Robots – Dino's Storage

The Good and Bad of Changes Ahead

At Columbia University in 2017, Microsoft co-founder and billionaire Bill Gates and his billionaire buddy Warren Buffett discussed increased productivity. The idea that more output per capita “should be harmful to society is crazy,” says Buffett. “If one person could push a button and turn out everything we turn out now, is that good for the world or bad for the world?” asks Buffett, the CEO of investment house Berkshire Hathaway. “You would free up all kinds of possibilities for everything else.”

“The macro picture that it enables is an opportunity,” agrees Gates. But, he adds, it “really forces us to look at the individuals affected and take those extra resources and make sure they are directed to them in terms of re-education and income policies.”

Buffett and Gates think it’s ‘crazy’ to view job-stealing robots as bad. Technological innovation is rapidly increasing the potential of human productivity. In the short run, those advances mean that many workers, particularly those in lower-skilled positions, will lose their jobs to automation. But Buffett and Gates say that increasing the potential output of each human being is always a good thing.

In the coming years, an increasing number of jobs are likely to be on the chopping block. Nearly half of U.S. jobs will potentially be replaced by robots and automated technology in the next 10 to 20 years, according to a 2013 study by Oxford University’s Carl Frey and Michael Osborne. In particular, transportation, logistics, office management and production workers are likely to be the first to lose their jobs to robots.

Those figures are more dire in less developed countries. A 2016 analysis from the World Bank estimated that roughly two-thirds of all jobs in developing nations around the globe are susceptible to replacement by automation.

Buffett cautions that the trend towards automation replacing lower-skilled labor is not new. “If we were here in 1800 and conducting this, somebody would point out that eventually tractors would come along and better fertilizer and that 80 percent of the people are now employed on the farm and in couple hundred years it is going to be 2 or 3 percent, and what are we going to do with all these people?” says Buffett. “Well, the answer is we released them.”

With fewer people needed to work on farms, more are able to pursue other skills and vocations.
“The macro picture that it enables is an opportunity,” says Gates. While both billionaires are self-avowed optimists and firmly preach the potential of a better future with robots doing more of our mundane or repetitive skills, both stress the importance of some form of wealth redistribution.

If robots take your job, the government might have to pay you to live. “Everything should be devoted initially to getting greater productivity,” says Buffett. “But people who fall by the wayside, through no fault of their own, as the goose lays more golden eggs, should still get a chance to participate in that prosperity. “And that is where government comes in.”

Buffett, Gates and SpaceX and Tesla’s Elon Musk agree that it’s a virtual inevitability that, as robots replace more and more jobs, the U.S. will have to implement a program of cash payments distributed to everyone. As founding members of The Giving Pledge, Buffett and Gates are already making moves in that direction, having committed to donate more than half of the wealth they have amassed. “A problem of excess really forces us to look at the individuals affected and take those extra resources and make sure they are directed to them in terms of re-education and income policies,” says Gates.

“Yeah, I am not sure exactly what to do about this. This is really the scariest problem to me, I will tell you.”
Transportation operators will be the first to lose their jobs, says Musk. The U.S. Department of Transportation says one in seven jobs in the U.S. is transportation-related. But no job is safe, he says. “Transport will be one of the first to go fully autonomous. But when I say everything — the robots will be able to do everything, bar nothing.”

Robots are getting smarter faster than expected. Artificial intelligence experts thought that it would be at least 20 years before a computer could beat a human playing Go, a strategy game that is more complex than chess. Last year, AlphaGo, a division of Google subsidiary Deep Mind, “absolutely crushed the world’s best player. And now it can crush and play the top 50 simultaneously and crush them all,” Musk says.
“That pace of progress is remarkable. Robots will be able to do everything better than us,” adds Musk.

Robots are now able to teach themselves physical skills faster than humans can. “You can see robots that can learn to walk from nothing within hours, way faster than any biological being,” Musk says.

“The thing that is the most dangerous — and it is the hardest to get your arms around because it is not a physical thing — is a deep intelligence in the network. “You say, ‘What harm can a deep intelligence in the network do?’ Well, it can start a war by doing fake news and spoofing email accounts and doing fake press releases and by manipulating information,” Musk says. Musk says that people are not as afraid of the potential of robotics and artificial intelligence as they should be because they don’t fully understand its potential.

“I have exposure to the most cutting edge A.I., and I think people should be really concerned by it,” he says.
“A.I. is a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization in a way that car accidents, airplane crashes, faulty drugs or bad food were not — they were harmful to a set of individuals within society, of course, but they were not harmful to society as a whole.”

