Found This Week #9
In this week’s post: Above the clouds, a new blue, the zipper, how do we deal with the AI revolution and a look at what’s wrong with elections.
Each Friday I share some of the best things I encounter, from the internet mostly but also from real life! Hopefully what I find interesting will also be interesting to you :-)
Photo Of The Week
I’ve flown between Wales and Ireland 26 times so far this year. Each time, I’m still amazed at how beautiful it is above the clouds and how different they can be each time :-)
New Blue Pigment Accidentally Discovered
In 2009, scientists working on experiments with manganese oxide accidentally discovered a new pigment of blue. YlnMn blue as it turns out is stable, highly reflective and non-toxic and is now available for use by artists.
Meet The Zipper
If you haven’t seen this before, it’s worth a look. The Zipper truck is part of a dynamic traffic management system that moves the central median to create an extra lane for inbound or outbound traffic at different times of the day.
Thought of The Week: How Do We Deal With The AI Revolution?
There’s lots in news this week about AI. We‘ve seen a veteran US fighter pilot instructor solidly beaten by an AI opponent.
We’ve seen an AI chatbot called DoNotPay help to overturn 160,000 wrongfully assigned parking tickets in London and New York. We’ve also seen a new company called Smacc create an AI system that heralds the end of accountants by fully automating the reconciliation of expenses and invoicing.
These are just snippets of the AI revolution taking hold. By revolution, I don’t mean that the machines are taking over. I see it as the next wave of progress in the use of technology in changing society, similar to the industrial revolution 200 years ago. As with any revolution however, the incumbent system is going to change, possibly rapidly and without knowing what to do. One of the incumbent systems in this case is work.
In a heated discussion with friends this week, I talked about topics I had read and included in previous blog posts, such as the road to superintelligence in Found This Week #5, and we discussed how automation (i.e. the implementation of AI) will hugely disrupt and eventually replace large amounts of professions as we see them today. Historical examples such as the prevalence of the surname Smith were given to demonstrate profession disruption in action. The heat of the discussion centred around the replacement of human intuition and high level decision making in many professions. While some points of this argument are valid, I think the evidence suggests that the future role of humans in work will have much less coverage than today. That’s not to say that humans will become irrelevant but rather much more efficient. I think our working lives will be augmented so much by AI automation that we will be able to focus on only those purely creative, intuitive or high level decision making processes. Granted, we may become much less dependent on intuition and experience because our AI “workers” will have crunched all the possible decision outcomes and presented us with the mathematically sound best predicted result.
This line of discussion led us to questioning the future of work and what it means for society. If AI “workers” end up doing most of the work, where does that leave the humans?
Some see the oncoming efficiencies as an exciting prospect. Being freed from work by AI automation will allow us to do more work at higher levels or even reduce the amount of work altogether and spend more time on experiences and learning. Others see the prospect as a doomsday scenario whereby their jobs are rendered obsolete. While both points of view are valid, it points to a major gap in how we perceive work. Traditional professions such as doctors, lawyers, accountants etc have yet to be truly disrupted and have a work domain that for the most part is definable and has been so for the last 100 years. Domains such as engineering and science however are predicated on constant progression. As a result these professions are at home with disruption and the prospect of one’s job changing multiple times during a career because of outside factors, like new materials or new data exposed by the LHC or an evolution in AI.
