Skills for competing with robots

My latest at Research magazine is on robots, jobs, Wall Street and studying math online: "Will Robo-Advisors Be Good at Relationships?" Excerpt:

For advisors eager to understand what it takes to be competitive in the advice business (and other fields) as computers take on a growing array of tasks, I recommend a new book: "Humans Are Underrated: What High Achievers Know That Brilliant Machines Never Will," by Geoff Colvin, senior editor at large of Fortune magazine (the book is published under the imprint Portfolio/Penguin).

The skills that will be valued in the workplace increasingly will be those of human interaction, in Colvin's view — abilities to work in teams and to understand what other people are thinking and feeling. “Being a great performer is becoming less about what you know and more about what you’re like,” he writes.

Another excerpt:

An experience of mine early this year provided some insight into just how entwined personal and technical skills can be. I was taking a popular online course titled “Introduction to Mathematical Thinking,” taught by Stanford mathematician Keith Devlin. My fellow students numbered in the tens of thousands worldwide. The course's goal was to give a sense of how mathematicians think and work. 

While math might seem to epitomize a technical subject, interpersonal skills were crucial. The professor encouraged students to form and join study groups, which met online or off. The coursework put considerable focus on writing proofs and evaluating proofs written by other students — exercises in communication as well as analysis. 

I have taken some other math courses online that did not involve anything like the same degree of personal interaction, and I learned less in them.

Whole thing here.

Sci-tech links

Some science and technology-related items of note

-- Chris Mooney on why a WSJ op-ed likening climate scientists to Lysenko is so ludicrous.

-- David Frum takes the pro-robots stance on space vs. Newt's moon base. I'm a big fan of the robots myself, but they don't do everything worth doing out there. Frum criticizes Charles Krauthammer for saying we go to space not for practicality but for "the wonder and glory of it." On that I'm more with David, as I'm not one to argue we should target some space objective "because it's hard" or "because it's there." But the practicalities are hard to predict and hard to disentangle from more intangible motivations. Anyone who has any concern about energy or climate should not want to foreclose future availability of space-based energy options.

-- Rand Simberg asks some cogent questions of Mitt Romney about space policy. Some background by me on Obama's record on space commerce and how it compares favorably with his record on Earth.

UPDATE: Regarding the WSJ piece cited above, some of the critics are engaged in some weak counterarguments to the effect that the 16 signatories don't have real or relevant scientific credentials. For instance, a Grist rebuttal complains that "one is an astronaut," without mentioning that that one, Harrison Schmitt, is also a geologist. The problem is not that the people who signed that op-ed (I wonder who wrote it, by the way) lack good credentials; they have enough that their views deserve to be read. The problem is that once you read their argument, it doesn't stand up under scrutiny, such as with the "Lysenko" canard.

Robot overlords, etc.

Via Justin Green, here's Kevin Drum on machine intelligence. Excerpt:

This is a story about the future. Not the unhappy future, the one where climate change turns the planet into a cinder or we all die in a global nuclear war. This is the happy version. It's the one where computers keep getting smarter and smarter, and clever engineers keep building better and better robots. By 2040, computers the size of a softball are as smart as human beings. Smarter, in fact. Plus they're computers: They never get tired, they're never ill-tempered, they never make mistakes, and they have instant access to all of human knowledge.

And, Drum argues, while they may not try to kill or enslave us, they will cause massive unemployment. His piece is less lurid than some predictions, but I'm inclined to think there's a lot we don't know about intelligence, and replicating it is not going to follow the exponential path he aptly illustrates. A few of my relevant pieces from over the years:

"Are We Just Really Smart Robots?" Reason.

"Searching for Bobby Fischer's Platonic Form." TCS Daily.

"Masters of the Universe." Reason.

"Dear Posthumans." TCS Daily.

"Only Posthuman." Sciam Mind.

