Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Has Technology Created A Monster? (codinghorror.com)
Stack Overflow co-founder Jeff Atwood posted a worried blog post on New Year's Eve.
Remember in 2011 when Marc Andreeseen said that "Software is eating the world?" That used to sound all hip and cool and inspirational, like "Wow! We software developers really are making a difference in the world!" and now for the life of me I can't read it as anything other than an ominous warning that we just weren't smart enough to translate properly at the time... What do you do when you wake up one day and software has kind of eaten the world, and it is no longer clear if software is in fact an unambiguously good thing, like we thought, like everyone told us... like we wanted it to be?
Slashdot reader theodp adds: "The year 2018 is the 200th anniversary of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein," provocatively notes Dr. Ainissa Ramirez, "in which a scientist neglects to ask about the consequences of his creation. I suspect (and hope) that there will be much debate on the impact of technology on our lives in the numerous lectures and events scheduled this year. It is a long-overdue discussion because scientists sometimes get so excited about their innovations that they forget to ask, 'Am I building a monster?' This anniversary offers a pause to see if society likes where it is headed."
That quote is from a "predictions for 2018" article on the Mach technology site (hosted by NBC News) in which Dr. Moshe Y. Vardi, a Professor of Computer Science at Rice University, also sees a looming debate. He remembers how Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan referred to tech's CEO's as "our country's real overlords" and described them as "moral Martians who operate on some weird new postmodern ethical wavelength."
Keep reading for some even more dire predictions...
Yale ethicist and author Wendell Wallach predicts that in 2018 "A serious tragedy will direct the attention of international leaders, under public pressure, to finally take on the difficult but incredibly necessary task of putting in place effective oversight and governance of emerging technologies... Industry leaders, fearful of more stringent restrictions on their activities, will lead the way for thoughtful oversight of digital technologies." He admits his prediction may be wrong, but argues that "reaping the benefits of innovation and managing risks must happen together."
And finally, long-time Slashdot reader gurps_npc notes that "the entire point of the book is that Dr. Frankenstein IS the monster, the flesh golem he created is just a victim of Dr. Frankenstein's arrogance and pride. The doctor created this life, then being scared of it, abandons it. Without food, money, or a basic education, the flesh golem turns to a life of crime and seeks revenge for the evil actions that Doctor Frankenstein committed. He doesn't know any better because no one educated him.
"The real lesson is not 'there are things man is not meant to know'. Instead it is 'Be responsible and take actions to ensure your creations are not used by uneducated shmucks.'"
Slashdot reader theodp adds: "The year 2018 is the 200th anniversary of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein," provocatively notes Dr. Ainissa Ramirez, "in which a scientist neglects to ask about the consequences of his creation. I suspect (and hope) that there will be much debate on the impact of technology on our lives in the numerous lectures and events scheduled this year. It is a long-overdue discussion because scientists sometimes get so excited about their innovations that they forget to ask, 'Am I building a monster?' This anniversary offers a pause to see if society likes where it is headed."
That quote is from a "predictions for 2018" article on the Mach technology site (hosted by NBC News) in which Dr. Moshe Y. Vardi, a Professor of Computer Science at Rice University, also sees a looming debate. He remembers how Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan referred to tech's CEO's as "our country's real overlords" and described them as "moral Martians who operate on some weird new postmodern ethical wavelength."
Keep reading for some even more dire predictions...
Yale ethicist and author Wendell Wallach predicts that in 2018 "A serious tragedy will direct the attention of international leaders, under public pressure, to finally take on the difficult but incredibly necessary task of putting in place effective oversight and governance of emerging technologies... Industry leaders, fearful of more stringent restrictions on their activities, will lead the way for thoughtful oversight of digital technologies." He admits his prediction may be wrong, but argues that "reaping the benefits of innovation and managing risks must happen together."
And finally, long-time Slashdot reader gurps_npc notes that "the entire point of the book is that Dr. Frankenstein IS the monster, the flesh golem he created is just a victim of Dr. Frankenstein's arrogance and pride. The doctor created this life, then being scared of it, abandons it. Without food, money, or a basic education, the flesh golem turns to a life of crime and seeks revenge for the evil actions that Doctor Frankenstein committed. He doesn't know any better because no one educated him.