According to Musk, the solution is to increase regulatory oversight of the development and implementation of artificial intelligence as soon as possible. “A.I. is a rare case where I think we need to be proactive in regulation than be reactive,” he says.

So is there any upside to all this? Yes, say some of the most successful tech billionaires. Entrepreneur Mark Cuban has said he thinks the world’s first trillionaire will be an artificial intelligence entrepreneur. And in the big picture, robots taking over jobs can be a good thing, says Gates.

No More Working 9-to-5

Proudly It Waves
If you have driven into Omaha on West Dodge from beyond Elkhorn since Dec. 7, you likely have noticed our great new flag at Dino’s Storage. The 30-foot by 60-foot flag is flying from a 125-foot flagpole. Right now it is at half staff until month’s end in honor of the late President George H.W. Bush.

The 9-to-5, Monday-to-Friday grind got you down?

Take solace: That will one day be history, according to billionaire British entrepreneur Richard Branson.
“The idea of working five days a week with two day weekends and a few weeks of holiday each year has become ingrained in society. But it wasn’t always the case, and it won’t be in the future,” Branson wrote in a recent blog. That’s because technology will change jobs currently held by humans, Branson says.

“As Google’s Larry Page and others have said, the amount of jobs available for people is going to decrease as technology progresses. New innovations will drive industries forward, but they will also reduce our reliance on people power,” Branson says. “Ideas such as driverless cars and more advanced drones are becoming a reality, and machines will be used for more and more jobs in the future. Even pilot-less planes will be become the reality in the not too distant future.”

Branson is not alone in this viewpoint. Tesla and SpaceX boss Elon Musk has issued dire warnings about technology usurping human jobs. “There certainly will be job disruption. Because what’s going to happen is robots will be able to do everything better than us. … I mean all of us,” Musk told the National Governors Association in 2017.

But unemployment rates will about the same in 20 years, even if the kind of jobs have changed, according to Rob Atkinson, founder and president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation.

If “governments and businesses are clever, the advance of technology could actually be really positive for people all over the world,” says Branson. For example, governments should pay for workers to be retrained, Branson says, and there will need to be a way to keep people’s income the same. But with solutions to such issues, more technology could help create “smarter working practices,” says Branson. “Could people eventually take three and even four day weekends? Certainly. Will job-sharing increase? I think so,” he says.

Microsoft cofounder and billionaire Bill Gates has also said advancements in technology will mean more time off. “Well, certainly we can look forward to the idea that vacations will be longer at some point,” said Gates. “The purpose of humanity is not just to sit behind a counter and sell things. More free time is not a terrible thing,” Gates added.

Branson believes more people will be able to have what he has: “I’m lucky in being able to work wherever I am, at any time, and don’t see work and play as separate – it’s all living,” Branson says. “I think this will be the case for more and more people in the future, to the benefit of businesses, countries and individuals.”

There have been some dour predictions about the potential of artificial intelligence from some high-profile technologists. For example, Musk has said A.I. will be more dangerous than North Korea. Legendary physicist Stephen Hawking says that A.I. has the potential to be the “worst event in the history of our civilization.”

Machine learning will make humans more productive and therefore able to accomplish the same amount of work in less time and that’s a good thing, says Gates. “The purpose of humanity is not just to sit behind a counter and sell things. More free time is not a terrible thing,” says Gates.

Surveillance, security and transcription are several areas where machine learning will make things faster and cheaper. “A.I. is simply better software,” Gates continues. “In these high value environments — whether it is an operating room, a jail, a factory, a courthouse — you will be able to transcribe everything that is being said, and you will be able to see things if they are safety violations even a construction site. And so you will be far more efficient in using resources, you will be far more aware of what is going on, and it is very cheap now because computers can see and hear as well as humans can.”

“This is a problem of excess, … so can you redirect people to help the elderly, to reduce class size, to help out kids with special needs? You will have the resources because you will just be so much more productive,” says Gates.

The transition will not be easy, says Gates. He says the government may need to create a safety net that allows employees to be retrained. That will be hard, though, because the rate of change in coming decades will be faster than it has been before. So the percentage of workers who need retraining will be high.

Musk has said he thinks the only option the government will have is to pay people a cash handout to live. “There is a pretty good chance we end up with a universal basic income, or something like that, due to automation,” says Musk, referring to programs through which governments pay their citizens a monthly stipend, regardless of employment. “Yeah, I am not sure what else one would do. I think that is what would happen.”

The Future: Amazing or Awful

The future is either going to be really, really amazing, or really, really awful. Will we be commuting to work on flying bicycles on air-conditioned highways, or replaced by robots and hiding in our homes because antibiotics have stopped working? Will cancer be cured? Will there be Internet on Mars? Some experts took a stab at the answers.

