Robomorphism

The JC pontificates about technology An occasional series. The Jolly Contrarian holds forth™ →Go Premium When I Grow Up I Want To Be A Real Boy, (von Sachsen-Rampton, 1945) Resources and Navigation Index: Click ᐅ to expand: Technology Design Index: Click ᐅ to expand: Essays

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Recently, Matt Bradley made an interesting point about our gallop towards AI: whatever we do, we should be careful of anthropomorphising when we talk about robots. Machines don’t think, and they don’t “hallucinate”. Hallucinating is actually a pretty special, strangely-loopy phenomenon. No-one has yet come up with a compelling account of how any kind of human consciousness works — cue tedious discussions about Cartesian theatres — but we do know this is categorically not what machines do. We should not let habits of language conflate the two. Down that road lies a false sense of security.

But the converse is just as important: we should not describe what humans do in terms meant for machines — we shouldn’t robomorphise, or evaluate human performance in terms suited to machine behaviour. This is to make a grievous category error.

This does not just invite technological redundancy — which, in its place, is no bad thing — we do not lament the demise of proofreaders over delta-view — mechanisation promises to clear away the tedium and bureaucratic sludge in well-understood, low-risk, standard processes — but that seems not to be the aspiration of the thought leaders.

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” says Arthur C. Clarke — the jury is out whether AI is different, but it is not unreasonable to proceed on the assumption it is not, and foolish to do otherwise.

The main use cases for machines in any industry from the beginning of civilisation are these: power, speed, accuracy, efficiency, economy. Machines do things easier and cheaper and quicker than humans. They always have done. Per George Gilder:

“The claim of superhuman performance seems rather overwrought to me. Outperforming unaided human beings is what machines are supposed to do. That’s why we build them.”

They therefore work best in constrained, predictable environments that have, as far as possible, been preconfigured to eliminate unknowns and minimise waste, such as a factory production line. Human intervention is minimised and, where possible, eliminated.

Why humans don’t work in manufacturing any more

Therefore humans have been largely absent from production industries — this has been a great driver of the colossal pivot to the service industry. It isn’t that we don’t make things any more: it‘s just that most of the time we don’t need humans to do it. We have optimised and configured the production industry so it can work by itself.

The service industry has undergone a similar process over the last forty years, expecially as it ballooned with refugees from manufacturing. Where it can, it will eliminate expensive, manual processes that can be done automatically.

Where this can be done easily, it has been: deltaview, for example. Law firms used hire teams of “document examiners”. Likewise email obviated the fax room and, largely the mail room.

But matters requiring human interaction have been harder to fully automate. The typical reactions have been to triage — delay the intervention of a human as long as possible — or to “self-serve” — a rather cheeky means of getting the consumer to do part of the work, or absorb its expense — for you.

Ryanair is the master of this — it even charges customers for getting their booking wrong! (penalising humans for their own human frailty is the ultimate in chutzpah) but it happens within and without organisations.

Internet enabled outsourcing service to the customer or consumer. Typing pool!

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See also

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• Rumours of our demise are greatly exaggerated

References

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