Dubious effort to contact aliens, only 99 cents

This caught my eye today:

The Lone Signal project is asking everyone to help beam messages into space to make our presence in the galaxy known. http://t.co/Sz0lCQRaRq
— The SETI Institute (@SETIInstitute) June 18, 2013

It links to a story at my long-ago employer Space.com: "New Project Will Send Your Messages to Aliens in Deep Space." Excerpt:

A group of scientists, businessmen and entrepreneurs are tired of waiting around for E.T. to get in touch.

Instead of passively listening for signs of intelligent life in the universe, the Lone Signal project is asking everyone with an Internet connection to help beam messages into outer space in an attempt to make our presence in the universe known.

When Lone Signal goes live late in the day on June 17, it will mark humanity's first-ever attempt to send continuous messaging to extraterrestrial intelligence, officials said.

 And there's a business angle. Excerpt:

The initial text-only message is free, but you can buy an unlimited number of text and photo messages that will be queued up and sent into space, officials said. After the first free communication, a text message costs one credit and a photo message costs three. Four credits can be purchased for $0.99.

CNN also has some coverage.

Me: There's long been a debate about efforts to contact aliens, or "active SETI." Here's what I wrote about it six years ago, reviewing Michael Michaud's book Contact With Alien Civilizations. Note the libertarian strain in my thinking then.

Should humans be sending our own signals to possible listeners out there? To a degree, this already occurs routinely, as radio and television broadcasts, plus military and civilian radar pulses, leak into space; such signals, though, may be too weak to detect at astronomical distances (depending on how sensitive their receivers are). There also have been a few efforts to send more detectable transmissions, as in 1974 when astronomers used the huge Arecibo radio telescope to beam toward a distant star cluster a pictogram showing our solar system, the DNA molecule, a human stick figure, and more.

Michaud is wary of such “active SETI,” noting that its goal is to elicit a reaction from aliens whose capabilities and intentions are unknown. Similar to many in the SETI community, he prefers listening to transmitting; the latter is costlier as well as riskier. Michaud also raises the possibility of requiring international consultations for any transmission above the signal strength of ordinary radio, television, and radar. The need for such regulation is dubious, however, given that active SETI is rare, its recipients may or may not exist, and they might already be getting American Idol and other programs.

Me: Not so confident now that I was right to take a laissez-faire approach to "shouting into the cosmos," as David Brin calls it. But I am confident that worrying about it is beside the point. Whether it's Lone Signal or somebody else, relatively detectable signals are going to get sent, sooner or later. The risks are unknown. The benefits are unknown. I was a bit surprised to find the SETI Institute tweeting about this project with seeming enthusiasm, but it turns out they've long been congenial to active SETI, even without engaging in it themselves. As Brin puts it:

"...the SETI Institute, based in California -- the field's acknowledged lead institution and operator of a dedicated SETI instrument, the Paul Allen Array -- has officially declared that it has no intention of engaging in "Active Seti." However, its leadership has expressed friendly support for these endeavors and -- more importantly -- has acted vigorously to block even mild efforts, through the International Academy of Astronautics, to ask that these groups meet international bodies first, presenting their plans and discussing repercussions, before acting unilaterally to make the Earth vastly more visible across the cosmos.

Me: Won't be participating in Lone Signal. A few more decades of listening and some better thought-out protocols for transmitting are the path I'd prefer. But who knows? Maybe we can help these R'ha aliens get away from the robots that are pursuing them (unless it turns out the robots are the good guys).

Backlashes against immigrants and robots [updated]

Tyler Cowen writes about "Why cosmopolitanism is utopian but useful nonetheless." The subject is Switzerland's recent vote to restrict EU immigration, and Cowen is writing in response to a post by Bryan Caplan that argued (based on Swiss voting patterns) that the way to overcome anti-immigration sentiment is through more immigration. Cowen thinks very high levels of immigration will spur a backlash, and so it's better to be open to immigration on a marginal, moderate basis.