You’ll communicate with dead relatives via virtual reality. Ray Kurzweil, a futurist and director of engineering at Google, doesn’t like the idea of people he loves dying any more than you do. We can’t stop them from dying, but we can preserve their memories a little better than just fading photographs. He thinks we’re heading towards an age when we’ll be able to create virtual reality avatars of our deceased loved ones, realistic enough that we can interact with them. “This will be a way to bring him back,” he says, referring to his father. “Even if it isn’t fully realistic to bring these people back in A.I., it’ll be close.”

You’ll check email with your contact lenses. Engineers at Samsung are hard at work trying to develop a pair of contact lenses that let you go online and read your favorite websites without lifting a finger. How does it work? Well, it involves a “light-emitting diode on an off-the-shelf soft contact lens, using a material the researchers developed: a transparent, highly conductive, and stretchy mix of graphene and silver nanowires.”

Mars will get rings like Saturn. Saturn’s rings always made it the most recognizable planet in our solar system, but it may lose those bragging rights in another 20 to 40 million years. Mars could one day get its own outer ring. It all depends on its moon, Phobos, which is getting closer and closer to the red planet’s surface. If it doesn’t crash into Mars, it will break apart into countless tiny bits, which will continue to orbit the planet.

We’ll be communicating with thoughts. The BBC is pretty confident we can make this happen in the not-so-distant future. “Picking up thoughts and relaying them to another brain will not be much harder than storing them on the net,” claims futurologist Ian Pearson.

China will undergo a revolution, according to George Friedman, author of The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century. One out of seven exports from China go to Walmart, he says, and even Warren Buffett doesn’t believe Walmart has a future. “All of the prosperity of China is built on the willingness of the U.S. and Europe to buy its products,” he says, and that time is coming to an end. When that time comes, he doesn’t think the current version of China will be able to survive “a billion [angry] peasants.”

We’ll have dinosaur zoos with real woolly mammoths. Thanks to advances in cloning technology, we might be able to bring back animals like the woolly mammoths. But according to Akira Iritani, a professor at Kyoto University, “Now the technical problems have been overcome, all we need is a good sample of soft tissue from a frozen mammoth.” Russian scientists are working on doing just that, and the big question in the medical community isn’t “is it possible,” but “should we do it?”

CGI will replace actors entirely. CGI has been used for everything from creating new scenes of actors in their youth to replacing actors who’ve died. How long before it just replaces them completely? Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise can relax for now, but according to Nadia Magnenat Thalmann, a computer graphics scientist and founder and head of MIRALab at the University of Geneva, as the technology improves, anyone who isn’t an A-list actor will likely be done “more and more by computer.”

Artificial intelligence will replace artists, according to futurist Ray Kurzweil. He says computers will be able paint, write and compose far better than humans ever will.

The days will get a lot longer. We’re not talking about the summer solstice, where it just feels like the days are longer because there’s more sunlight. We mean literally longer. Granted, you’d need to live a long, long time to experience it, as we’re only gaining about 1.7 milliseconds every 100 years. But it’s still amazing to think that one of the things we consider absolute can actually be altered. It won’t affect you, but your great-great-great-great grandkids are going to have a little more time in their day to get everything done.

Pills will be able to detect cancer. Google’s X Lab announced in 2014 that they’re working on a pill that’ll send microscopic particles into your bloodstream, capable of identifying cancers and even future heart attacks long before they become deadly. We’d prefer a cancer cure, but knowing about cancer years before it’s diagnosed could save millions of lives.

You’ll fly in planes that are literally all window. If companies like Technicon Design in France and the UK’s Center for Process Innovation have their way, everybody will get a window seat in the plane of tomorrow, which will offer panoramic views of the sky as you fly towards your destination. Relax, the windows aren’t technically real, they’re just cameras mounted on the plane’s exterior. Still terrifying, though. Happy flying!

Bathroom mirrors will inspect your moles. Worried about sun damage or the possibility of skin cancer? Ian Pearson, a senior futurologist at the U.K.-based company Futurizon, claims we’ll soon have bathroom mirrors with LED displays and high-resolution cameras. “They’ll be connected to the Internet so you could have a video check-up with your dermatologist,” he says.

We’ll discover another 2,000 planets. We’ve already identified 2,341 planets outside our solar system, but thanks to a collaboration between NASA and Google, that number is projected to jump to 4,496 in the near future. Will there be life in any of those planets? We’ll find out soon enough.

