is going to continue accelerating. What happens to these people? They won't all be able to retrain into high-skill jobs, especially the ones that have already worked for some time. Do you seriously expect a 50 year old truck driver to turn into a computer programmer when he gets replaced by a driving robot (one that can, incidentally, work 24/7 and remain alert even in bad conditions)? I'm sure a few might be able to, but what about all the others?

In the past, it used to be that all you needed to be able to earn enough to get by was to simply be an able bodied adult male, that was willing to work hard. Likely you could even support a family. That's no longer the case, and really hasn't been for a long time. We've been relying on Government programs - ones originally intended as a "safety net" for those who had a run of bad luck to help them get back on their feet - to bridge the gap for more and more people. We're going to have to do more of it, and at the same time, we're going to have to do so against the current of a culture that has a tradition of valuing hard work, to the point of deriding and denigrating those who do not work, or rely on government assistance.

I think the long term solution is going to be to tax the productivity of robots, probably in the form of taxes on profits and capital (rather than on wages, which will likely decline), and in turn to institute a guaranteed basic income, that goes to every citizen. We might even want to eliminate taxes on wage earnings entirely, as crazy as that may sound, but it wouldn't be the first time that governments have switched their tax base. The USA originally funded itself based on tariffs and excise taxes, and income tax wasn't even legal until the constitution was amended to make it so.

No one would need to work to earn a living, though anyone would be free to do so in order to earn money beyond that. This has many benefits - for one, you could eliminate the cost of managing all the other mishmash of programs. You could eliminate the minimum wage, since no one is relying on wages to survive - let the market establish the real price of any labor. The biggest obstacle is going to be the mindset that anyone who doesn't work is worthless, and the "I don't want to pay to support those lazy bums" mindset (but this is why we'd want to stop taxing wage income).