April 1, 2021 - 3:07pm
A little over a year ago, I went to visit the robotics lab of a well-known tech company for a piece I was writing, and spoke to a bunch of roboticists. It was incredible. The challenges of robotics are particular. With image recognition, say, you can train an AI on 10 billion images of dogs that you take from the internet. You can’t make a robot do a backflip 10 billion times to learn how it’s done; it would take about 600 years and would probably break the robot. The way they approached those challenges was absolutely fascinating.
The tech company wasn’t in Silicon Valley, but it was very much of Silicon Valley. Silicon-Valley-ish companies do incredible things. Last year, DeepMind solved the protein-folding problem. SpaceX launched humans into space, then landed the rocket again neatly on its pad. Just Meat started selling commercially available lab-grown meat.
This is ridiculous. It is future-stuff. It is science fiction.
But it’s easy to lose sight of that. The other day, Spotify announced that they were going to make it possible for podcasters to do live broadcasts. Hundreds of people — including journalists at Vox, Slate, and BuzzFeed — made the same joke: lol, they’ve invented radio. A few days earlier, an NYT tech columnist sniffed about Boston Dynamics — they of the backflip robot — inventing an Amazon-warehouse-shelf-stacking robot. “[A] pretty good metaphor for a lot of today’s AI and automation,” he said.
This is not new: “X. The techbros have invented X” is a whole genre of joke tweet/column. A few years ago, a silly startup tried to disrupt the smoothie market or something with a $400 blender called Juicero. It was very silly, and so the Washington Post, Newsweek, Vox, Slate etc lined up to tell us that it was “what’s wrong with Silicon Valley”.
But Silicon Valley-ish firms will, of course, do some silly things; there are thousands. But as Scott Alexander says, while Silicon Valley invented the Juicero, it’s also driven a world solar revolution. It’s flown the first zero-emissions hydrogen-powered commercial aircraft. It’s — I mean, look around you. What are you reading this on? The techbros have invented the modern world. For better or worse.
And even these recent examples: does anyone really think that Spotify doesn’t know that live radio exists? They’ve added a new function to their podcasting software. Now you can broadcast live. Yes, you could broadcast live via a radio station, if you happened to own a radio station. But most people do not own a radio station, and now if I want to start a Warhammer 40K live game report, I could do that. It’s not “just the radio”. It almost never is “X. They’ve invented X.”
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SubscribeIt will be an absolute disaster (in the short and medium term – next couple of decades, the long term will hopefully be fine), and I don’t understand why this is not *absolutely obvious* to everyone everywhere. I have been droning on about this for several years and most IT people in my ambit just go meh (because they will be least affected in the first instance). But most people outside IT are completely unprepared – because you will *not* be able to slow down or control where the tech applies – the biggest myth is thinking people, or rather their representatives the governments, have the option to pick and choose on the basis of which bits of tech are good and which is damaging – it does not work that way – it’s a steamroller and all of it will keep coming regardless.
My opinion only, but there are a couple of things to keep in mind:
Large scale job losses are coming far faster than economists especially, anticipate – my best guess is 2025 as the tipping point, when the world loses more jobs to automation than are created for people entering the job markets. Thereafter job loss will be precipitous. Demographic trends in the advanced nations don’t help – oldies like me working ever later into life. There will be a cliff edge, because thereafter both blue and white collar jobs will start falling off a cliff. The real disaster is on for poor nations, especially in sub-Saharan Africa.
There will be a race in the first instance – between fast dropping costs of tech produced goods and services, and slower dropping of wages in reaction. But it’s obvious where that heads. Costs cannot go to zero. But you sure can get to the point where large numbers of people without work cannot afford the cheapest goods.
“the biggest myth is thinking people, or rather their representatives the governments, have the option to pick and choose on the basis of which bits of tech are good and which is damaging – it does not work that way – it’s a steamroller and all of it will keep coming regardless.”