The robots are indeed coming. Only not as personal assistants and vacuum cleaners. Ask any smart person and they’ll tell you, “Oh yeah, we’re making robots that are way too smart. We’re all doomed.” Sam Altman, president of Y Combinator, a Silicon Valley startup, believes that “we will be the first species ever to design our own descendants.” Dr. Nayef Al-Rodhan, a Neuroscientist and Geostrategist – which are two occupations that almost sound like fake jobs from a science-fiction movie – says that it’s only a matter of time before human beings create “transhumans,” which are just “improved versions of themselves that will eventually pose a threat to non-enhanced humans.”

Your every move will be monitored by dust spies. Kris Pister, a computing professor at the University of California, Berkeley, came up with the idea for “smart dust” particles in the 90s, which were basically tiny sensors, almost undetectable to the human eye, which would record everything that happened in the world. From big cities to small towns, billionaires to working class citizens, everything humans do will be recorded. “It’s finally here,” Pister told CNN in 2010.

Driving yourself will be passé and considered unsafe. In 2020 automated cars will start to become something most people take for granted. By some projections, there’ll be nearly 10 million cars on the road with self-driving features. The thing that seems so weird and futuristic now will, by the next presidential election, become something that annoys you if you don’t have it. You know how angry you get when you rent a car and it’s an older model without satellite radio? In the next five years, cars that don’t drive themselves will be the hand-me-downs that nobody wants.

Terrorists will be capable of creating their own pandemic. Think terrorism is scary now? Just wait till they’re making their own diseases. In 2016, Oxford’s Global Priorities Project curated a list of potential future catastrophes that could kill off 10 percent or more of the human population. A man-made pandemic was probably the scariest of the bunch, not just because of the death toll but because of the human evil necessary to create it.

Nanobots in your bloodstream will protect you from getting sick. We’re all on board with the “not getting sick” part. But tiny robots in our bloodstream might also be transmitting our personal thoughts to a data-mining cloud? That sounds downright Orwellian. We like the idea of not getting cancer because of our robot protectors. Since this isn’t expected to be reality until at least 2030, according to some predictions, we still have time to think about it and not seriously ponder the ethical dilemma until it’s too late.

An asteroid “might” destroy us in 862 years. Wait, did we say might? That’s right, based on NASA calculations, there’s a less than 1% chance that a mile-long asteroid will collide with Earth, wiping out all human life, on March 16, 2880. Of course, that means there’s a 99% chance humanity won’t be wiped out. And as NASA is the first to admit, “the upper limit could increase or decrease as we learn more about the asteroid in the years ahead.”

Antibiotics will stop working. We’ve come to depend on antibiotics as a quick fix for so many medical ailments. But what if the medicine just stopped working? What if you got pneumonia and doctors just shrugged and said, “There’s not much we can do, sorry?” That time may be coming sooner than we think. In fact, a 2016 report found that the new era of “antimicrobial resistance” could kill up to 10 million people each year by 2050.

Robotic earthworms will gobble up our garbage, according to an issue of The Futurist magazine. Do you want to know what any of that means? Or is it enough just to know that “tiny, agile robot teams will go through mines and landfills to extract anything of value”?

You’ll have easy access to all of the world’s knowledge. That’s what Google’s Eric Schmidt was promising in 2005, saying that the company would eventually “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” It would take 300 years to make it happen, but it’d be worth the wait. Imagine having the ultimate Wikipedia at your disposal, but filled with all human knowledge, and none of it fabricated by trolls!

We’ll have prosthetic brains. They were first announced in 2003, but we’re still years away from a commercially available “neural prosthetic.” Bryan Johnson, who launched a startup called Kernel, is making strides to be the first to produce a brain implant. “Just like we’ve had civil rights, human rights, abortion rights, marriage rights, the next big debate to consume our society will be evolution rights,” he says.

We’ll have interplanetary Internet. We take it for granted that there’ll be colonies on Mars someday. But will the red planet get any Internet access? An interplanetary Internet has been in the planning stages since 1998. When we finally make it to Mars, which could be by the early 2030s, you won’t have to give up your Twitter account.

You’ll be able to smell your favorite TV shows. Have you ever watched your latest episode of the Walking Dead and thought, “That would’ve been so much better if I could smell the zombies?” You may be in luck. Nicholas Negroponte, a former director of M.I.T.’s Media Lab, predicted back in 1992 that we’d soon be getting “full-color, large-scale, holographic TV with force feedback and olfactory output.” Do we really need smell-o-vision?

Most office workers will be taking drugs to work harder and longer. Seventy percent of people surveyed across the globe claim they’d let medical science mess with their brains or bodies if it helped their career prospects. Some have predicted that “smart drugs” will soon become commonplace at offices. And a 2017 report from professional services firm PriceWaterhouseCoopers found that “medically-enhanced workers” will be a reality soon enough.

