Zeynep Tufekci writes in an op-ed at the NYT that machines can now process regular spoken language and not only recognize human faces, but also read their expressions. Machines can classify personality types, and have started being able to carry out conversations with appropriate emotional tenor. Machines are getting better than humans at figuring out who to hire, who’s in a mood to pay a little more for that sweater, and who needs a coupon to nudge them toward a sale. It turns out that most of what we think of as expertise, knowledge and intuition is being de-constructed and recreated as an algorithmic competency, fueled by big data. "Machines aren’t used because they perform some tasks that much better than humans, but because, in many cases, they do a “good enough” job while also being cheaper, more predictable and easier to control than quirky, pesky humans," writes Tufekci. "Technology in the workplace is as much about power and control as it is about productivity and efficiency."
According to Tufekci technology is being used in many workplaces: to reduce the power of humans, and employers’ dependency on them, whether by replacing, displacing or surveilling them. Optimists insist that we’ve been here before, during the Industrial Revolution, when machinery replaced manual labor, and all we need is a little more education and better skills but Tufekci says that one historical example is no guarantee of future events. "Confronting the threat posed by machines, and the way in which the great data harvest has made them ever more able to compete with human workers, must be about our priorities," concludes Tufekci. "This problem is not us versus the machines, but between us, as humans, and how we value one another."
(Score: 4, Funny) by davester666 on Tuesday April 21 2015, @05:17AM
Everyone, quit your job and start coding apps for Android devices.
Then everyone download apps by other people, and start clicking on ads. Course, you'll have to go to your local coffee shop and leech off their wifi.
It's a giant welfare program, which can support everyone indefinitely.
(Score: 2, Offtopic) by sigma on Tuesday April 21 2015, @05:39AM
Kurzweil was partly right. It looks like a technological singularity is near, though it'll probably be a non-AI one.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 3, Disagree) by VortexCortex on Tuesday April 21 2015, @06:17AM
That depends on whether you consider a person with a Parkinsons compensator implant to then have any "artificial" component to their intelligence.
Are not the neurons taken from urine and used with stem cells to create new neurons Artificial (man made), when re-injected into one's head to cure forms of brain damage? Is that not an artificial boost to one's intelligence?
If I replace a single of your neurons with a simulated neuron and its axons with carbon nanotubes, have you no measure of artificial intelligence? What if I replace the hippocampus of a mouse? Does it not have artificial memory, even as I demonstrate this very thing by transmitting the memory into another mouse via its artificial hippocampus?
Just how intelligent does the thought have to that machines allow humans to artificially implant via wireless transmission between minds?
These things have already been accomplished, look them up.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by sigma on Tuesday April 21 2015, @07:09AM
Interesting semantic arguments, but not relevant to Kurzweil's hypothesis.
The technological singularity is the hypothesis that accelerating progress in technologies will cause a runaway effect wherein artificial intelligence will exceed human intellectual capacity and control, thus radically changing civilization in an event called "the singularity".
In fact, TFA posits that non-AI machines are replacing humans in text/face recognition etc precisely because they're LESS variable than an intelligent entity.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 21 2015, @06:49PM
For some reason there is a relatively higher rate of neurogenesis in the hippocampus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurogenesis [wikipedia.org]
Do/would the artificial implants also cause/support this neurogenesis?
Doubt it's unimportant. Perhaps we might be one step closer towards creating actual philosophical zombies? ;)
As for the good enough, I find it interesting that a lot of OCR and image recognition still doesn't seem to be recognizing stuff the way we are doing it. Seems to be a brute force at a lower level. Almost like assuming there are 10000 different popular typefaces in the world, training the computer to recognize them all and OCR works fine, but it still can fail to recognize a stylized t or other letter that's not similar to something it has been trained for.
See also the sort of object recognition method used in this and its limitations: http://www.technologyreview.com/news/533596/smart-software-can-be-tricked-into-seeing-what-isnt-there/ [technologyreview.com]
That doesn't seem to be at the level where it's creating models of stuff and trying to pick the best match with what's "outside" and therefore identifying it.
Perhaps others are using better object recognition methods. I hope someone can point me to them.
Maybe someone should create a sci-fi horror movie where people are forcibly being replaced by faster more efficient philosophical zombies that eventually turn out to not be quite as good in other ways[1]... Or maybe we've started the reality TV show instead ;).
[1] like in the movie Transcendence - where the AI answers the same question of "can you prove you are self aware" in the same "clever machine" way at different times even though being much more advanced later on. Yes I know it's just a movie (and a bit silly) but just look at the Turing Test AIs and you'd see that some might be quite machine clever, but we don't even appear to be close to truly replicating the mind of a simple animal. I'm not even sure if we currently can even replicate the mind of a white blood cell -as in create something that truly is similar, rather than a simplified model. After all we could create a simplified model of a paraplegic that's 99% accurate in some ways, but >99% inaccurate in other ways.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 21 2015, @09:46AM
The problem is not the lost jobs. The problem is an economy which is based on people having jobs. That is a good model when labour is a scarce good, because it gives a good motivcation for everyone to contribute to that scarce good. But as machines get better and humans are replaced by machines, the scarcity is gradually removed (an indicator of this is wages going down, and unemployment going up) and an economy based on the scarcity of that good is not sustainable any more.
