Meet Your Robot Overlords

I am leading a panel later this month in Vitoria, Brazil titled: "Meet Your AI Overlords." Panelists will grapple with the possibility of an AI uprising, the growing use of autonomous robotics in the military and will discuss how AI exerts more and more control over our daily lives. Creating a brain for 25 kinds of military robots gave me some understanding of the challenges associated with creating useful AI as well as the challenge of keeping the human front and center. We don't need to give robots a soul, but we do need to preserve and respect the human soul. It may be harder to do this than you think.

In Brazil, depictions in film and fiction will inevitably surface including the Terminator movies where robots take over and seek to eliminate humanity and the Matrix franchise where robots take over but enslave humanity. Both of these focus on the AI, but obscure the human hand and will that set the AI in motion. If we fear robots it is because we fear humans. Whether you love AI or hate it, remember that it's never about the AI... It's always about the human. The human who created the AI... the company that controls the AI... the user who interfaces with the AI.

Less likely to surface in Brazil, the Flaming Lips' depiction of Yoshimi is one of my favorite 90's tunes:

https://youtu.be/AzlMeTxVdH8?si=J9prehx1994ECHeX

The name is Yoshimi. She's a black belt in karate. Working for the city. She has to discipline her body. Cause she knows that it's demanding to defeat those evil machines. I know she can beat them. Yoshimi they don't believe me. But you won't let those robots eat me. Those evil-natured robots. They're programmed to destroy us. She's gotta be strong to fight them. So she's takin' lots of vitamins. Cause she knows that it'd be tragic if those evil robots win.

I love the 90s. Back then we all knew, deep in our hearts, that AI was going to run amok and be bad for humans. Very bad. Today we have Roz the "Wild Robot" who learns to love while raising a gosling. Don't believe it for a moment! Be like Yoshimi and eat your vitamins.

By the 2000's, society had learned a lot about fighting AI. I can point you to a vital film that tells us all we need to know. I'm talking about Disney's The Incredibles. The audience meets a quirky family of supers -- super humans with incredible strength, speed, force fields.. even stretchiness. Mr Incredible is a fascinating specimen not only because of his super strength, but also because of his human failings. He gets upset, can't hold down a job and struggles with his ego. He's being told he's got to fit in so he hides his most defining characteristics.. two in particular. One is his strength, but the other is even more impressive and gets him in even more trouble... his ability to thwart bureaucracy.

While masquerading as a normal human, Mr. Incredible works for an insurance company... one that doesn't want to pay claims. The elderly woman in his office would never know how to thwart the elaborate system if it weren't for his super human ability to guide her through the red tape. In my favorite scene, the same actor who played the Sicilian in the Princess Bride provides a cameo as the personification of every corporate stooge. If you haven't seen it already, you really must see it now.

https://youtu.be/mC_97F2Zn9k?si=YJMBkFgGt8ve9Tby&t=52

The rest of the movie follows his journey as he takes on the ultimate foe: a fast learning AI killer robot. I kinda wish he'd nurtured his inner Honoré de Balzac and continued to fight the real enemy of humanity -- corporate bureaucracy.

Eating vitamins and disciplining your body might not help in the war against AI. Here in the year 2024, the real danger is much less exciting than battling evil robots. The real danger is that corporations will use AI to better enact corporate will. They've replaced Mr Incredible with an AI system to ensure you can't pull on the chords of a human soul. If you can't plead with a real human who understands your plight, how are you ever going to get your cell phone company to fix the bill?

I once spent three months trying to deal with a billing fiasco where I was being charged for sim cards I had never received. In order to cancel the lines I needed the phone numbers but in order to get the phone numbers I needed to activate the sim cards, but I couldn't do that... because they didn't exist. So I couldn't cancel them. As far as the company was concerned I could continue paying for the rest of my life.

I am not sure which is worse, an AI that can't help us or a human that won't help us. It took five different tries with five different humans till I found one who actually cared about finding a solution. She relished the task of fighting the machine. She told me she would make it her personal mission to go all the way up the chain and she did. She eventually did win the war against the machine, but it required that she take some vitamins and discipline her body. She did actually start yelling at her own billing department until they finally fixed the problem. Listening to the sound of her soul kindle nearly brought tears to my eyes. My telecom maven is the real super! She is my Yoshime. The others were robots --the wrong kind of robots. They do what they are told and read the script. Don't be one of those evil human robots.

AI will be programmed to deal with the basics envisioned by the company... but will be incapable of dealing with the edge cases you need sorted. Today, if you are lucky and persistent you can still find that one human in the company willing to stick their neck out and take on the machine. Tomorrow your Yoshime may be harder to find.

So compared to James Cameron's vision of the robot apocalypse, my cell phone bill doesn't sound so bad. Unfortunately, corporate skullduggery is not the only danger of AI. Actually, I do have concerns about putting weapons onto robots. Just after narrowly escaping the Y2K apocalypse, I started work on the first of its kind killer robot -- a 300lb machine that could chase down people using a combination of visual, laser and thermal tracking. We tested it with the Navy in an abandoned bunker, chasing down naval reservists as they attempted to get past the robot. At first it was just a camera system to track them but then a turret and paint ball gun was added. In a formal experiment, none of the humans managed to evade the robot.

Warfighters seem to always find a way to take that next step. You can build a robot to find bombs and when you turn your back, they'll figure out a way to turn it into a bomb. Just last week, we took our latest GPS denied robotic technology to White Sands Missile Range thinking we could use the positioning technology for landmine detection. When the new General flew in to see it he immediately wanted to use the robots as weapons.

The use of lethal force on robots is a real and present issue... but it isn't actually autonomous robots that are handing out the death sentences right now. That's being done by humans using first person view (FPV) drones to take our tanks in Ukraine.

https://youtu.be/WC5fD_B-o80?si=t0P7R6lvwn9wmxiT&t=42

The FPV pilots must be close, often within the range of enemy fire, to control drones in this way. This danger is accelerating a push towards autonomy in hopes that the human can remain at a safe distance. Instead of teleoperation or full autonomy the W8less team is working on shared human-robot teaming approach which gamifies the real world, reducing the need for human training and workload. Onboard behaviors assist the human and alleviate the negative impact of communication latency. The robot builds an abstracted, video-game style depiction of the world which requires 50,000 times less bandwidth than streaming high definition video. The human remains in the loop, but can now be thousands of miles away. Some point out the ethical challenges of turning war into a video game, but if you're the pilot it's hard not to see this as a very good thing.

Neither call center AI nor FPV drones are likely to bring about the robot apocalypse. The thing that worries me is that we are largely powerless to change the trends already in motion. Drones are killing people everyday in Ukraine which has already trained thousands of pilots. Likewise, thousands of humans in call centers have already been replaced by AI "digital workers." The two threats are very different, but they both curtail the influence of the human soul. A human soul should have the choice to pull the trigger on a weapon and the responsibility to listen to your cell phone billing woes. I don't know how we can ensure this, but one thing I do know is we can herald our heros -- all of you Yoshimi's out there still fighting to be human.

#ethics #robotics #autonomy #autonomousrobots #FPV #drones #ukraine