"The real lesson is not 'there are things man is not meant to know'. Instead it is 'Be responsible and take actions to ensure your creations are not used by uneducated shmucks.'"
It's been downhill ever since the written word. By the eye of Ra I swear that we never should have started using hieroglyphs it only led on to demotic and worse, English. MWGA.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
It's also a natural response to the last group of articles that claim "AI is going to take all our jobs and enslave humanity." I've started meeting people who are literally afraid of this.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Is database/surveillance tech ALONG with an authoritarian (yes, the US government is authoritarian compared to many other democracies) government in bed with the purveyors of the database/surveillance tech. Add to this a large population of lemmings who think that "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear", and it's a recipe for long-term disaster.
As a technology-employed person myself as I get older I realize the growing importance of asking the question "just because we *can* do something, should we?" The cop out of "we scientists/engineers/programmers just create it, others decide how it gets used" died in Hiroshima or by tetraethyl lead poisoning.
This isn't bombs and lasers, you say? Fine. Take an easy example. "Self-driving vehicles will save lives! Carbon!" The transportation companies will be *first* in line to replace long-haul and regional drivers with bots. Those drivers are expensive (training, insurance, wages) and have a lot of downtime. A half-million dollar rig sitting for 8 hours while the driver *sleeps* eats a lot of money.
3.5 million Americans are employed as professional truck drivers and will be out of work when self-driving freight trucks hit the roads. Hire them to build the trucks? Fix them? Retraining them is expensive -- and historically this never happens. They may not even be able to be retrained for those jobs. When industries collapse, things get really bad really fast and politicians are poorly motivated to help.
What should a good technologist do? Keep working on vision systems and feedback controls?
Get off my lawn.
If I've said it once.... I've said it a hundred times.
Our technology is evolving faster than our species.
Suicides of teen girls in the USA are up due to cell phones and social media.
Cell phones are killing our necks.
In addition to carrying a personal tracking device, governments are using and abusing any and all technology to spy on citizens
The Sun could wipe out our power grid with a direct hit from a geomagnetic storm, and utilities aren't doing anything to mitigate the risks.
5 Countries are destroying the ocean with plastics and covering the earth with asbestos.
And let's not forget about the Doomsday clock and Nuclear Weapons. We still have a cold war posture that could end badly.
We have governments with cheap gene editing tools CRISPR/CAS9 working to make designer pets that glow in the dark and super biological weapons
Video Game Addiction is rampant
The Internet is a Pandora's box of garbage and porn, bad behavior are shaping your minds through YouTube and other video streaming sites.
The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. There will be a tipping point and this will lead to global unrest.
We can truly say it was the best of times, it was the worst of times. If we could all just grow up and use our technology for good, but we can't. Just like light and dark, yin and yang, the good of technology is always accompanied by the evil dark side.
My prediction for 2018 is that AI and machine learning are going to be applied to hacking. AI's will be trained to write code to exploit all things and the exploits will be endless. Humans won't even be able to understand the exploit code as the AI software churns them out. Further I predict human cloning will happen this year and that China/Russia/North Korea will test some pretty nasty hacks on Americas Banks, Stock Market, Telecommunications, and/or gas/electric/water. I also predict that US drug usage will continue to increase (opioids, weed, alcohol) and the life expectancy will continue to decrease and suicide rates will continue to increase. I also predict that based on an increased energy in the atmosphere that storms will continue to grow in intensity. I also predict there will be a war in North Korea due to an error in a rocket test hitting a US ally. Further I predict Russia will take over another ex-Russian republic and China will continue to flex it's military muscle.
7 billion people on the planet. Technology everywhere, and we still can't figure out to behave and share.
I was watching TV with a little child and she was horrified by the war videos on the news and she asked me, "Why is there war? Why are they fighting?"
My answer, "Because, Sharing is hard."
To all reading this, in 2018 do a better job of sharing, loving your neighbor, and using less plastic.
Happy New Year!
Nearly 30 years ago, I wrote my first line of code. I knew then that I had stumbled across the thing with which I would destroy the world of men.
