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Reports of our death are an exaggeration: Difference between revisions
Reports of our death are an exaggeration (view source)
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“Today,” he warned, “we have people doing work like robots. Tomorrow, we will have ''robots behaving like people''”. | “Today,” he warned, “we have people doing work like robots. Tomorrow, we will have ''robots behaving like people''”. | ||
No bad thing, you might say — who will miss the bankers? | You can see. They have displaced us in our routine functions. Soon they will take the good stuff, too. | ||
In any case, No bad thing, you might say — who will miss the bankers? | |||
You can see | You can see where Cryan’s idea comes from: what with high-frequency trading algorithms, AI medical diagnosis, accident-free self-driving cars: the machines are coming for us. Some see technology at a [[tipping point]], at which ''we'' will be tipped out. The machines have taken over our routine tasks; soon they will take the ''hard'' stuff, too. | ||
A fashionable view. But a big call, all the same. | A fashionable view. But a big call, all the same. | ||
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We [[sacks of meat]] are better at handling ambiguity, conflict and novel situations. We’re not perfect, but whatever the conundrum is we can at least produce an answer. We don't hang, or freeze waiting for a dialogue box to be clicked: even though syntax errors are par for the course: humans don’t (easily) crash. That’s the boon and the bane of the [[meatware]]: you can’t tell when one makes a syntax error. | We [[sacks of meat]] are better at handling ambiguity, conflict and novel situations. We’re not perfect, but whatever the conundrum is we can at least produce an answer. We don't hang, or freeze waiting for a dialogue box to be clicked: even though syntax errors are par for the course: humans don’t (easily) crash. That’s the boon and the bane of the [[meatware]]: you can’t tell when one makes a syntax error. | ||
But put human and machine together and you have a powerful proposition: the machine handles the rule-following; the human figures out what to do when you run out of road. It’s a partnership. A division of resources. Technology is an extended phenotype. But this is nothing new: this is always how we’ve used technology: the human | But put human and machine together and you have a powerful proposition: the machine handles the rule-following; the human figures out what to do when you run out of road. It’s a partnership. A division of resources. Technology is an extended phenotype. But this is nothing new: this is always how we’ve used technology: the human figures out which field to plough and when; the horse ploughs it. | ||
Now technology has caused the odd short-term dislocation — the industrial revolution put a bunch of hand-weavers out of work — but the long-term prognosis has been benign: “labour-saving devices” have freed us to do things we previously had no time to do, or hadn’t realised you could do, before the technology came along. As technology has developed, so has the world’s population grown, while poverty and indolence have fallen. ''People have got busier''. Whatever technology is doing, with due regard to the risk of confusing [[correlation]] and [[causation]], it ''isn’t'' putting us out of work. | Now technology has caused the odd short-term dislocation — the industrial revolution put a bunch of hand-weavers out of work — but the long-term prognosis has been benign: “labour-saving devices” have freed us to do things we previously had no time to do, or hadn’t realised you could do, before the technology came along. As technology has developed, so has the world’s population grown, while poverty and indolence have fallen. ''People have got busier''. Whatever technology is doing, with due regard to the risk of confusing [[correlation]] and [[causation]], it ''isn’t'' putting us out of work. | ||