I agree, but I think what will slow the tech steamroller is the breakdown of Western societies. So much of the anger we’re seeing in the woke movement is really an outlet for the frustrations of young people whose opportunities are already much reduced due to technology and globalization. As this trend continues, and fewer people have any realistic hope of a meaningful career or a decent livelihood, I think we’ll see at least a partial breakdown of Western societies.
I agree varieties of societal roil will result. Not sure if it will slow either tech advance or the further permeation of new technologies. And yes, the anger of the young does seem to be some kind of displacement activity, at not being able to influence, let alone control the world they should rightfully have already inherited. It’s shocking that the boomer generation is *still* setting the tone of modernity, half a century on.
You can always go back to the 1970’s Science Fiction to find every possible future. (the automated future)
I remember one great story which describes a guy beginning his day, sheets stripped and put in garbage, new clothes on, breakfast served, a spoon full eaten and it binned to try some other breakfast instead, same again, changes clothes again after showering, clothes binned, new ones put on, new car taken to office, changes clothes in staff bathroom, new clothes put on, lunch served, tasted, rejected, another ordered, new flowers called for, new desk ordered as old one has hand prints on it…..
Meanwhile the CEO shows up in yesterday’s clothing on an old bicycle, goes into his cluttered and ragged office – and the junior guy wishes he could be as wealthy as his boss so he did not have to consume his daily level of $20,000 worth of stuff every day, which he knows is needed to maintain the economy, but it was so much work to do so every day. And he is glad he is not more junior as to have to consume $40,000 every day as he did when just starting out.
Sounds like you talking about The Midas Plague from the mid fifties. Frederik Pohl was a great writer.
Wasn’t he!
Oddly it’s those same young people who are demanding the breakdown of borders and increased globalisation not less.
This is why Gates gave us Covid. They have a solution.
Unless there is a nuclear war. Taiwan, Iran, North Korea, Kashmir and Ukraine might all kick one off in the next decade.
Well, yes, and they have also re-invented censorship in the style of the USSR etc, as we can see with the removal of people like Steven Crowder from YouTube.
Personally I think we might be ready for the return of the horse and cart as people get sick of technology.
I’m already there! I ditched the TV and mass media a decade ago. The day I quit or lose my job my cell phone goes into the Puget Sound. As far as I can tell they are building nothing but a totalitarian hellscape for us.
Today’s, April 1, issue was all sex and racism, what a ghastly issue it was, till this more interesting article. That it means the end of humanity, and us all to be unemployed and living on lab grown meat at the sufferance of our robot masters is almost cheering after the articles preceding. happy April Fools day, you all are completely messed up and doomed.
I hope Unherd could get back to its roots and do an interview with PANDA, the amazing group who holds Lockdown not only had caused a hundred times more harm than helped, but that the leaders of this crime against humanity need punishing as they knew what harm they were causing.
NEXT I want Unherd to do a series on the costs of Lockdown. I want to read all about the 12 Trillion of Fiscal/Monetary stimulus and the coming great depression.recession, the ignorance of the youth after missing a vital year of school, the psychological harms to all, the lost business, the weird NHS and its trail of illness by neglect of its real function…And who is to blame, the Nuremberg as it were, as Biden, that Great Reset stooge, just said Covid was as bad as WWI, WWII, Korea, and Vietnam all rolled into one. This means a great War Crimes Trial needs to happen!
Please back off on this issue’s direction, get back to the post Lockdown world – that is the real story.
The conceptual map / diagram puts writing in the highest peak, while showing the rising sea level lapping at the shores of translation. And of course, if one is translating a road sign, this is no doubt true. But I remember a friend commenting that a computer would be able to write a novel before it would satisfactorily be able to translate one, because the latter process required more empathy.
Lab-cultured faux meat is NOT a good thing.
You think? The WEF says we will be eating meal worms with our lab meat too. Great stuff I’m sure.
Bill Gates cuisine I believe? He seems to be buying up lots of land-presumably to stop farmers grazing cattle-separate the Americans from their steaks-surely not!
