Your Job Has Been Robot-sourced

“People are racing against the machine, and many of them are losing that race…Instead of racing against the machine, we need to learn to race with the machine.”

– Erik Brynjolfsson, Innovation Researcher

Libraries are busy making lots of metadata and data networks. But who are we making this for anyway? Answer: The Machines

I spent the last week catching up on what the TED Conference has to say on robots, artificial intelligence and what these portend for the future of humans…all with an eye on the impact on my own profession: librarians.

A digest of the various talks would go as follows:

• Machine learning and AI capabilities are advancing at an exponential rate, just as forecast
• Robots are getting smarter and more ubiquitous by the year (Roomba, Siri, Google self-driving cars, drone strikes)

Machines are replacing humans at an increasing rate and impacting unemployment rates

The experts are personally torn on the rise of the machines, noting that there are huge benefits to society, but that we are facing a future where almost every job will be at risk of being taken by a machine. Jeremy Howard used words like “wonderful” and “terrifying” in his talk about how quickly machines are getting smarter (quicker than you think!). Erik Brynjolfsson (quoted above) shared a mixed optimism about the prospects this robotification holds for us, saying that a major retooling of the workforce and even the way society shares wealth is inevitable.

Personally, I’m thinking this is going to be more disruptive than the Industrial Revolution, which stirred up some serious feelings as you may recall: Unionization, Urbanization, Anarchism, Bolshevikism…but also some nice stuff (once we got through the riots, revolutions and Pinkertons): like the majority of the world not having to shovel animal manure and live in sod houses on the prairie. But what a ride!

This got me thinking about the end game the speakers were loosely describing and how it relates to libraries. In their estimation, we will see many, many jobs disappear in our lifetimes, including lots of knowledge worker jobs. Brynjolfsson says the way we need to react is to integrate new human roles into the work of the machines. For example, having AI partners that act as consultants to human workers. In this scenario (already happening in healthcare with IBM Watson), machines scour huge datasets and then give their advice/prognosis to a human, who still gets to make the final call. That might work for some jobs, but I don’t think it’s hard to imagine that being a little redundant at some point, especially when you’re talking about machines that may even be smarter than their human partner.

But still, let’s take the typical public-facing librarian, already under threat by the likes of an ever-improving Google. As I discussed briefly in Rise of the Machines, services like Google, IBM Watson, Siri and the like are only getting better and will likely, and possibly very soon, put the reference aspect of librarianship out of business altogether. In fact, because these automated information services exist on mobile/online environments with no library required, they will likely exacerbate the library relevance issue, at least as far as traditional library models are concerned.

Of course, we’re quickly re-inventing ourselves (read how in my post Tomorrow’s Tool Library on Steroids), but one thing is clear, the library as the community’s warehouse and service center for information will be replaced by machines. In fact, a more likely model would be one where libraries pool community resources to provide access to cutting-edge AI services with access to expensive data resources, if proprietary data even exists in the future (a big if, IMO).

What is ironic, is that technical service librarians are actually laying the groundwork for this transformation of the library profession. Every time technical service librarians work out a new metadata schema, mark up digital content with micro-data, write a line of RDF, enhance SEO of their collections or connect a record to linked data, they are really setting the stage for machines to not only index knowledge, but understand its semantic and ontological relationships. That is, they’re building the infrastructure for the robot-infused future. Funny that.

As Brynjolfsson suggests, we will have to create new roles where we work side-by-side with the machines, if we are to stay employed.

On this point, I’d add that we very well could see that human creativity still trumps machine logic. It might be that this particular aspect of humanity doesn’t translate into code all that well. So maybe the robots will be a great liberation and we all get to be artists and designers!

Or maybe we’ll all lose our jobs, unite in anguish with the rest of the unemployed 99% and decide it’s time the other 1% share the wealth so we can all, live off the work of our robots, bliss-out in virtual reality and plan our next vacations to Mars.

Or, as Ray Kurzweil would say, we’ll just merge with the machines and trump the whole question of unemployment, let alone mortality.

Or we could just outlaw AI altogether and hold back the tide permanently, like they did in Dune. Somehow that doesn’t seem likely…and the machines probably won’t allow it. LOL

Anyway, food for thought. As Yoda said: “Difficult to see. Always in motion is the future.”

Meanwhile, speaking of movies…

If this subject intrigues you, Hollywood is also jumping into this intellectual meme, pushing out several robot and AI films over the last couple years. If you’re interested, here’s my list of the ones I’ve watched, ordered by my rating (good to less good).

