Stepping back, and looking forward

“If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic” – Ursula Guin

In 1962-63, Hanna-Barbera (producers) aired The Jetsons, an American Comic Science Fiction sitcom. The Jetsons lived in the year 2062, in a futuristic utopia of elaborate robotic contraptions, aliens, holograms, and whimsical inventions. The  technology reflected in The Jetsons - belt conveyors, sliding doors, LCD televisions, vending machines, food robots, and video calling - has become a reality less than five decades later.

Progressively, writers and scientists are prophesying science fiction converting into reality. Since the1950s,  proponents of Artificial Intelligence (AI) have maintained that machines thinking like people lie just a couple of decades in the future. We are approaching an age in which computers or machines will be more powerful than the human brain. A machine will be able to do complex calculations within seconds, for which a human will take hours.

The question is what skills humans need to develop in order to deal with technological advancement. As we have seen in the past, with the advent of new technologies the demand for labor decreases, leading to a fall in wages and increase in unemployment. During the industrial revolution, between 1811 and 1817, a group of English textile workers opposed the automation of looms, as machines had become a threat to their employment. This movement progressed under the leadership of Ned Ludd, who went as far as attacking mills and machinery before being subjugated by the British government.

That was how the term “Luddite movement” came about, describing the situation in which large-scale automation affects people’s wages and employment. Economists and other scholars predicts such Luddite movement with the progress of technology. The Chauffeur project led by Google engineer Sebastian Thrun has been successful in driving a car through the roads of San Francisco without a human driver. Soon we will see such cars more often on the roads, thereby replacing the human drivers

In “The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies”, Eric Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee warn future generations about the speed of technological developments, and suggest that humans should learn to work with these technologies rather than compete with them. The authors describe the Industrial revolution as the ‘First Machine Age’, during which the graph of Human Development Index and Population took a ninety-degree turn. The authors are skeptical about the direction in which this graph will tilt in the ‘Second Machine Age’ of computers and other digital advances.

Companies such as IBM and Honda are trying to develop robots that can interact with humans through AI. IBM’s supercomputer Watson, designed specially to play the television game show Jeopardy! (Knowledge game), has been successful in defeating Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter,  the long standing winners of the game. Honda’s ASIMO (a humanoid robot), after failing in the 2006 demo presentation, is still grapping to replicate human movements. These examples show that machines are able to do intelligent calculations and play games like chess, but are not yet physically flexible like humans.

As the cognitive scientist Steven Pinker puts it, “The main lesson of thirty-five years of AI research is that the hard problems are easy and the easy problems are hard. . . . As the new generation of intelligent devices appears, it will be the stock analysts and petrochemical engineers and parole board members who are in danger of being replaced by machines. The gardeners, receptionists, and cooks are secure in their jobs for decades to come.”

To conclude, we cannot hinder the development of technologies, but we should learn how to adjust with the change in the economic environment due to technological progress. And we should learn to work with robots to get the better of two worlds (metal ability and physical ability).

So, if in the future one falls in love with an operating system, the way Theodore Twombly did in the movie ‘HER’ by Spike Jonze, don’t be surprised. Computers are and will be an indispensible part of our society.