The link I’m placing just below this sentence is to a very interesting blog post titled “No, DeepMind has not solved protein folding”, there are also many other other pieces of writing like it that explain how no they did not indeed “solve protein folding”, they did something interesting but its mostly hype.
http://occamstypewriter.org/scurry/2020/12/02/no-deepmind-has-not-solved-protein-folding/
As for cars being able to do self driving, that appears to still be just hype, it doesn’t seem as though they’ve got any models that generalize yet, and they release these videos and press releases that if you peel back the layers turn out to be mostly hollow PR.
There’s a real chance, perhaps not above fifty percent, but a real chance none the less, that we’ll soon reach a tech plateau and not see much new that’s interesting for quite a while.
MOORE’s LAW! and in fact it is out of date, it triples now, and in 6 years will be quadrupling, and then it really gets going….
Hmmm… I know Moore’s Law to be quickly slowing down and has been for years, in fact its approaching its end, do an internet search for the phrase “Moore’s Law ending”. Is there something I’ve missed?
They can keep squeezing out more processing power from optimizing chips for certain tasks and continuing the endless work of optimizing software, and they will do all that. But while for some years we may get boosts from that, its just not the same, Moore’s Law was a significant boost to human development, and the fact of the matter is that its ending (you could say already ended, and years ago, really).
Major tech companies, notably Google, now run research operations similar to the old Bell Labs in its heyday. Bell Labs was very much an industrial research lab but it also provided scope for scientists researching fundamental problems to do original work with no immediate application but which might be paradigm shifting. Many leading academics of the era did a stint at Bell Labs which, among other things, lead to the discovery of semiconductors and lasers.
Today, computer scientists at Google, for example, contributed to the extremely rapid solution of the three-dimensional structure of proteins encoded by SARS-covid-19 virus. That information will help drug discovery targeting those proteins.
The tech companies appear to be becoming not just the IT leaders of the future but the scientific leaders of the future. No doubt that will increase their importance (and invulnerability to antitrust attack?).
For now, Western universities train most of the scientific talent that the tech companies hire. Given how the progressive left are attacking traditional science, I’m not sure how much longer our higher education institutions will maintain that lead.
awaiting for approval, awaiting for approval, awaiting for approval….
“Miranda:
O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world
That has such people in’t!
Prospero:
‘Tis new to thee.”
as Shakespeare, the forbidden poet of the modern schools, put it.
Bell Labs indeed had some seminal figures in it’s ranks, who created our modern world, but they are almost completely unknown to the general public. The extraordinary Claude Shannon (who pretty much singlehandedly invented Information Theory) and William Shockley, (co-inventor of the transistor) who set the ball rolling on Silicon Valley, come to mind.
First they released a gain of function virus from a lab. Now we have travel and business restrictions worldwide. Tech will provide a “covid”passport to track and trace us. They aren’t trying to help anybody. They are trying to enslave us.
Astonishingly, the takeover of the world by IT people was in fact prophesied by JC on that famous occasion of the Sermon on the Mount, when he foretold, ‘blessed are the geek, for they shall inherit the earth’. Matthew misheard and misreported it in 5:5, because he didn’t have his hearing aid in. Impressively prescient of JC to have forecast Gates, Brin, Ellison, Musk, et al, two millenia on. But then, you wouldn’t expect any less from the Son of God.
There are many comments below on how the end of the world is nigh.
Just think on one issue farming. 300 years ago, around 90% of the population (in the UK) were involved in farming. Today around 2%.
Even with Covid we do not have 88% unemployment as a result, nor are we starving.
This might sound uber pessimistic, but I am no longer convinced what happened in the past will happen this time. The difference is speed and scale.
In past industrial revolutions, step change was limited on either scale or speed, such that human societies as a whole could eventually adjust even when there were localised hotspots of pain. This time is different. On scale, everything and everyone is affected simultaneously: automation will eat large numbers of entire professions, both blue and white collar, within a decade. On speed, tech advance is already overthrowing older practices within five to ten year windows (cf the smartphone), and this is accelerating. At an individual level we face multiple revolutions within a single working lifetime.