I agree with Cowen. I grew up in the highly ethnically diverse area of Elmhurst, Queens, with immigrants from throughout Asia and Latin America, and got an up-close view of plenty of ethnic tensions, in multiple directions. Knowing many people from other countries may have made some people more cosmopolitan in some ways, but it was hardly an invariable or universal reaction.

Backlashes, it seems to me, are an underrated phenomenon. Predictions of technological transformation, for instance, tend to edit out the tremendous fear and loathing that will be precipitated by such developments (even if they are basically benign; witness genetically modified foods). Seeing that the world you're going to grow old in has little in common with the one you grew up in, whether because of immigrants or robots or whatever, will spark a strong reaction, and often not a positive one especially if one's job security seems diminished, and the assurances of elites that it's all beneficial or inevitable can produce some notably angry dissension.

UPDATE 2/15: Tyler Cowen's co-blogger Alex Tabarrok takes him to task for not being willing to "launch a revolution" in the cause of open borders, and for failing to recognize a historical lesson that great things can be done when you have the moral high ground. I find Tabarrok's historical analogies rather overstated, in that eliminating immigration restrictions does not, to me at least, carry anything remotely like the moral weight of eliminating slavery and serfdom. (I also note that the most effective proponent of abolishing slavery, Abraham Lincoln, took a more incrementalist approach than some others did back then.) Here we have an example of the absolutism to which the libertarian movement is all too prone: immigration is a good thing, so it must be infinitely good and must never be limited; there's an absolute right to mobility across national borders, but if the streets are privately owned such that nobody can walk through without permission, that's fine.

Logic terminator

h+ magazine: "Is a Terminator scenario possible?" (Found via Instapundit.) Interesting, but I'm left nonplussed by this statement from J. Storrs Hall of the Foresight Institute:

...if all you mean is are the robots going to take over, it's more or less inevitable, and not a moment too soon. Humans are really too stupid, venal, gullible, mendacious, and self-deceiving to be put in charge of important things like the Earth (much less the rest of the Solar System). I strongly support putting AIs in charge because I'm dead certain we can build ones that are not only smarter than human but more moral as well.

Leaving aside the one-dimensional view of humanity and the nastiness of wanting our species to be enslaved, isn't there a problem of logic here? If humans are so venal, gullible, mendacious, and self-deceiving, how can we trust ourselves not to build robots that are just as bad (or worse)?

Danger: radioactive

Every once in a while, there arises the arcane question of how to keep far-future people (robots? aliens?) away from radioactive waste dumps that will still be dangerous millennia hence. Juliet Lapidos at Slate discusses it here, and there are some glosses on it here and here. I've long been fascinated by this question, but in a minor irony something I once wrote about it (a review of Gregory Benford's Deep Time) is now lost, though perhaps retrievable in the Internet archives.

Based on my own experience with certain outdoor-adventure, rock-climbing people, I think it's going to be hard to prevent future explorers from getting into the fields of giant jagged spikes or other such features that are meant to send a universal message of Stay Away.

Robocall politics

Some things should be handled by robots, and some things should not. Exploration of the outer solar system, for now, should be robotic (I'll have more on that soon) while telemarketing calls should not. So, while I'm glad that a ban is being placed on robocalls, I'm nonplussed to see that the politicians enacting it have exempted ... themselves.

Calls from politicians, public service announcements and "informational" calls will be exempt from the new rule. A call alerting a traveler that his or her flight has been delayed would still be allowed, for example.

So push polls and political smears still make the cut?

UPDATE: Yes, they do. What a crock:

However for those who have called on the FTC to help eliminate the other phone scourge - political robocalls - the new rules will not help. Calls from political campaigns are considered protected speech the FTC said.

How about if a political campaign sprays graffiti on my front door? Is that also protected speech?

Brain blame

"My Brain Made Me Do It." Interesting SciAm interview with young neuroscientist Eliezer Sternberg. I took a look at the same subject, with a similar perspective, a few years ago in a piece titled "Are We Just Really Smart Robots?" back when I wrote for Reason.

