Robots, jobs, and war
Many ethical questions are being raised as robots take on more and more roles in society.
By Rick Nelson, Editor-in-Chief -- EDN, September 17, 2009
Robotics was a focus of attention at National Instruments' NIWeek event in Austin, TX, last month, when presenters discussed the technical capabilities and ethical considerations surrounding robot use. Although the technical issues got most of the attention, it may be the ethical ones that prove to be more difficult. Consider mining accidents. Six miners died tragically in the 2007 Crandall Canyon Mine disaster. The loss 10 days later of three would-be rescuers compounded the tragedy. Could the use of robots to perform the rescue reconnaissance have averted those three deaths?
At NIWeek, Thomas Bewley, a professor at the University of California—San Diego, described the challenges robots can face. Those small enough to access a collapsed mine tend to be too small to climb over the debris they encounter once inside. That problem is one Bewley and his students are addressing by finding ways to have small robots climb over large obstacles. A robot should roll when possible, he says, but use multifunction mechanisms, including plungers, for example, when necessary.
It would clearly be ethical to have robots search for survivors in collapsed mines, sparing rescue workers the risk. If such robots can reconnoiter collapsed mines, however, they could take over mining itself. Mining is a dangerous job, but is it better than no job at all? In less dangerous occupations, is it ethical to substitute robots for humans?
In a recent article, Gregory Clark, a professor of economics at the University of California—Davis, doesn't discuss the ethics of the situation but rather the consequences of what he takes to be the inevitable (Reference 1). Clark writes that the current downturn is a minor blip in technology-driven economic growth, and, he cautions, "The economic problems of the future will not be about growth but about ... the ineluctable increase in the number of people with no marketable skills and technology's role not as the antidote to social conflict, but as its instigator" as machines displace people.
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In a keynote address at NIWeek, David Barrett, PhD, director of SCOPE (Senior Capstone Program in Engineering) at Franklin W Olin College of Engineering (Needham, MA), described robots that are or will be taking over human tasks, including mining, industry, construction, and agriculture. It won't just be unskilled workers who might have something to fear. Barrett also described various medical robots, including ones that perform surgery.
What should we do about robots' displacement of people? Clark pictures a dystopia: "We could imagine cities where entire neighborhoods are populated by people on state support. In France, generous welfare has already produced huge suburban housing estates, les banlieues, populated with a substantially unemployed and immigrant population, parts of which have periodically burst into violent protest." To support such populations, he says, "you tax the winners—those with the still uniquely human skills and those owning the capital and land—to provide for the losers."
Perhaps the most difficult problem of ethics centers on robots' use in the military. In another recent article (Reference 2), James Carroll writes, "When will the unempathetic Americans imagine what it feels like to have a robot monster bolt from the sky—the drones of August—and, in one strike, turn a wedding feast into a funeral?" On the ethics of using robots in warfare, SCOPE's Barrett said that, if we don't do it, our enemies will.
It's inevitable that robots will take on more and more roles. The true ethical question comes into play in how we address the consequences, and so far we have fallen short. We cannot continue turning weddings into funerals and turning middle-class neighborhoods into violent banlieues of disaffected, unemployed losers meagerly supported by taxing the winners.
Contact me atrnelson@reedbusiness.com.
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When I was in grade school in the 1960's one teacher or another would routinely ask 'what happens when computers replace all the workers?'. So, now it's post-PC, post-Internet, pre-robot. Computers decimated the demand for secretaries, now they're administrative assistants. It also did a number on 'middle management': the people who gathered data from the shop floor, created reports, and passed them up the chain of command. C'est la vie.
One of my interminable novels (unwritten, much less unpublished) is set around 2040 when robots are 'everywhere'. One character in this story toys with robot control software the way that a lot of people build PCs for gaming today, and develops an improved methodology for recognizing a particular kind of insect on a particular agricultural plant. This is worth enough that the kid has enough money on graduation day to retire.
The labor pool falls into several categories: the medical technologists (making up 25% of the workforce at this point), the on-site techs (people that go to a specialized robot for mining, for example, to repair it), the teleoperators (people who monitor robots, and intercede when they run amuck), and the 'theoretical types' (people that understand some obscure set of rules about some highly specialized topic, and solve problems, improve code, and convert algorithms from one language to another. The first three categories have fairly obvious compensation: generally based on hours worked or uptime assured. The last make their money as consultants, and find progressively better ways to use robotic machinery. Most build up license and patent portfolios over their life... some of them very quickly.
A robotic economy will need constant technical attention, just as servers, routers, printers, and laptops do now. The amount of data that would have to be encoded to describe the collection of everyday things in every corner of the globe will keep a lot of people busy. Having robots build houses is great, but someone has to describe the kind of house they want to live in, and this requires that the person either know how to design a house, or use the assistance of an architect that can 'read their mind'. As building houses is progressively more automated, people will tend to build more and more bewildering houses: rabbit warrens, 'Chaco Canyons', 'Versailles', and so forth. These will have massively excessive technology portfolios: 'custom water refining', automated greenhouses, 'tropical paradise pools', 3-d graphic studios, etc. A large number will be energy and water self-contained: not needing anything more than solar power and occasional rainfall to replenish their cisterns.
The entire world turns into one enormous instrument, and everyone spends their time exploring 'hidden worlds' for fun and profit. Many people will discover automating tasks is an afterthought, the really fun stuff is seeing things that were hither to 'invisible'.
Meredith Poor - 2009-12-10 21:37:00 PDT -
We are in the midst of another economic change. In 1900, >50% of the US population were employed in farming. Today, it is less than 4%, with only 2% actually engaged in farming. This was the industrial revolution, with 1929 crash was a marker of the change. Farm machinery - the tractor - caused the shift. So, we shifted to manufacturing. In 1950, >50% of the US population was employed in manufacturing. Today, it is 12% and going down, perhaps headed for 4% also. Reason? Automation (not out sourcing). Lights-out manufacturing has been around for decades. The electronics business is an other example, where chips and boards are printed automatically by machinery. The 2008 crash may eventually be seen as a marker of the change. What next? "Service" has been proposed, but this is just another way of saying people-to-people activity, like sales. It is people that buy and sell, even if they use machines to help them. It will eventually be obvious in the past tense. Will the machines take over and everyone be idle? Did not happen in the Industrial Revolution. Reason? People always want to improve their current situation, regardless of what it is. As a rich man once said, there is always a higher shelf in the candy store. Restless people find new interests. Will the machines eventually take over? Nope. People have wants; machines want nothing. And this is unlikely to change. The dreams of AI and alchemy have been equally unrealized. Will we see robots in war? Of course. We have had them in the form or torpedoes (WWII) and cruise missiles, and now as UAVs. They will get more sophisticated as time goes on, but they are tools, not people. They want not.
David Wyland - 2009-17-9 11:05:00 PDT -
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manuelalfaro - 2009-17-9 04:44:00 PDT