To support your stance, you should be able to point to employments that will accommodate hundreds of millions across the globe. And not with hypothetical types of work that will emerge in the future, but what we see right now. Because automation is not three decades away, or even three years away. It is here *now*. And it looks set to decimate in short order not just repetitive manufacturing work (sweatshops in the east etc), but swathes of highly educated office work – accountants, actuaries etc. Such people can adapt and reinvent themselves, but what will the less skilled bulk of humanity do? In a decade of debating this question with all types of people including some high-end academics, I have found no one who can point to what work they will do. If you have ideas, I’m all ears.
Corona is an excellent example to pinpoint on it and scrutinize, of how the techbro are a failure all along. Of course, the words and pictures they are using for describing themselves in the media, which is also under their control, is far from reality. Words are doing the job mostly because applying and materializing the opposing meanings those words meant to. This kind of brutality to the finest chords of meanings, aims to affect the reality we might sometimes share with them such as via TV or by using their mobile phones. In fact, if there is bigtech, is happening by words alone due to divert our attention. They treat us as children giving us toys to control our behavior, they are doing it again and again.. by introducing new models, however tech and science have reached their farthest, they cannot go beyond this point.. what we are experiencing with corona is exactly this.. they have hit the wall, it is their swan song..they have repudiated all principles they were built upon their metanarratives. No, big tech, is not big other than an illusion they wish for themselves and projecting it on to the rest of us. In fact, all they do is out of severe mental and psyche deficiencies and distrust to themselves. They also destroy nature to a scale as never before, they need tremendous resources and behave as the entire planet belongs to them.. but yes, it is you and me writing on paper that we are the bad guys and please before you print think the environment which the printer’s and computer’s manufacturers have never had any intention to do so… The truth is that bigtech is just machinery as anything else. Hopefully, many more the sooner will realize their true purpose and start taking out of their houses TVs and stop using mobile phones. It is those 2 evil machines without them there would have never been corona. As for the job loses … can anyone please let me know of any ideas what is gone happen to those trillions upon trillions of products manufacturing the robots ect… when nobody will be able to buy them?… or only a tiny portion of the earth’s population?.. and if the population is reduced to a few millions then.. what is the purpose of all this machinery when nobody will need mass production anyway?
Another rising water level metaphor for you:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRG8eq7miUE
you can train an AI
I recently did a brief (which took me about 10 hours) introductory free online course in English on AI by the university of Helsinki, which I would highly recommend to readers who are comfortable with basic maths and statistics (they remind me of the bits you need.)
They were actually scathing about people who say an AI or similar. I am afraid I agree.
sorry, they remind YOU of the bits you need on the course
Robotic efficiency isn’t political but deciding what to be efficient about is. UK wise it does destroy the elite imposed GDP growth through immigration issue because we ‘need’ workers as if immigration is zero cost and 100% growth. Capitalists and culture warriors are strangely agreed on the need for immigration. Real environmentalists want more rewilding. Far better if we’d had circa 40m people in the UK over time.
Yeah sure.. You have to dodge human feces to walk about the tent filled cities of San Francisco but hey… maybe the robot dogs can pick up the poop? Maybe the amazon robot stackers can make tents more affordable? At least the techbros and investment bankers are living well? Some world. I think I’ll pass.I’m just going to focus on going old tech and more rural. Being debt free, growing food on my land, owning the roof over my head, having a source of water and the ability to get rid of poop (preferable private well and septic system since we can’t depend on the government and the techbros to care about these things anymore), having a source of energy for heat and mobility, knowing my neighbors and working with the people in my community to try and protect ourselves against the increasing fascism as best as we can. Our future is a fight against these forces that are wasting resources that could help humanity instead of pursuing technology for power and privilege by hanging a noose around our necks. What is coming out of silicon valley is a curse and a dangerous evil. Humanity is suffering from it.