Rise of Robots has a thousand faces

The rise of robot surgeons, robo lawyers, robots replacing Venture Capitalists, fully automating the Amazon warehouses and future stores, it seems robots are in the news a lot these days.

For human beings, to compete in a world of AI with robots is not a choice, read on.

The Right to be Fearful

But whether you see the rise of robots as an existential risk (and are labeled a fearmongering singularist) as was the case of Mark Zuckerberg being critical of Elon Musk, the fact remains the robots are here. They are only going to get smarter!

Robot cooks, robot construction workers, smarter drones, better algorithms, more sophisticated computer vision and machine intelligence in cyber security, finance, and predictive analytics many of us already don't understand.

That's not to even enter the debate of the impact of robots on our jobs, wealth inequality and what the information economy will mean for recent grads and young professionals who must in effect, compete with artificial intelligence in the workplace and in the job market and cope with an uncertain future where their skills could become obsolete tomorrow.

As far as robots have come from the imagination of sci-fi into reality, it's what they could become in the next two decades that will have profound consequences on the future of work.

Robots, as an all-encompassing term for any machine intelligence in human systems, means human life (not just the future of work) could be disrupted.

We likely have at least fifteen years (2017+15=2032) before the possibility of robots going rogue becomes a distinct possibility. However the enormity of such an AGI event, could have profound impacts on civilization and many view it as the greatest danger of modern times; as more urgent than Global warming, Nuclear war and far more likely to occur than pandemics or asteroid extinction events.

Machines out-performing human beings on any given task appear to be an inevitability. What happens when robots are able to mimic social behavior and start to do it fairly well? What happens when a personal virtual assistant can organize your time better than an administrative assistant could?

As dozens of robots are now learning about the world around them, the IoT will mean new streams of data to train machine intelligence and robots of increasing sophistication to serve human needs in any variety of verticals, industries and the accomplishment of tasks of economic, practical and social value.

Automation Addicts

The dawn of the driverless car is a metaphor for what it will be like to be human in the 2030s.

We already spend five hours a day on mobile devices, on apps such as gaming, texting, music, video and social media. What will we be doing when 50% more of the entire world around us, in our cities and offices, is automated?

Will the rise of the robot be our downfall? The case can be made that the algorithm is disrupting how digital influence takes place already.

As we approach an age of AI and BioTech, are human beings ready for the ethical conundrums and implications of 'The Singularity'?

Robots will invent their own languages for greater convenience (as two did supposedly at Facebook recently), they may learn to learn in ways we cannot anticipate. If leaders in business turn off their empathy switch in order to get ahead, how can we expect the robots they create for profit to be any better?

Progress Run a-Musk

Human beings have thwarted the environment, exploited resources, and likely will devour exponential technologies all for the sake of consumption, progress, and profit like we always have; because our system of capitalism rewards risk-taking and aggression.

Robots for education, robots for military use and robots for sex, there are no morals in how we use technology. Where every major company is in an unofficial race for AI, if robots are an existential threat to a human centric world or a “fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization”, we are about to find out very soon.

As we did with the environment and global warming, we are being incredibly irresponsible with the adoption of AI as a priority, without understanding the long-term ramifications and the acceleration of the possibility of AGI. The global technology companies and their CEOs are saying the global economy needs AI and robots.

The Algorithm of Greed

The reality is if it's not Google, Microsoft or Amazon, it will be Beijing or Tencent, Alibaba and Baidu.

If machine intelligence reaches autonomous levels of adaptation, robots would be able to learn, maintain themselves and self-engineer at a rate that would overtake humanity in mere months, it's hypothesized. Most professionals in machine learning and deep learning remain incredulous that unsupervised learning in AI could or would pose a risk to humans anytime soon.

Letting robots into the family tree now seems as inevitable as drones, electric cars, and autonomous vehicles. While much of innovation is seen as contributing to human good and "convenience", aren't robots simply the next "device" of human exploitation and profit? And who has the final say? It's not Governments, Politicians, Banks, Scientists or the public.

Increasingly, it's tech companies themselves, their financial investors and institutions like Wall-Street, Silicon Valley and the edicts of Beijing, that could be responsible for the perils of robots not just on our livelihoods but increasing conditions where robots and AI could present an extinction level danger to humanity.

This article is just one in a series of blogs I'm doing on AI, robots and the future of work.

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