How long until we’re
all out of work?
Techno Talk
Max the Magnificent
Generally speaking, I’m a glass-half-full type of guy, but some of the things I’ve been seeing recently
have got me worrying. Could it be that, within the next decade or so, AI will be performing a lot of the
things humans currently do, thereby leaving us all twiddling our thumbs?
T
hese days, we are constantly
being buffeted by a tsunami of
information. In my case, I’m a
sucker for the latest ‘Ooh, shiny’ nugget
of knowledge or tidbit of trivia. The
problem is that I’m easily distrac…
‘Squirrel!’ For example, here are a just
couple of the notions that are bouncing
around my noggin as I pen these words.
It’s life Jim, but…
Do you remember the episode in Star
Trek: The Original Series when Spock
said, ‘It’s life Jim, but not as we know
it’? If so, you are like my mother, whose
mind is so sharp she can remember
things that haven’t even happened
yet. As it happens, Spock never actually spoke these words. Similarly,
Kirk never said, ‘We come in peace;
shoot to kill.’ Both these quotes actually originated in the 1987 song Star
Trekkin’ by The Firm.
When I was a young lad, following
our weekly boy scout meetings, my
friend Jeremy (who lived just around
the corner) and I would lay on the roof
of his parents’ garage looking up at the
stars wondering if alien boy scouts
were looking back at us.
I personally am convinced that life
in one form or another abounds in the
universe. If you are wondering how life
could spontaneously come into being,
may I recommend Life’s Ratchet: How
Molecular Machines Extract Order
from Chaos by Peter Hoffmann. Also,
Wetware: A Computer in Every Living
Cell by Dennis Bray.
But what sort of life? Until a few
years ago, if you’d asked me if there
were other intelligent lifeforms in the
universe, I would have responded, ‘Of
course!’ That was until I read Alone
in the Universe: Why Our Planet Is
Unique by John Gribbin. Now I’m
not so sure. On the other hand, more
recently I also read Imagined Life:
A Speculative Scientific Journey
among the Exoplanets in Search of
Intelligent Aliens, Ice Creatures, and
Supergravity Animals by James Trefil
and Michael Summers, which gave
me cause for hope.
8
If you haven’t already seen it, there’s
a brilliant 4-part series called Alien
Worlds on Netflix. Depicted using
awesome CGI techniques, this British
sci-fi nature ‘docufiction’ blends fact
with science fiction and conceptualises what alien life might be like by
applying the laws of life on Earth to
imagined exoplanets.
Did you know that, by mass, about
96% of our bodies are made of four
key elements: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen? If we add in calcium,
phosphorous, and sulfur, then we’ve
covered 99% of what makes me (and
you) so magnificent.
‘That’s very interesting, but what
has any of this to do with technology,’
I hear you cry. Well, one of Saturn’s
moons, Enceladus, boasts an enormous
ocean of liquid water underneath an
icy crust, plus it flaunts massive water
geysers blasting various elements into
space. The Cassini space probe (now,
that’s technology) visited Enceladus
about 15 years ago. Scientists are still
rooting through all the data Cassini
sent back. Just a few days ago, as I
pen these words, they announced that
they’ve detected phosphorus in these
geysers, where this is the rarest of the
six elements upon which life (as we
know it, Jim) depends.
Brother, can you spare a dime?
The Great Depression, which consumed
the decade from 1929 to 1939, was a
devastating economic shock that ended up impacting most countries around
the world. A mindboggling number of
people ended up without jobs, money,
homes to live in, and food to eat. (Written
by lyricist Yip Harburg and composer
Jay Gorney, Brother, Can You Spare a
Dime? is one of the best-known American
songs from that era.) If you don’t want
to be depressed yourself, this might be
a good time for you to stop reading this
column and turn the page.
Did you hear the joke about the little
boy who says to his father, ‘Dad, I’m
an optimist because my glass of milk
is half empty.’ The father responds,
‘You’ve got it wrong son, you’re only
an optimist if you see the glass as being half full; you’re a pessimist if you
see the glass as being half empty.’ The
boy replies in turn, ‘It all depends on
whether or not you like milk!’
I’m an optimistic glass-half-full type
of guy. For some time, I’ve tended to
the view that machine intelligence will
be at its best when combined with human intelligence on the basis that both
can perform tasks the other cannot. To
put this another way, excluding the
possibility of an artificial intelligence
(AI) apocalypse with killer mechanoids
hunting us down like… well, humans, I
suppose, I have – until recently – been
regarding AI in a positive light.
However, things are now speeding
so fast on the AI front that I’m starting
to worry. Many experts are predicting
it won’t be long before AI reaches the
level that it will be able to do almost
anything humans can do, while doing
it faster, better and cheaper.
Have you heard about Amazon’s
Mechanical Turk workers? The idea
is for businesses to outsource tasks
to individuals, where these tasks –
which take only a few seconds to do
and pay only a few pennies for doing
them – can only be done by humans
(like solving a CAPTCHA) because AI
isn’t capable of doing them. Jeff Bezos
once quipped that this was ‘artificial
artificial intelligence.’ Well, I just read
a report (https://bit.ly/446z7Pu) that
says around half these ‘turkers’ are
now using AI to perform these tasks.
I’m currently reading Homo Deus:
A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval
Noah Harari. I just reached the part
where Yuval informs us that two Oxford
researchers, Carl Benedikt Frey and
Michael Osborn, published a paper,
The Future of Employment, in which
they predict that, in the coming few
years, there is an extremely high probability (as high as 99% in some cases)
that people in certain professions will
lose their jobs to AI algorithms. We are
talking about all sorts of jobs here, from
paralegal assistants to bus drivers to
construction workers to… Ah, technology, what can you say, eh?
Practical Electronics | August | 2023
