California's would-be governor prepares for battle against job-killing robots
So, okay, he's a California Democrat quite literally in-bed with Silicon Valley execs and engineers, but I think he helps illustrate an important point. If he makes political headway with this message, it means there's a yet untapped source of anxiety in the American psyche for politicians (and other would-be leaders) to exploit: technoskepticism.The graduating computer science students at the University of California at Berkeley had just finished chuckling at a joke about fleets of “Google buses, Facebook shuttles and Uber-copters” lining up to whisk them them to elite jobs in Silicon Valley. The commencement ceremony for a cohort of students who, one professor confided, were worth around $25bn was a feel-good affair.
Until, that is, Gavin Newsom took to the lectern and burst the bubble.
The smooth-talking Democrat, and frontrunner to win California’s gubernatorial race next year, warned the students that the “plumbing of the world is radically changing”. The tech industry that would make them rich, Newsom declared, was also rendering millions of other people’s jobs obsolete and fueling enormous disparities in wealth. “Your job is to exercise your moral authority,” he said. “It is to do the kinds of things in life that can’t be downloaded.”
That is not the kind of message computer engineers tend to hear. But Newsom, who has been waiting in the wings as California’s lieutenant governor for the past seven years, has put the consequences of automation and the center of his campaign.
“This is code red, a firehose, a tsunami that’s coming our way,” he told the Guardian a few days after his commencement address at Berkeley. “We’re going to get rolled over unless we get ahead of this.” California, a crucible of technological transformation that is reshaping the world, could be on the cusp of the first major election to be dominated by a debate over what to do about robots.
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He frequently complains about Momentum Machines, a secretive San Francisco startup promising to transform the fast-food industry with robotic technology. The ambition, according to the company’s founder, is to “completely obviate” human workers.
“There’s an empathy gap,” Newsom said. “I really feel intensely that the tech community needs to begin not just to solve these business problems but to begin to solve societal problems with the same kind of disruptive energy that they put behind developing the latest app.”
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He says that while he respects technology, “I’m starting to appreciate the downsides more and more”. But in his own business, a conglomerate of restaurants, bars, hotels and wineries, Newsom said he is increasingly aware of the upsides of labor-saving technology.
His interview with the Guardian took place in Balboa Cafe, a Newsom-owned restaurant in the Marina district. One of his waitresses was within earshot when he remarked: “I think we’ll have some bartenders for a while, although I know for a fact they have robotic bar tending technology.”
One of his Napa vineyards, he added, recently started using a $50,000 German-made machine that utilizes sophisticated optical scanning technology to pick and sort grapes. He conceded that the machine was replacing human grape-pickers, who might not be able to find work elsewhere. “It’s their lives,” he said. “And that’s my point. I’m part of the problem.”
Precisely what to do about that problem is the issue that is vexing all politicians. For all the effort he has put into asking questions about automation, Newsom, by his own admission, is coming up short on answers.
He is “not opposed” to universal basic income, an idea popular among Silicon Valley utopians that would see all citizens receive some kind of regular and unconditional payment, and is interested in a proposal from Bill Gates to tax companies when they replace humans with robots.
Then he reverted to a more frank response. “I’m struggling to figure it out,” he said. “So I don’t have the damn answer.”
More and more in recent years, I hear people refer less to "The Domestic Terrorist Unabomber" and more to "The Tragic Folk Hero Ted Kaczynski." Right now, the American people are riled up over immigration and Muslims. But I suspect in the future the rallying cry will become "No more immigrants! Out with Muslims! AND BLOW UP THEM ROBOTS!"
