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Monitoring hyper-automatization: No job is safe from robots!

globinfo freexchange

The Glass Cage [a new book by Nicholas Carr] examines the possibility that businesses are moving too quickly to automate white collar jobs, sophisticated tasks and mental work, and are increasingly reliant on automated decision-making and predictive analytics. It warns of the potential de-skilling of the workforce, including software developers, as larger shares of work processes are turned over to machines."

"This book is not a defense of Luddites. It's a well-anchored examination of the consequences and impact about deploying systems designed to replace us. Carr's concerns are illustrated and found in, for instance, the Federal Aviation Administration's warning to airlines about automation, and how electronic medical records may actually be raising costs and hurting healthcare.”

... until the development of software that can do analysis, make judgments, sense the environment, we've never had tools, machines that can take over professional work in the way that we're seeing today. That doesn't mean take it over necessarily entirely, but become the means through which professionals do their jobs, do analytical work, make decisions, and so forth. It's a matter of the scope of automation being so much broader today and growing ever more broad with each kind of passing year.”

A good example is the self-driving car that Google, and now other car makers, are manufacturing. We're certainly not to the point where you can send a fully autonomous vehicle out into real-world traffic without a backup driver. But it's clear that we're now at the point where we can begin sending robots out into the world to act autonomously in a way that was just impossible even 10 years ago. We're also seeing, with new machine-learning algorithms and predictive algorithms, the ability to analyze, assess information, collect that, interpret it automatically and pump out predictions, decisions and judgments. Really, in the last five years or so we, have opened up a new era in automation, and you have to assume the capabilities in those areas are going to continue to grow, and grow pretty rapidly.”

We have to figure out how to best balance the responsibilities between the human expert or professional and computer. I think we're going down the wrong path right now. We're too quick to hand over too much responsibility to the computer and what that ends up doing is leaving the expert or professional in a kind of a passive role: looking at monitors, following templates, entering data. The problem, and we see it with pilots and doctors, is when the computer fails, when either the technology breaks down, or the computer comes up against some situation that it hasn't been programmed to handle, then the human being has to jump back in take control, and too often we have allowed the human expert skills to get rusty and their situational awareness to fade away and so they make mistakes. At the practical level, we can be smarter and wiser about how we go about automating and make sure that we keep the human engaged.”

Then we have the philosophical side, what are human beings for? What gives meaning to our lives and fulfills us? And it turns out that it is usually doing hard work in the real world, grappling with hard challenges, overcoming them, expanding our talents, engaging with difficult situations. Unfortunately, that is the kind of effort that software programmers, for good reasons of their own, seek to alleviate today. There is a kind of philosophical tension or even existential tension between our desire to offload hard challenges onto computers, and that fact that as human beings, we gain fulfilment and satisfaction and meaning through struggling with hard challenges.”

I think we have a choice about whether we do this wisely and humanistically, or we take the road that I think we're on right now, which is to take a misanthropic view of technological progress and just say 'give computers everything they can possibly do and give human beings whatever is left over.' I think that's a recipe for diminishing the quality of life and ultimately short-circuiting progress.”

Full article and interview:


Further philosophical extensions:

Nevertheless, another question emerge: What if AI is meant to be the next step of human evolution itself? What difference does it make when we progressively abolishing human conquered concepts, like morality, from our culture?

If we want truly evolve, as humanity, we need to bring back morality. We need to develop concepts like solidarity, altruism, collectivity and put them in the core of our civilization. Otherwise, it would make no difference - and probably would be better - to be replaced by super-intelligent machines.


Socio-political consequences especially in the class war field:

Hyper-automatization is the key for the ruling class to break the social contract exactly because it doesn't need human labor anymore. The culture of extreme individualism serves perfectly the plan, because for decades generations learned to grow just to consume and protect their individual rights without caring for the others (this is the general picture of course, there are exceptions). The “inflation” of the middle class based on this one-dimensional culture, destroyed any class consciousness, fed apolitical generations and now used as a tool to trigger conflict interests inside the shrinking middle class, always on an economic basis.

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