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

DARPA SJW

[Thud457]

I always knew they were a bunch of closeted robosexuals over there.

Re:DARPA SJW

[Tablizer]

Robots are now forbidden in Indiana stores

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

[steveg]

The most menial.

That turns out not really to be the case. If you had said the most repetitive jobs, I'd be more likely to buy it.

A housekeeper or a janitor is a fairly menial job, but it is a very difficult one to automate. It involves recognising randomly present items (clutter) and dealing with them (putting them away, straightening them or whatever.)

Assembly lines are different -- those are very repetitive. It's not nearly so hard to automate, since the variety of actions and the judgment of when and how they should be carried out doesn't change much.

Re:The Problem with Robots

[lymond01]

My concern is that companies will continue their current methods of spending money. For example:

Current:
Revenue: $100,000,000 per year
Salaries, VP+: $30,000,000 per year
Salaries, standard: $40,000,000 per year
Other (R&D, maintenance, etc): $30,000,000 per year

With Robots:
Revenue: $110,000,000 per year
Salaries: VP+ $50,000,000 per year
Salaries, standard: $30,000,000 per yar
Other (R&D, maintenance, etc): $30,000,000 per year

How'd they flip salaries? With robots in place, after the initial expenditure of conversion, you're bringing in $10,000,000 per year extra due to simply making things more efficient -- faster work, less errors, less levels of management. You've laid off $10,000,000 worth of employees, work now done by robots, and given that salary savings to the executives. The other option, which many companies decide not to take, is to raise salaries for the remaining standard employees, reduce time worked for standard employees while keeping them at their current rate, train standard employees in other tasks, etc. There's lots of places for that extra $20M to go instead of executives' pockets. And those places would be better for the company's future, if not for the executives' vacation destinations.

Re:The Problem with Robots

[JimSadler]

People underestimate the speed at which robots, computers and automation are displacing human workers. It is happening quite quickly and from areas that Americans usually do not think of as high tech. Spain is home to an extremely advanced strawberry picking machine. It can displace vast numbers of field workers. Taxi and truck drivers are about to be replaced. And the building trades are also on the verge of going without much human input.

Re: The Problem with Robots

[steveg]

Image a robot that can only pick things up off the floor and put them away.

Then work on that problem for ten or twenty years until you can build what you imagined.

It's not conglomerating a bunch of tasks together that's hard, it's that some of the tasks themselves are very hard.

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).

What the "doomsday" critics all have in common:

[kuzb]

Not one of them is an expert in AI systems.

Re:What the "doomsday" critics all have in common:

[dpidcoe]

When I was getting my degree, I had to take an "ethics" class geared towards CS students. Towards the end of the semester, we started discussing AI and how morality may or may not apply to it. The half of the class who had actually done some machine learning and had backgrounds in AI got really annoyed with it because 100% of the hand wringing in the assigned reading was done by philosophers and "futurists" with horrible track records.

The worst part about it is that to someone who's actually worked with this kind of stuff, the doomsday people look about as silly as that one senator who was afraid an island might tip over if they landed too many marines on one side of it. It's just so stupid that it tends to put one at a loss for words on how to even begin refuting it.

Re:Isaac Asimov:

[steveg]

Don't lose sight of the fact that the majority of stories in I, Robot were about the failure modes of the Three Laws. Why they didn't quite work as intended.

Re:My view

[rogoshen1]

why would you want the dog killing robot to take a dump in your yard?

There was a focus group for this.

[Minwee]

"Now I want you all to imagine the perfect DARPA robot. What would it be like?"

"It should be soft and cuddly."

"Yeah, with lots of firepower."

"Its eyes should be telescopes! No, periscopes! No, microscopes! Can you come back to me?"

"It should be full of surprises."

"It should never stop dancing."

"It should need accessories."

Re:Isaac Asimov:

[mi]

Why they didn't quite work as intended.

Oh, yes. But in none of them has a robot actually done harm to a human — and where that almost happened, the fault was with the modified 1st Law...

Easy Way to Kill Robophobia

[perry64]

When the sergeant tells the grunts that SOMETHING is going to have the carry the thousands of pounds of stuff (food, water, ammo, batteries, etc.) that the platoon requires - it can either be them or the the robots - I think that the grunts are going to get over whatever dislike of the robots they may have had.

Re:Easy Way to Kill Robophobia

[blue9steel]

Of course, in order for that to be helpful it needs to be a better choice than a Humvee. That means it needs to be smaller, more mobile, more fuel efficient. Manage that with a reasonable level of reliability (it has to be better than a mule) then sure, the troops will cheer all day long.