System Error by Rob Reich

Author:Rob Reich
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harper
Published: 2021-07-23T00:00:00+00:00

Beware the Bogeyman

Science fiction writers have long conjured up worlds where machines have become more intelligent than humans and humans become subservient to our new robot overlords. In our present age of massive advances in artificial intelligence, there are already domains in which machines can reliably outperform humans. But is this something we should worry about? The answer is complicated, and how it plays out will depend on the kind of tasks we give over to machines and the way we design the interactions between machines and humans.

One conventional way to trace the history of AI is by its success in defeating humans at various tasks. In 1959, Arthur Samuel, who popularized the term machine learning, developed a computer program that played checkers and could improve—could seemingly “learn”—by playing against itself. It was not until 1994 that a computer program could defeat the human world checkers champion. Then, in 1997, front-page stories in newspapers around the world announced that IBM’s Deep Blue computer had “unseated humanity” by defeating the reigning chess champion, Garry Kasparov. In 2011, IBM’s Watson system, built to play the TV quiz show Jeopardy, soundly defeated the two former all-time winners, Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings. Final score: Rutter with $21,600, Jennings with $24,000, and Watson with $77,147. In 2017, scientists from Google’s DeepMind group used machine learning to build a program that would go on to beat Ke Jie, the number one Go player in the world. Until that time, many game players believed that Go, a game that has far more than a billion billion billion more board configurations than chess, was beyond the scope of world-championship, or even expert-level, play by a computer. The success of AlphaGo left many of those gamers startled, with some players reporting the computer’s play as “from another dimension.”

These are astonishing technical accomplishments. And they’re just the beginning. Rapid advances in artificial intelligence and its deployment in autonomous systems herald an age in which machines can outperform humans at more than just games. On the one hand, the automation of unpleasant, dangerous, alienating, or mind-numbingly repetitive tasks has already proved to be a blessing for many. On the other hand, the automation of other kinds of tasks from which we humans derive meaning, pleasure, and fulfillment may become a curse and herald a transformation in the very meaning of what it is to be human.

Do you enjoy doing laundry? Almost no one does, and this despite the fact that doing laundry today is easier than it ever has been. Before the advent of washing machines, cleaning clothes was a time-consuming process of soaking, soaping, rinsing, and drying each garment. The washing machine is nothing more than an automated system that relieves the need for human labor. And to the great benefit of humanity! Washing machines not only liberated humans from the boring, labor-intensive task of doing laundry but, given the traditional division of labor in households around the world, freed women in particular from drudgery. Does anyone lament the diminished place of human labor in the task of doing laundry? We doubt it.

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