Digital Genocide or Another Big Leap
In the movie Robocop (2014) there is a frightening scene of a teenager colliding with the EM-209 walking robot. A young boy in a fit of revenge rushes with a knife on a murderous car equipped with a powerful lethal weapon. EM-209, guided by the prescribed algorithms, turns him into a bloody mash. The scene ends at the moment of the shot, but judging by the size of the weapon, it happened.
There will not be such a future. We were lucky, and humanity jumped this step of development without having walking robots. But the war is already under way, it’s just very quiet.
CJ Rosenbaum in article “Is Amazon Destroying Small-Town America?” wrote:
The late 1990’s arrive and e-commerce is booming. The same shoes that John has in his 60-year-old shoe shop are being sold at half the price. In addition to the reduced prices, Amazon is also carrying every type of shoe ever made — size, color, pattern, material, anything the customer wants.
The malls cut an arm off of John’s shoe store.
Walmart cut a leg off of John’s shoe store.
Amazon stuck a dagger in the heart of John’s shoe store.
By simplifying the ecommerce-genocide-problem to one sentence, it turns out that a small business with calculators loses the war for a client from powerful servers in the data centers of large federal companies. What is not the war of the peasants with robots?
Or here is another example Nike’s focus on robotics threatens Asia’s low-cost workforce. It will be good if the dismissed will be able to find work in other organizations And if they can not? If this is the early warnings of a large wave of cost optimization? In the video at the beginning of the article, the terrorists were hung with belts stuffed with explosives and rushed to the robots, exploding them. Imagine the desperate unemployed worker who is trying to blow up the local data center of Nike.
Well, how not to mention Uber. Effective route calculation is performed on servers in the faraway United States, and the work is deprived of taxi drivers around the world. And they do not like it.
We can certainly say that the passengers from the new model of the operation of the escaped services were the winners. But always someone will win (lowering costs as far as possible sounds good until you remember that one of those costs is labor… One of those costs is us.) It is important to fix the struggle between “analog” human methods of work and effective digital algorithms.
But that’s the most important thing. What do these examples have in common? They are united by centralization. Calculations are more profitable to produce centrally. For example, the search engine in the world has been left in fact only one (the preventive measures of the Chinese government protected their territory from coverage by Google). Vertical channels are formed that take information in the field and process it centrally. All that so far justifies the presence of people on the lower floors of verticals — inefficient data collection and lack of trust in remote data centers. Two of these problems will be solved with the development of the Internet of things and blockchain-technologies.
Humanity has two paths. The first hard way is to fight for aging models of behavior and ways of earning money. To see the cars in danger and join trade unions against Nike’s dismissals, turn over the cars of Uber drivers and demand tax benefits for the regional small business. But choosing this way, do not be surprised by the day when an effective EM-209 turns you into a pile of meat debris.
The second way is even more difficult, because it will have to change. Fighting against oneself is the most difficult struggle, but we will have to rethink our methods of work and “supplement ourselves” with effective machine calculations. I will finish the note with the words of Garry Kasparov. A person who was able to step over through his loss to the computer and become the best, digital version of himself.
We don’t get to choose when and where technological progress stops. We cannot slow down. In fact, we have to speed up. Our technology excels at removing difficulties and uncertainties from our lives, and so we must seek out ever more difficult, ever more uncertain challenges. Machines have calculations. We have understanding. Machines have instructions. We have purpose. Machines have objectivity. We have passion. We should not worry about what our machines can do today. Instead, we should worry about what they still cannot do today, because we will need the help of the new, intelligent machines to turn our grandest dreams into reality. And if we fail, if we fail, it’s not because our machines are too intelligent, or not intelligent enough. If we fail, it’s because we grew complacent and limited our ambitions. Our humanity is not defined by any skill, like swinging a hammer or even playing chess.
There’s one thing only a human can do. That’s dream. So let us dream big.