Change is coming for all of us and those in traditional professions need to start mentally preparing. When I was 17 and choosing what subject to study in university our guidance teacher gave us a 2 minute summary of many of the options available to us. When it came to computer science, he presented us with a sheet of computer code and told us that computer scientists learn how to write code like this to control computers. I was excited, that sounded cool to me. He continued to say however that “in computers”, you will never be able to stop learning because it’s a field that is always changing, unlike accounting where you learn the majority of what you need at the start of your career (not this this is necessarily true for accountants, but he had 2 minutes to get across to a room full of uninterested teenagers waiting for the lunch break, so he had to be concise). This filled me with a jolt of fear. I remember debating whether I should go with a perceived safer and easier career option. Thankfully my curiosity won over my fear and I started a career that above all else would teach me that continuous learning and progression are to be embraced. I can understand though that not everyone has been exposed to this way of thinking and in fact exponential and sometimes uncontrolled progression goes against the ethos of some long held professions. Unfortunately it is these professions that the AI revolution will impact. According to Google’s head of machine learning, we are entering an AI spring (This is reference to the many AI winters, see the AI Primer video featured in Found This Week #7 for more). Google also believe the positives such as safer roads due to self driving cars and better medical diagnoses in the short term outway the possibilities of any longterm doomsday scenarios. But of course they would say that :-p
But again back to the question, where does that leave the humans? This article in the economist points to education being the key to surviving this revolution and that it’s up to policymakers to start planning for a re-education of societies now. Capitalism is the current operating system of our society (in the west anyway), the processes of which are jobs. But if we no longer need to work as much, or at all, how do we stop the system from crashing? This article suggests a negative income tax to sustain the capitalist system while also accommodating the elimination of the large scale need to work. It also points to Periclean Athens circa 450BC where work was not necessary for a productive society (albeit that was predicated on slaves). It may be a bit of stretch to think that being able to talk to your phone is going to cause a complete upheaval and re-examination of how society operates. We as a society will need to deal with these changes on much smaller timeframes now however than we have in the past, that is over tens of years rather than hundreds, thanks to the exponential growth in technology innovation. Change is good, you just need to be ready to embrace it :-)
Elections Are The Fossil Fuel of Democracy
In the wake of the Brexit vote, many of the 48% of voters here in Britain are feeling disappointed and somewhat isolated and betrayed by the result. Having experienced three elections in the past 18 months, two of which I voted in here in Wales and the general election in Ireland which I followed out of interest, I’m becoming somewhat disillusioned with the process of elections. The onus is on the voter to gather enough information to make an informed decision in the voting booth.
Not only does this information gathering exercise oftentimes not happen, people are now so easily mis-informed and swayed by the information delivered by mass media. Unfortunately, as evidenced by the lead up to the Brexit vote, this information is rarely factual or truthful and often manipulated by all sides to trigger underlying biases and emotions rather than an informed discussion.
I’ve been searching for a way to describe this and I came across this excellent guardian article describing exactly what I was feeling. Apparently it’s called Democratic Fatigue Syndrome. The article describes how it is elections as the apparatus of democracy, rather than democracy itself, that is beginning to break under the stress of a society which, at this moment in time, has a high distrust of national governments but a passion for politics and are highly connected allowing for the easy dissemination of information. It describes elections as the fossil fuels of democracy, which once provided a much needed boost in democratic performance and stability but now present a problem because of our reliance on their current incarnation.
The article examines some alternatives to elections as we operate them now, one of which is sortition, whereby a cross-section of society is drawn by lot to discuss and/or decide on a particular topic, similar to a jury. I was surprised to learn that Ireland is considered at the forefront of innovation in this democratic technique. In 2012, a constitutional convention was formed to address revisions to the constitution of Ireland. This convention was formed by 33 elected politicians and 66 randomly selected ordinary members of society who met one weekend a month for a year. During their deliberations they sought the help and opinions of experts and thought leaders in different topics and fields before presenting their decisions for ratification by both the houses of the Irish parliament, then by government and eventually by a referendum of the people.
I’d like to see more experimentation and exploration like this within the operations of democracy. Otherwise, elections will continue to be a battle of propaganda machines :-(
Cool Thing Of The Week: Common MythConceptions
This is a great infograph from David McCandless from Information is Beautifull. There’s bound to be one myth on the infograph that you weren’t aware of, like the Coriolis effect not effecting the water in toilets (thanks The X-Files and The Simpsons! :-p).
See you next week :-)
About Me
I’m a web consultant, contract web developer and technical project manager originally from Cork and now based in Swansea, South Wales. A lot of my work is done with clients in Ireland & the UK, where I offer strategy, planning and technical delivery services. I also offer freelance CTO services to companies in need of technical bootstrapping or reinvention. If you think I can help you in your business, check out my details on http://darylfeehely.com.