We’ll need to leave Earth. Stephen Hawking, the world famous physicist and cosmologist who died last March, was not very hopeful about the future of our planet. Thanks to dangers like climate change, epidemics, population growth and even direct hits by asteroid, he believed we’ll need to find a way to leave Earth in the next hundred years.

Robots Coming, Disruption Ahead

The march of the robots – Artificial Intelligence – into all aspects of society is under way. Robots are nondescript, intelligent machines programmed to mimic, and even surpass, the human capacity to recognize patterns and perform tasks. They do so by rapidly processing massive amounts of data as well as reading instant feedback from sensors, such as those that guide self-driving cars.

The WorldPost, a partnership of the Berggruen Institute and The Washington Post, has provided a look into the impact of AI, an impact already being felt in nearly every realm, from how we manufacture things and make a living, to the quality of our lives as we age. Advances in artificial intelligence are redefining warfare and reconfiguring the geopolitical balance.

The challenge is making smart policy choices that realize the promises of AI while containing the perils. Eliminating the drudgery of routine labor and enhancing energy efficiency in a warming climate are surely triumphs for humankind. The dissolution of privacy as individuals lose control over their personal information not so much.

The founding president of Google China, Kai-Fu Lee, dispels the idea that universal basic income, or UBI, is an optimal solution to the massive job displacement that the AI revolution is expected to unleash.

Kai-Fu heads the AI institute at the venture capital firm Sinovation Ventures. He says “Roughly half of all jobs will disappear in the next decade.” When robots and AI inevitably take over, he says, we cannot naively assume a government stipend alone “will be a catalyst for people to reinvent themselves professionally.” In order to truly turn this technological revolution into “a creative renaissance,” he writes from Beijing, we will instead need to capitalize on the human touch and focus on people-to-people interaction, because ultimately “only humans can create and come up with new innovations. AI…cannot think outside the box, and it can only optimize problems defined by humans.” Societies will have to bend to the new realities not only with a basic guarantee of subsistence, he says, but also with a new definition of the work ethic and a new valuation of social labor, such as elder care.

John Markoff worries that there won’t be enough humans to handle elder care and sees the elderly as the next frontier for AI. “Globally, the number of people over 80 will double by the middle of the century – almost half a billion people will fall into the neediest care category – and that percentage will increase by sevenfold by the end of this century,” he writes. “The dependency ratio – that proportion of humans who require care compared to those who can give care – is also increasing inexorably.”

Japan is leading the way in robots for elder care, Markoff says. Other aging nations, including China – a byproduct of decades of a now-abandoned one-child policy – as well as Europe and the U.S., lag behind and will inevitably have to follow suit, he says. For now, he says, as roboticist Rodney Brooks has suggested, “self-driving cars will be the first elder-care robots,” enabling old people to maintain their mobility when acute awareness of their surroundings and reaction time diminishes. Sensors that can track when an elderly person needs medical assistance are not far behind, followed by what Markoff calls “machines of loving grace” that will offer companionship for the old and isolated.

As with all great transformations, there is a geopolitical dimension as well. Whoever dominates AI, especially its military and security applications, will put their stamp on the world order. America has long held the delusion that it has a permanent advantage in leading technological innovation. But Eric Schmidt, chairman of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, says he expects China will surpass Silicon Valley in artificial intelligence advances in about a year.

Edward Tse explains why. “While so much of the world today lacks clear direction,” Tse writes from Shanghai, “China has an edge in its ability to combine strong, top-down government directive with vibrant grass-roots-level innovation. Beyond this, China has an abundance of data to train AI-learning algorithms because of its huge population of Internet users – more than 700 million. China’s thriving mobile Internet ecosystem also provides a test bed for AI researchers to collect and analyze valuable demographics and transactional and behavioral big data and to conduct large-scale experiments at a much higher level than foreign counterparts.”

Beware to the winner. Big data analysis through the prowess of intelligent machines introduces a host of threats – not least of which is the unsettling reality that where there is connectivity, there is also surveillance. The more we know or learn though connected networks, the more that is known and learned about us. The communication technologies we use today are invasive by design, collecting our photos, comments and friends in giant searchable databases. In the West, private companies intrude on privacy to monetize personal data. In China, the security state is well on its way to becoming an all-seeing Big Brother.

Technological change would not gain momentum if it was not in some way responsive to the demands of society. In the end, who defines those needs and desires will determine whether fulfilling them is good or bad for society as a whole. For now, unless or until they acquire “general intelligence,” robots and AI remain bound to the humans who design them.