The thing is, no matter if you may think we should halt this line of technological development or not, we're already past the point of no return on automation and AI development. Now that it's viability has been proved with the success of the Alphago and Libratus tournaments, as well as how automation has done a splendid job of picking up the labor slack in the wake of the Great Recession, all the nations in the know are putting their chips on the "Automated Revolution". Just ask our old frenemies, China:
AlphaGo and Beyond: The Chinese Military Looks to Future “Intelligentized” Warfare
Whether you personally think this AI and automation business is a new economic revolution or a distracting flash-in-the-pan fad, the fact remains the business and political leaders of the world are sitting up and taking notice, and the Great Tech Race is on. Nobody can afford to sit out, because if you do and someone gets there first, they could end up winning all the economic marbles.Indeed, the rapidity of recent Chinese advances in AI has indicated its ability to keep pace with—or perhaps even overtake—the U.S. in this critical emerging technology. The dynamism of private sector efforts in China is clearly demonstrated by the successes of major Chinese companies, including Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent, and even start-ups such as Iflytek, Uisee Technology, or Turing Robot. From speech recognition to self-driving cars, Chinese public and private efforts in AI are cutting-edge. The magnitude of research, as reflected by the number of papers published and cited, has already surpassed that of the U.S. However, for the time being, AlphaGo represents a high-profile demonstration of the sophistication of U.S. AI.
Looking forward, the Chinese leadership aspires to achieve a dominant position in AI, surpassing the U.S. in the process, in order to take advantage of the unique advantages that AI could confer to China’s economic competitiveness and military capabilities. To date, China has released several national science and technology plans involving AI and established a national deep learning lab, headed by Baidu. In particular, China’s new “AI 2.0” mega-project will advance an ambitious agenda for research and development, including economic and national security applications.
At the highest levels, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) also recognizes and intends to take advantage of the transformation of today’s informatized (信息化) ways of warfare into future “intelligentized” (智能化) warfare. According to Lieutenant General Liu Guozhi, director of the Central Military Commission’s (CMC) Science and Technology Commission, the world is “on the eve of a new scientific and technological revolution,” and we are “entering the era of intelligentization” due to rapid advances in AI and its impactful military applications. He believes that AI will result in fundamental changes to military units’ programming, operational styles, equipment systems, and models of combat power generation, even leading to a profound military revolution. The PLA might have a unique opportunity to take advantage of these trends through leveraging the dynamism of Chinese advances in AI through a national agenda of military-civil integration (军民融合).
While the lessons learned by the PLA from other nations’ wars have traditionally informed its approach to military modernization, its current thinking on the military implications of AI has, in fact, been influenced not by a war but by a game. AlphaGo’s initial defeat of Lee Sedol appears to have captured the PLA’s imagination at the highest levels, resulting in the convening of high-level seminars and symposiums on the topic. PLA thinkers’ apparent fascination with AlphaGo presents early indications of its initial thinking on and potential future employment of AI in warfare, with applications ranging from autonomous unmanned systems and swarm intelligence to command decision-making. The PLA appears to see AlphaGo’s mastery of the complex tactics associated with the game as an apt demonstration of its future military utility.
From the perspective of PLA strategists, this “great war of man and machine” (人机大战) decisively displayed AI’s potential to take on an integral role in command decision-making in future “intelligentized” warfare. The successes of AlphaGo are considered a turning point that demonstrated the potential of AI to engage in complex analyses and strategizing comparable to that required in warfare—not only equaling human cognitive capabilities but even enabling a distinctive advantage that may surpass the human mind.
Certain PLA thinkers anticipate that the intelligentization of warfare will result in a trend towards a battlefield “singularity,” such that human intelligence may prove unable to keep pace with the new operational tempo of machine-age warfare. At that point, as warfare occurs at machine speed, keeping humans “in the loop” for the employment of weapons systems or even certain aspects of decision-making could become a liability, rather than an asset. Consequently, AI could necessarily take on a greater role in command and control.
And so the automation and AI-zation will continue, and as more and more workers are displaced with seemingly no alternative prospects, their already huge anxieties and frustration will only grow, and they'll blame the robotic arms and algorithms that replaced them. And power seekers will notice, and take advantage.
So, which do you think you'll be: one of John Connor's rebel foot soldiers, or a Cyberdyne shareholder?