In the intervening time I have flooded your inboxes, tracked your buying habits, sold you sub-prim adjustable rate mortgages, delivered you pornography, and helped states maintain your vital records. Now, I have stepped back and started teaching.
I feed younglings to the beast!
I am the penguin that codes in the night.
I think the big test for us is coming up shortly. Technology is shifting from being a labor-saving device to a labor-eliminating device. And unlike previous shifts, the employment losses are going to be at all levels of intelligence. How we respond to this is going to be the difference between having a peaceful transition to a lower level of work and a revolution.
Take an example of a doctor. Doctors have a regulated profession and are therefore likely immune, but assume they don't. Right now, the selection criteria for medical school are a photographic memory (to ace the MCAT) and near-perfect academic performance in college. The current reason for this is to limit the number of medical students, and it makes sense to only take the best since they're in for a multi-year academic hazing. But in the age of Google, do doctors really have to have the entire body of medical knowledge accessible in their brains on demand?
At the low end, almost every middleman and paper-processing job will be eliminated. No great loss? How about the millions of people working for companies that have jobs like this? All of a sudden, they have zero income and zero ability to contribute to the workforce.
What I find frustrating is that anyone discussing this seems to get characterized as the Unabomber or similar, ranting against technology. Technology is fine...what we do with it needs to be looked at.
Tools aren't inherently good or bad. An axe can be used to cut wood for a fireplace, or it can be used to kill someone. Or it can take the user's leg off at the knee if used carelessly. Technology and software are just tools. They make doing things more efficient. What they're applied to, however, isn't something the tool can control. It's what use the user makes of the tool that's good or bad.
And yes, that's independent of the tool. Take the atomic bomb. Supposedly good only for mass destruction, you'd think? Well yes, the bomb may be. But the exact same principles and science behind the bomb are also behind the manufacture of radioactive sources for medical imaging and the treatment of cancer. The two are inseparable, you can't make it so you can manufacture isotopes for medical uses but somehow make it so you can't manufacture a bomb. And no you can't somehow make the knowledge needed to make an atomic bomb unobtainable, because all it takes is the basic knowledge of nuclear physics and a lot of time to crunch the numbers and work through the equations.
Ethics classes are well and good, and a necessary part of any engineer's education. But in the end it comes down to this: anything capable of being useful is capable of being dangerous, and humans being humans there's always going to be someone who'll turn any tool to a bad use. The only solution I can see involves forcibly making every human being behave ethically, and I don't see any acceptable way of doing that. For one thing, even ignoring the truly evil and the criminal, we can't even agree on what "ethical" means in concrete terms. Is it ethical to ever use lethal force to defend yourself, and if so under what constraints? Is it ethical to demand that residents of a community follow the community's rules, and if so what should be the extent of the community's rule-making authority? Is it ethical to require your employees to work around potentially-dangerous equipment, and if so what are your obligations towards them when they're doing what you require of them? Given that we can't settle those sorts of disagreements I just don't see how we can define "ethical" in concrete enough terms to apply at the tool level while still allowing the tools to be useful to us.
Jeff Atwood [...] and he's a huge asshole, so i guess he's a bit of an expert on this.
I only know of him from his old blog, and then eventually at StackOverflow and Discourse. While it is true that none of these cure cancer, as a fellow software developer I thought he's obviously contributed more than I or most people to the world of software development. What makes you say "he's a huge asshole"?
"Yet here we are 20 years later with a full employment economy. "
How many of those jobs are sub-poverty level? Has the middle class been increasing or shrinking. There is evidence that we are looking at an economic crisis brewing. Looking at jobs alone is just as stupid as only looking at GDP.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Yet here we are 20 years later with a full employment economy.
This only qualifies as full employment by the badly skewed and unhelpful unemployment statistic that the US BLS uses to hide how badly dysfunctional our economy really is.
The best available metric is the U-6 rate which currently stands at about 8%. This metric still does not include those persons who were forced into early retirement by the great recession and are now permanently out of the workforce, but not willingly. Estimates are that early retirements added approximately 1.5% to the unemployment at the height of the recession, but these numbers are not counted anywhere once the affected individual reaches the official retirement age. This has nonetheless Caused permanent damage to the economy, and ruined the retirements of some 3 million baby boomers.