Doomsday scenarios

Recommended weekend viewing: "Killer Asteroids, Killer Robots, and Killing Killer Pathogens."

Odds and ends: AI, ISIS, DREAMers

Posting will continue to be light. This is a busy summer. A few items I've found interesting:

-- "Elon Musk Is More Dangerous Than AI." A fascinating piece in h+ magazine. It includes this cogent point:

Reality check: A machine that hunts and kills humans in large numbers wouldn’t need to be more intelligent than an insect. And yes it would be super dangerous to make such machines especially if we add in the idea of self replication or self manufacture. Imagine an insect like killing machine that can build copies of itself from raw materials or repair itself from the spare parts of its fallen comrades. But notice that the relative intelligence or lack thereof has little to do with the danger of such a system. It is dangerous because it has the ability to kill you and is designed to do so. The fact that this machine can’t play chess, converse in English, or pass a Turing Test doesn’t change anything about its ability to kill.

Me: For some background on this overall subject, see my recent piece "Are Killer Robots the Next Black Swan?"

-- "Will the U.S. Help the Kurds Fight ISIS?" and "To fight the Islamic state, Kurdish and Iraqi forces need expedited aid." This is a moment when the deliberative, temporizing, conciliate-your-enemies-and-sell-out-your-friends approach to foreign policy is particularly inappropriate.

-- "Rep. Steve King Grabs Latina Woman's Wrist: 'You're Very Good At English' (VIDEO)," at TPM.  I have little sympathy for anti-immigration sentiment in the GOP (which is still my party, by the way) and I'm not a fan of either Steve King or Rand Paul, who in the latter case made headlines by rushing away at the first sign of confrontation with a couple of "DREAMer" activists. But reading the headline above and then watching the video reminds me of the smug tendentiousness of outfits like TPM. The Latina woman, handing King a business card and inviting him to rip it up, was not there for any kind of reasoned discourse but rather to goad him into an angry response on camera. Instead, he sought, vainly, to have a conversation with her. As for Paul, I can't blame him for leaving as he did.

Wall Street AI risks

At Research magazine, I look at a dark scenario: "Are Killer Robots the Next Black Swan?" Excerpt:

No less a scientific name than Stephen Hawking has been raising alarms about out-of-control AI. In a recent opinion piece, Hawking and several scientist co-authors warned: “One can imagine such technology outsmarting financial markets, out-inventing human researchers, out-manipulating human leaders, and developing weapons we cannot even understand. Whereas the short-term impact of AI depends on who controls it, the long-term impact depends on whether it can be controlled at all.” 

In an era of grandmaster-beating chess programs and driverless-car prototypes, it is no surprise that anxieties about where such technology is heading have gained traction. Nor is it a surprise that critics target the tech sector and the Pentagon (especially the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA) for working on increasingly powerful systems that may one day outsmart, outrank or outlive us all. (A UN meeting in Geneva in May convened experts to discuss emerging “lethal autonomous weapons.”) 

What might be surprising is the idea that Wall Street could give rise to dangerous AI—not in the obvious sense that financial institutions raise capital for the tech sector, but in that financial technology itself might be the matrix for the rise of the machines. That is the gist of one emerging line of thinking about the dangers of smart computers.

Whole thing here. Some related writing by me is here.

Review: The Farthest

I saw The Farthest last night at the Tribeca Film Festival and highly recommend it. This is about the Voyager space probes and the people who sent them to the outer solar system and beyond. That mission not only opened vast new vistas of exploration but also marked an early example of the synergy of humans and robots in achieving unprecedented things (and, remarkably, doing it with 1970s computing technology now comparable to a key fob). The film does an adept job at interweaving science communication, striking imagery and personal recollections, with narration provided by numerous interviews with project scientists, engineers and other participants.