1. Her: Wow! Spike Jonze gives his quirky, moody, emotion-driven interpretation of the AI question. Thought provoking and compelling in every regard.
2. Black Mirror, S02E01 – Be Right Back: Creepy to the max and coming to a bedroom near you soon!
3. Automata: Bleak but interesting. Be sure NOT to read the expository intro text at the beginning. I kept thinking this was unnecessary to the film and ruined the mystery of the story. But still pretty good.
4. Transcendence: A play on Ray Kurzwell’s singularity concept, but done with explosions and Hollywood formulas.
5. The Machine: You can skip it.

Two more are on my must watch list: Chappie and Ex Machina, both of which look like they’ll be quality films that explore human-robot relations. They may be machines, but I love when we dress them up with emotions…I guess that’s what you should expect from a human being. 🙂

Optimism for a Change

The good folks at Singularity University continue to trail blaze into a starry-eyed future. I’m pretty pessimistic about where we’re headed, but watching Peter Diamandis explain away fear and how the future is one of abundance and optimism, even made me hopeful.

Check it out:

Peter Diamandis

Abundance is Our Future

Dazzled to the End

I’ve been going to the Dark Side again, reading Eaarth by Bill McKibben, another one of those “we’re so screwed” climate change books. His vision is one I’ve written about elsewhere, but since I started this decidedly more optimistic FAIL!Lab blogging effort, I thought it would be interesting to reconcile the two very different outlooks.

In fact, I was reading Clusterfuck Nation, James Howard Kunstler’s blog on peak oil, et al, and he hit a nerve. As he so often does, he noted the moth-like fascination with technology that seems to enchant people these days…these End of Days days. Kunstler has a lot of contempt for threads like FAIL!lab, which admittedly has a better-living-through-technology impulse. In his mind, when peak oil starts to make modern civilization impossible, all that technology will amount to nothing more than naively construed dead end…a cultural clusterfuck that just fizzled out with the last drop of cheap crude.

Personally, I share McKibben’s and Kunstler’s pessimistic vision: it’s already too late to avoid collapse of life as we know it. We dithered too long. We didn’t change while we still had all that cheap fuel, a more uni-polar world economy, a cooler-milder planet and, above all, time. Talk about a big FAIL.

McKibben actually couches this notion in an interesting way, suggesting that we now live on a new planet called Eaarth. Trouble is, we really don’t know how to keep 6 billion people (and growing) alive on this new world where nothing is certain. Not the coastlines, not the rainfall, not the viability of our breadbaskets, nothing. His suggestion is that we need to change our bad habits if we’re to have any chance of saving civilization, namely by reorganizing on more local, sustainable models.

I’m actually less optimistic than McKibben. I don’t think the current global zeitgeist can conceive of the sacrifices needed to avert disaster. And if we ever do come around to making the necessary changes it will happen too late. That’s because long before the climate goes truly haywire, the seemingly incremental changes will be enough to bring our economy down.

After reading the assessments from experts in science, agriculture, energy, insurance, finance and the military, I concluded that these crucial sectors will likely collapse in just a decade or two. Some like Kunstler suggest there is evidence that we are already in the midst of this collapse, pointing out the food-driven revolutions in the Arab world, persistant oil price inflation, etc. Indeed, one of the first scientists to warn about the climate was James Lovelock, who has now given up on our survival beyond a scant few of us left to wander the Arctic Circle.

These are the thinkers that I agree with. But, of course, one has to have hope. And so I pin that on the remote possibility that at the last minute, human ingenuity will be able to keep up with the crisis. This is a tall order, of course, because several key developments need to fall into place very, very soon for us to stave off total ruin.

We need bio-tech to re-engineer our crops so that they can survive on McKibben’s new Eaarth. Plants that can withstand the kinds of unprecedented heat waves that destroyed a third of Russia’s grain harvest last year. Plants that can handle salt water intrusion. Plants that can withstand floods like those that hit Australia this year. Plants that do without the fossil-fuel based pesticides and fertilizers that will soon be too expensive for 6+ billion people.

We need fusion energy. The Chinese are working on this furiously. So are the Europeans. We need these foreign researchers to save us from the impending oil shock, and from the nightmare that will come when we turn to coal to keep our homes comfortable and our cities lit.