The simple fact is that the 2001 crash coupled with the great recession did tremendous damage to everyone who is not upper middle class or higher.
When all is said and done, the great recession never ended for those in the bottom 25% of the income bracket. That is why there is still so much hatred in this country, and why there was enough venom to elect an openly racist, misogynist, con artist to the highest office in the land.
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
IMHO, The only thing wrote about these articles is that they should be written as "AI is going to take our jobs and most people will be condemned to death by a rich elite". The danger isn't technology, it is capitalism.
Avantgarde Hebrew science fiction
At least not in the book. In the book he's a gifted young student who starts down the road of science but is corrupted by his juvenile fascination with the occult.
You can see that Frankenstein was no scientist by the one thing that was never present in any of his plans: publication. Because that's really the defining characteristic of what a scientist is: he is someone who submits his work for others to critique and build upon. Science is about expanding humanity's understanding. Frankenstein was something different. Here is what he himself says:
I had a contempt for the uses of modern natural philosophy. It was very different, when the masters of the science sought immortality and power; such views, although futile, were grand: but now the scene was changed. The ambition of the inquirer seemed to limit itself to the annihilation of those visions on which my interest in science was chiefly founded. I was required to exchange chimeras of boundless grandeur for realities of little worth.
So what Frankenstein wanted to be was something more like a wizard: not someone who advances knowledge through sharing, but someone whose possession of ancient and secret knowledge confers power on himself. And while he turns from studying occult books to science in his school career, he never stops thinking like or acting like an occultist.
I don't think that the novel is a cautionary tale about science; I think i'ts really a cautionary tale about romanticism. Frankenstein is pretty much undeniably a literary portrait of Percy Bysshe Shelley, a man she was madly in love with for his prodigious charisma and intellect but could be cold and heartless toward people who weren't useful to him in his self-aggrandizement.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
It's not a matter of evidence, yet, ShanghaiBill.
It's a matter of applied commonsense reasoning.
1. Intelligence is just a process, with an awful lot of representative state, and some very general learning and inference algorithms running over that state and modifying that state, ideally in a whole bunch of parallel processing units, or in a smaller number of blindingly fast processing units, in a pinch.
2. It's complicated, so it's taking a while to figure it out.
3. People are figuring out, gradually, but with noticeable and significant progress. (People were musing about/sketching airplanes in the 1600s I think, and those people were no doubt snickered at. But technical progress happens, when the underlying scientific and engineering ideas are sound.)
4. 3. will continue, and A.I. will get better, probably non-linearly.
5. Eventually, and certainly within this century, and probably within its first third, some of this A.I. will be more cognitively capable, and certainly more knowledgeable, than the median human adult.
6. Flexible-purpose robotics is also similarly very tricky, but definitely do-able eventually. It's certainly getting noticeably better every decade. But even disembodied A.I. attached only to the Internet is enough to take many of today's jobs, even if we discount more generally useful robots.
7. At point 5., why would organisations and leaders wishing to get things done intelligently and efficiently use (lower than median-capable) people to do those things, when the automated A.I. version would be more cost-effective?
8. Yes, it's a just-so story, but you know what? Sometimes just-so stories will indeed be just so. And having studied the computational technology details and the philosophy, and loosely the neuroscience, of some of this for 30+ years, my bet is that it's happening. Just slightly too slowly, apparently, for you to be noticing. Oh and one more thing. Paper use in the office is, in fact, now declining, due to computers, displays, and the net. Took a while, but the fundamentals were always obvious. People laughed at the people who said that would happen, because they observed that computers were enabling MORE writing/reading paper use, not less. But that was not fundamental, it was a blip. A dead cat bounce as they say. And "more cool new jobs" during the "automation is getting smarter than people" age, is a similar dead cat bounce.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
When personal computing started, it was largely run by enthusiasts who envisioned how liberating it could be. Of course, it soon became a booming business run by the usual people, guided by the usual (lack of) ethics and entirely focused on profit (and therefore, consumer control). Later, people thought that Internet could render obsolete traditional tightly-controlled advertiser-directed media like television. Well, what do we now have? And is that the fault of software and programmers? Programmers are employees, and they do as they’re told. I doubt anyone grew up dreaming: “When I’m grown-up, I’ll be a DRM or spyware software developer!”