My lifelong interest in space exploration was sparked in considerable degree, I'm sure, by seeing the images of Jupiter and Saturn returned by the Voyagers in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Seeing the film's interview with Linda Morabito, the astronomer who first saw an image of a volcanic eruption on Jupiter's moon Io, reminded me that I saw her in a TV interview back at the time. It was also good to see Nick Sagan, my onetime Space.com colleague, discuss his parents' and his own involvement with the golden record, which includes his own voice saying immortally, "Hello from the children of planet Earth." A very funny bit of the movie recalls a press conference about that record that NASA, reluctant to emphasize the mission's "alien" aspect, relegated to a hotel banquet hall with a wedding in progress on the other side of a room divider.

I expect the film will find an audience among the sorts of people I've worked with in science- and space-focused journalism, and I hope it will find a broader audience as well. An interesting perspective from the filmmakers, who were present last night for a Q and A and who are from Ireland, is that this is a uniquely American story; no other country has done anything like this, on such a scale. At the same time (and as reflected in the multilingual, multicultural golden record) the mission was an achievement for humanity at large. And while this particular feat won't happen again (it hinged on a once-in-176-year planetary alignment) may the future have much more where that came from.

Recommended readings

Posting may be light,  as various weather-, work- and tax-related matters press on my time. A few recommendations for reading things on topics I found interesting:

--"Will more workers be artists in the future?" James Pethokoukis commenting on a post by Martin Hutchinson on robots and work. If I were the president of the United States, FWIW, I would appoint a commission to examine a range of societal dangers and opportunities arising from robotics and artificial intelligence, and would ask its members behind the scenes to produce something worthwhile, not BS.

--Walter Olson with a Cato post "About That Coke Ad." I didn't see the Superbowl, but now that I've read this and watched that commercial, I feel I am up-to-speed on the most important part.

--"A Beautiful Map of Global Ocean Currents." I'm increasingly impressed by how io9 covers real science and science fiction without making a hash of the distinction between them. On a similar note, I recommend Nature Futures, which runs science fiction under the auspices of the science journal Nature.

UPDATE 2:08 PM: Review copy received: Unleashing the Second American Century: Four Forces for Economic Dominance, by Joel Kurtzman. Looks interesting. UPDATE: My review.

The sofalarity is near

An interesting piece in The New Yorker: "As Technology Gets Better, Will Society Get Worse?" by Tim Wu. Particularly memorable line: "If we’re not careful, our technological evolution will take us toward not a singularity but a sofalarity." Defined: "That’s a future defined not by an evolution toward superintelligence but by the absence of discomforts." A WALL-E reference follows.

Also: "The technology industry, which does so much to define us, has a duty to cater to our more complete selves rather than just our narrow interests." That strikes an unduly passive note; the consumer "defined" by the tech industry, which should "cater" to our better selves. Still, I agree with the basic sentiment. Too much time staring into electronic screens, not enough time amid society or nature--can be a very bad thing even if the robots don't decide to exterminate humanity in the next few decades.

Robots, Downton Abbey, etc.

A couple of misc. notes on items of interest:

-- In Slate there's a piece on "Why Watson is real artificial intelligence," by Miles Brundage and Joanna Bryson, written as a rejoinder to Douglas Hofstadter's "Why Watson and Siri Are Not Real AI," in Popular Mechanics. Why the rejoinder doesn't discuss Siri I'm not sure, and there's an element of semantic quibbling in discussing what constitutes "real AI." Still, I don't think Brundage and Bryson adequately rebut Hofstadter's argument, which is that the programs in question don't understand the meaning of the questions with which they're grappling. The critics cite Daniel Dennett in making the point that intelligence arises from numerous sub-intelligent parts, but the more important point Hofstadter is making is that in current-day AI the parts have not been arranged in such a way as to constitute an entity that actually knows or cares what it's talking about or that it even exists.

