The Robots Are Coming
lrb.co.uk
The Robots Are Coming
1–10 of 23 posts
Re: The Robots Are Coming
#2The article has this to say about Google Translate's improvements in accuracy:
"Translate has hoovered up gigantic quantities of parallel texts into its database. A particularly fertile source of these useful things, apparently, is the European Union’s set of official publications, which are translated into all Community languages."
The first thing I thought was "what happens when the EU starts outsourcing its translations to Google Translate?"
Is this the future of machine learning? The learning algorithms start by mining a corpus of human output. Once they get good enough, they replace the majority of humans that generated the corpus. We then enter an echo chamber of machines largely feeding off their own output. Consequently, improvement of the machines stagnates, but the machines are still doing a good enough job to keep humans out of a job. We then have a future of "good enough that the cost of improvements can't be justified, but bad enough to be irritating"?
Humans have a sense of pride in their work, and will strive to improve for their own edification, even when the cost outweighs the benefit, or they have been told not to. A machine will just continue to deliver the level of service that the committee in charge tells it to.
Edit: fixed spelling
Re: The Robots Are Coming
#3This article was fantastically well written and comprehensive. Worth reading if you're interested at all in the topic of automation and its potential effects on the future of employment.
The narrative that machines will "eat" all the jobs leaving the mass of humanity unemployed is an easy to understand story, but it hasn't ever come to pass and probably won't for reasons that don't need to be detailed in this comment. The nobel laureate Robert Solow compared it to worrying about the earth being struck by an asteroid. Possible, even worth consideration, but highly unlikely.
The idea that machines will dominate labor to the point where a few rich people gain all the profits from labor and the rest of us are left jobless and effectively under their control is equally unlikely. A gem from the article:
"Capital isn’t just winning against labour: there’s no contest. If it were a boxing match, the referee would stop the fight."
Income inequality is probably the biggest problem facing our society today. But it can only go so far. If the majority of people don't have jobs, no one will be able to pay for new iphones or driverless car service fees. Even B2B companies depend on B2C customers for revenue at some point in the chain. The basic, common sense economics of the world dictate that there are limits to inequality. The idea that machines will create a truly dystopian scenario is still the realm of science fiction, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't take steps to address the problem.
Finally, I loved this quote:
"Robert Gordon, an American economist who in 2012 published a provocative and compelling paper called ‘Is US Economic Growth Over?’ in which he contrasted the impact of computing and information technology with the effect of the second industrial revolution, between 1875 and 1900, which brought electric lightbulbs and the electric power station, the internal combustion engine, the telephone, radio, recorded music and cinema."
Worth noting that four of those seven inventions were created by one man. Not relevant to the topic of automation, just truly freaking amazing.
Re: The Robots Are Coming
#4This article was fantastically well written and comprehensive. Worth reading if you're interested at all in the topic of automation and its potential effects on the future of employment. The narrative that machines will "eat" all the jobs leaving the mass of humanity unemployed is an easy to understand story, but it hasn't ever come to pass and probably won't for reasons that don't need to be detailed in this comment…
Regarding Edison, were they "created by one man" or "one man took the credit for them"? I get the impression it was closer to the latter.
Re: The Robots Are Coming
#5This article was fantastically well written and comprehensive. Worth reading if you're interested at all in the topic of automation and its potential effects on the future of employment. The narrative that machines will "eat" all the jobs leaving the mass of humanity unemployed is an easy to understand story, but it hasn't ever come to pass and probably won't for reasons that don't need to be detailed in this comment…
>The narrative that machines will "eat" all the jobs leaving the mass of humanity unemployed is an easy to understand story, but it hasn't ever come to pass and probably won't for reasons that don't need to be detailed in this comment.
It is already happening, just take a look at graphs of labor rate participation against productivity. Will it happen to 'all the jobs', no, but will it leave masses of humanity unemployed? Yeah that is already happening, EU unemployment for those under 30 is staggering.
Re: The Robots Are Coming
#6The article has this to say about Google Translate's improvements in accuracy: "Translate has hoovered up gigantic quantities of parallel texts into its database. A particularly fertile source of these useful things, apparently, is the European Union’s set of official publications, which are translated into all Community languages." The first thing I thought was "what happens when the EU starts outsourcing its transl…
Machine learning researchers aren't going to stop looking for ways to develop better translation algorithms, learned more effectively from the vast volume of data that already exists.
Re: The Robots Are Coming
#7The article has this to say about Google Translate's improvements in accuracy: "Translate has hoovered up gigantic quantities of parallel texts into its database. A particularly fertile source of these useful things, apparently, is the European Union’s set of official publications, which are translated into all Community languages." The first thing I thought was "what happens when the EU starts outsourcing its transl…
Maybe we will be content to have "good enough," but I'd think that there is enough value in good quality translation that Google and others will pay people to "train" their algorithms and data set. Instead of waiting till someone tediously translates things, and then trying to learn from it, it would have skilled translators skim over the output, and correct it where it deviates from perfection, while providing concise feedback as to how it got things wrong, how bad it is, why it is wrong, etc. Which is one example of the type of skilled job that I see opening up in the future....the training (not "programming" per se) of robots.
The same thing can happen for, say, training a self driving car how to merge. A good driver can let the car attempt it itself, but slap it into manual when it is failing, then provide some sort of additional feedback -- not so different than a driving instructor teaching a kid to drive.
As robots do more and more things, there will be more and more opportunities for people to train them.
The only scenario where the economics of that doesn't work out is if everyone is employed so they can't afford to pay the trainers enough....but the rest of the article doesn't support that.
Re: The Robots Are Coming
#8The article has this to say about Google Translate's improvements in accuracy: "Translate has hoovered up gigantic quantities of parallel texts into its database. A particularly fertile source of these useful things, apparently, is the European Union’s set of official publications, which are translated into all Community languages." The first thing I thought was "what happens when the EU starts outsourcing its transl…
I know translators who use Google Translate for a first pass and then correct the results. Translators time is limited so anything that allows them to focus more on the nuances of language is a good thing.
Re: The Robots Are Coming
#9The article has this to say about Google Translate's improvements in accuracy: "Translate has hoovered up gigantic quantities of parallel texts into its database. A particularly fertile source of these useful things, apparently, is the European Union’s set of official publications, which are translated into all Community languages." The first thing I thought was "what happens when the EU starts outsourcing its transl…
> Humans have a sense of pride in their work, and will strive to improve...
Including the humans who make machine translation algorithms.
Re: The Robots Are Coming
#10The torrent of money and talent going in to self-driving cars seems to be only increasing. One of the strong points of this smart and level-headed article is pointing out how disruptive this will be, and how fast the disruption can come. I'm aware that there will be a lot of benefits, but the problem is, they are not distributed evenly. Some people will lose.