We need the electric car to get alot cheaper. Not because I think there is much hope in keeping our atomized, egotistical mode of transportation functioning in a world beyond peak oil and continued commodity inflation. But we need cheaper batteries for electric buses and trains.

And some, if not all of this, may actually happen because of the ultimate invention: the Technological Singularity. You see, if you can build a machine that is exponentially more intelligent than we are, and you can lend it human empathy (perhaps by merging human consciousness with this machine), then you might be able to invent all the nifty things that will keep Homo sapiens and what few fellow critters remain on Eaarth with us, alive.

This is my hope…my last, lingering fantasy of how it will all be okay.

Vernor Vinge on the Technological Singularity at #alamw11

It was an otaku-ramma at the Vernor Vinge interview at ALA Midwinter 2011, hosted by LITA. The subject: the technological singularity, that moment in the near-future when our understanding of the human mind converges with excelerated computer power. The twist being, that the otaku in this audience were librarians, so the conversation oriented itself appropriately.

Here’s the BIG idea: In 20-odd years, cognitive science will have largely described the way the human brain works and be able to replicate it and even improve it. Add to the mix, the geometric rise in computing power in terms of speed, capacity, networking and scale. That’s right, hybridize the two knowledge streams into a single point in technological progress and you get the technological singularity: that point at which brains and bytes become interchangable.

Vinge has lots of paths he can take you down, but mostly, he stuck to those related to librarianship…or, if you will, the preservation and indexing of knowledge.

So here’s an image of your life in 2030: You wake up to a terribly warm day and have a knowledge question: at what point did the world lose control of its climate. Gone are the days where you’d have to consult a book. Gone are the days where you’d have to go to a library website, or any website (now an anachronistic paradigm itself). Gone are the days where you have to think over the matter for more than a few minutes.

As Vinge envisions it, you simply consult the human knowledge base that is at your neural-tips. Making the same effort that you might to remember what you did for your birthday last year, you quickly access the answer, but not one that anyone in 2010 would be able to comprehend. It’s a kind of hyper-nuanced answer that only a super-brain could grapple with.

So, suddenly you can see the problem for the world that the singularity poses, especially for anyone who authors books, works in a library or builds websites. You’re all fired!

Of course the silver lining here is that as Homo sapiens-super-smarty-pants, we have likely fixed joblessness along with all our other problems, including climate change. Indeed, as soon as we move past the singularity, say, singularity plus 1 nano second, we will have likely figured out a much more comfortable and interesting plane of existence upon which to live.

That’s the optimists’ view, of which Vinge seems slightly oriented.

The other view is that one depicted in the Matrix or Terminator, where we’re all doomed by super-machines that couldn’t give a hexicode for the bio-pests that invented them and either remove us from the equation, or ditch us for some other gig. A NASA guy once said to me, that his bet was that the aliens haven’t contacted us because they’re all machines and are still waiting for Earth to get interesting.

At a lecture by MIT’s Marvin Minsky at Adobe Systems a few years ago on A.I., Minsky added, with a rather dismissive chuckle, that the first few versions of this super brain will likely be psychotic. So how exactly, then, are relatively dim-witted scientists expected to control such a thing once it’s turned on? So you can see the potential for a rather bad day for organic life on Planet Earth. Vinge’s own point of view is that the nightmare scenario is unlikely, since all life that has evolved on Earth always relies on the critters that came before it (think bacteria in your gut). As he put it: humans are the ultimate backup system and any super brain will understand that.

The other possibility, which Vinge brought up, was that the singularity will happen, but nobody will notice (say because the super mind just winks out of the universe as noted above, but doesn’t say hello or goodbye). Vinge added, our only indication that something did happen, would be unusual activity that appears to be outside the human sphere.

This reminds me of my favorite UFO explanation (I generally have a hard time disbelieving something isn’t happening in the sky, but have a problem assuming it has to be aliens). My preferred UFO story is that it’s just us…from the future! But perhaps, it’s the singularity looking backward at us. And perhaps the rise in those sighting is really just an indication that were getting closer to something interesting.

And what if the singularity effort fails? Vinge sees in this scenario a steady build-up to the singularity where we learn more and more about the brain and how to replicate it, but then we hit a wall that cannot be overcome. Vinge especially enjoys this particular scenario, because it means that we will finally understand that last kernel of humanity that makes us so special.

No matter what the case, it should be a wild ride to The Big Moment. Watch the skies!