-- Castigating "Downton Abbey" for sugar-coating Edwardian* labor relations has been a left-liberal cause and is becoming a right-libertarian one with this Megan McArdle piece (and this gloss on it by Instapundit). I think the show does a decent job of conveying that not every employer of the time was as generally benevolent as the Crawleys, and I am impressed by this Foreign Affairs piece in which Jeremy Musson discusses some ways in which the series' depictions of servant life do have veracity. Bear in mind that the people working in a house like that would have had a set of alternative options in mind that also were not necessarily desirable from a 21st-century middle-class perspective.

* - Added: and post-Edwardian

-- Something to look forward to: man-versus-machine ping pong.

Some quick political notes

1. A lot of traffic (by this blog's standards) is going into my old post "Gingrich Park Place Disgrace." Don't know if this reflects people actually reading that post, or some horde of robots or something. I sure haven't had the impression that particular controversy is going to make any kind of comeback.

2. I expressed skepticism the other day about Elizabeth Warren's presidential prospects, in line with my piece about her from last year. On the other hand, she does seem to have gotten Larry Summers' scalp just now. Still, like David Frum, I'd hesitate to sell any Hillary Clinton stock currently.

3. Kudos to Nick Gillespie for his article "Four Principles for a Libertarian National Security State." I'm sure a Gillespie national security policy would have differences from a Silber national security policy (and for some broader differences, see my FrumForum review of his and Matt Welch's book) but I don't see much to disagree with in this latest piece, including "target the bad guys."

Battlestar and Akhenaten

By Mitch Johnson

Fans of the TV show Battlestar Galactica are left to wonder why the humans are polytheists and the cylon robots are monotheists. Back on Earth, however, the motivations and outcome of the first experiment with monotheism in history are well documented. Amenhotep III, pharaoh of the 18th dynasty in Ancient Egypt, desired to wrest power back from the priests at Karnak, who as direct representatives of the various gods were collecting enough tribute and power to challenge the pharaoh. His son, Amenhotep IV, ultimately rejected the Amen, embraced the obscure sun god Aten (changing his name to Akhenaten), built a new holy city away from Karnak in Amarna, and introduced to the world both monotheism and religious oppression. Only he could worship the Aten, and all references to the Amen were to be destroyed. After the unexplained loss of his queen, Nefertiti; his mother; and one of his daughters, Akhenaten became fanatical, introverted, and self obsessed. He ignored the entreaties of allies and the growing threat of foreign enemies, notably the Hitites in the East, and soon the empire was on the verge of collapse. With his death, Egypt dispensed with this disastrous experiment and managed to survive long enough for Ramesses II to rise and restore glory. Monotheism, of course, would return with the much more successful religions of Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

Space retirement

My latest at Research magazine: "Space Travel, Robots and Your Clients’ Retirement." Excerpt:

Consider the scenario below. Though it reads like science fiction, it is from a serious-minded report, with the sober title “Commercial Space Transportation Study,” that was presented to NASA by a consortium of aerospace companies in 1994 to assess various potential uses of space. One possibility raised was retirement in orbit: 

“For long-term residences in space, the elderly may be some of the people who could benefit from living in reduced gravity conditions … Without the heavy weight of gravity pulling down on them, elderly people may find themselves far more self-sufficient than they were on Earth. If they were only able to get around a little in their room and dress themselves while on the ground, they may find that they are able to get around enough to completely take care of cleaning, cooking, or other chores. In some cases, they may want to perform some type of job. It is possible that very little staff would be required to maintain a retirement center in space because the tenants could care for themselves.”

Hasn't worked out that way. Whole thing here.

Mind books at Maggie's Farm

Some kind words from one Dr. Joy Bliss at an intriguing site called Maggie's Farm:

I won't write the essay here, but I am convinced that the idea of "mind," "self", "consciousness", and free will are so useful that they must mean something. In normal language, I believe people, or at least most people, have souls. However defined.

The subject arises because of an excellent review by Kenneth Silber of two books in Reason, entitled Are We Really Smart Robots? Mr. Silber has an impressive grasp of an immensely complex subject which involves neuroscience, philosophy, psychology, and culture.

The site also has some racy photos (not of me).