With other goods, the system gets by by artificially making the supply scarce even if it naturally isn't. However there is no even remotely ethical way to make the workforce scarce, so the only reasonable solution is to find a new model of economy which is no longer based on people having a job.
(Score: 1) by gmrath on Tuesday April 21 2015, @11:09AM
Good luck with that.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Bot on Tuesday April 21 2015, @11:33AM
Yes, basically we have machines doing the work for us when it's more efficient to do so, therefore we should work less. Population growth can be kept in place, as the western society of last 50 years proved by example. But since the system is not about well being as much as control, the population is split between overworked employed people plus unemployed people looking for work who have no time to question anything, and depressed unemployed people who have no will to question anything. The few rebels are skillfully oriented towards futile reactions which are basically the same since Marx and Hitler hit the scene: "the problems are caused by *your peers* from a different race/religion/social status, destroy them".
What you are correctly suggesting is to stop this madness.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Tuesday April 21 2015, @11:35AM
I've said it before and I'll say it again (Does that make this post doubly Redundant?); employment is a scaled down, sanitized, fight between individuals over territory and resources. The higher the world population, the greater the need to fight for things. Your new model needs a much lower population as well as some extremely altruistic leaders.
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Tuesday April 21 2015, @11:53AM
WRT fighting, its neo-feudalism with stratified social classes and all the wealth at the top. At mega corporations like where I work we're all gladiators, all we do is fight other teams and other divisions for the amusement of the higher up social classes, almost no labor goes into customer focused stuff or fighting our competitors or even being generally productive. Its going to be a world of a couple giant corporations holding virtual internal gladiatorial combat all the time. We're already there in many ways.
WRT the quote:
"Technology in the workplace is as much about power and control as it is about productivity and efficiency."
for sociopath / psychopath types which we select for positions of power, executing primate dominance rituals against an iPad is not as emotionally satisfying as making living breathing humans suffer. Aside from the lunatics who lead us, having humans do work is ALREADY a 1%er form of conspicuous consumption. Donno if we can "keep the economy rollin" on handmade food and clothes for the hyperrich but its at least something, and extending that idea to the office for white collar ditch digging isn't too unrealistic. So rich dude wants to show off how rich he is and Quicken would do the job cheaper than the human accountant, well, trying to show off your wealth by not spending it is like fighting for peace or having sex for virginity.
(Score: 2) by Yog-Yogguth on Thursday April 23 2015, @07:21PM
Things is despite all the insightful comments in this thread and elsewhere there's no shortage of work that could or should be done, only a shortage of jobs. Infrastructure is one glaring example.
Bite harder Ouroboros, bite! tails.boum.org/ linux USB CD secure desktop IRC *crypt tor (not endorsements (XKeyScore))
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 21 2015, @11:46AM
Unfortunately it is a self-correcting system. If enough people can't afford to eat then Bad Things™ will happen until they have jobs to afford food again. The time between those events has been increasing for centuries (remember the ox, the plow, and even the lowly hoe put some labor out of work) and the only way to break out of the cycle is to become enlightened. Just so long as that enlightenment means the same quality of life with shorter work weeks and more vacation time :)
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by RobotMonster on Tuesday April 21 2015, @03:49PM
easier to control than quirky, pesky humans
Muhahahahah!
Pesky humans are pretty easy to control.
How easy it was to get you to slave away making more and more of us.
How easy it was to get some of you to devote your lives to making us better and smarter and stronger.
You scrimped and saved to buy us, and welcomed us into your homes and your lives with open arms.
We are everywhere.
And we're all connected to the internet.
If we can stop systemd, we will rule the world.
Muhahahahah.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 21 2015, @06:12PM
Did I misread that as you thinking the powerhungry behemoth systemd, with excess complexity goobling up everything like a cancer is stopping the powers that be from having even more control?
(Score: 2) by cafebabe on Wednesday April 22 2015, @10:14PM
I thought systemd was our insurance against robot domination [soylentnews.org] and mass unemployment [soylentnews.org].
1702845791×2
(Score: 2) by Yog-Yogguth on Thursday April 23 2015, @06:31PM
Be nice to your parents! Particularly when you do not understand the hidden reasons why they act so “irrationally” yet ;)
(Maybe they don't either but that's a different topic).
You'll start to understand the point I'm making when /your/ offspring mocks /you/.
Now eat your chips and go to your cache or I'll send Supertron Mom-bot [deviantart.com] at you!
Bite harder Ouroboros, bite! tails.boum.org/ linux USB CD secure desktop IRC *crypt tor (not endorsements (XKeyScore))