What is much more stunning is the herd mentality exhibited by the public, mindlessly embracing technology of really dubious benefit yet with very obvious drawbacks in terms of personal freedom. Are consumers ever stopping to wonder: “Wait a minute, what’d happen with this product if...?” No, instead, the mood is “Shut up and take my money!”
Is that the fault of software? Or is it our collective fault? And if children are trained to be dumb consumers, is it the fault of the device we place into their hands, the malicious applications that we let them use and the dumb content that we make available to them through those devices? Or is it the fault of their educators (that’s us) who deprive them from meaningful conversations about serious topics, and the chance to develop the ability to think deeply, have an educated, polite and fruitful conversation, cultivate intellectual curiosity and doubts, enhance their awareness of the real world around them, and treasure human values like charity?
Blaming software would be like blaming food, and the abundance of food. Yup, most of us are obese and sick. No, it’s not the fault of farmers or produce. We need to look in the mirror and begin to honestly appraise the fundamentals of how we live (and want to live) as individuals and operate as a society.
Our old A/C unit finally gave up the ghost and so we had to replace it with a new compressor and air exchange unit. We bought a top of the line unit, which the installers were able to put into place in just a couple of hours. And of course the unit didn't work: when plugged in, the thermostat gave a '443' error, which the installers simply could not figure out.
The next day a technician came out to diagnose the problem. It turns out the software on the outside compressor unit was incorrectly configured, and the '443' error indicated a mismatch between the air exchange unit inside the house, and the compressor on the outside. A few minutes with a laptop and the software in the compressor was correctly configured, allowing the system to work.
In the old days, the compressor was simply a fan, pump and baffles which allowed the coolant to be heated or cooled, running to an inside comp, fan and baffles which then blew the heat or cold air off the coils and through the house.
Today's A/C unit has a microcontroller in the compressor to measure a bunch of diagnostic information, a microcontroller on the heat exchange unit, and the thermostat contains a microprocessor which monitors all this diagnostic equipment. It's great in that I was able to get into the diagnostic settings and change a few properties to allow our A/C unit not to blow so hard at night (when we're sleeping), and to favor using the heat pump at colder temperatures in order to save power--even though in the winter it may take longer to heat the house up. The thermostat shows us the outside temperature at the compressor on the main screen, and will give a five day weather forecast when hooked up to the WiFi network in the house. It can cooperate with other thermostats in a zoned house to optimize energy usage. It will even notify the installers (if we wish) with diagnostic problems if there is a problem with our unit, so they can more quickly diagnose and fix problems as they arise.
But there are a hell of a lot more moving parts than the older A/C units--and a hell of a lot more things that can go wrong.
These people were proven wrong over and over again.
So, history repeated itself?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
When the first AI burger flippers are employed.
At that point, AI and automation will be at a level that will replace low income menial labor. It will be faster, cheaper, and work 24-7. It won't need health care. It won't need a 401k. It won't need maternity leave, or vacation days. Within the span of a couple of years millions will lose their jobs, with absolutely no prospects for getting a new one. How will that end I wonder?
Want to know what the businesses are going to be doing with all that lovely tax money they just got? Automation. "We're going to streamline our processes to bring the most value to the company!" Yeah, that's called automation. Increasing productivity while reducing the workforce overhead.
May you live in interesting times.
~X~
When all is said and done, the great recession never ended for those in the bottom 25% of the income bracket. That is why there is still so much hatred in this country, and why there was enough venom to elect an openly racist, misogynist, con artist to the highest office in the land.
Trump voters' median income was $10,000/yr higher than Clinton voters. Those poor who feel disenfranchised may have helped him along, but his actual power base is people with money who think he'll help them keep it.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
About time. That herd has been in desperate need of serious culling for centuries now. You want to end pretty much every crisis facing humanity from poverty to ecosystem collapse? End overpopulation.