Implications of Drones
and the growing gap in our two class society
When you think about drones and the new ecosystem being built around them (see Airware a startup that is building an operating system for drones) I don’t think we can begin to rationalize the extent of how it will affect society. Drones fascinate me because as soon as we start using them, they will begin to do everything for us. The use-cases are endless, and the extent of their footprint will be much larger than Amazon having packages dropped off in half an hour. Amazon will be able to capitalize on using drones; in highly populated dense urban areas, all amazon would have to do is drive one truck full of drones and packages, open the truck door, and watch the drones optimize a delivery schedule, maximizing efficiency.
First we have drones flying around dropping of packages. Next we have drones being our cars (see google).
How about drones that build drones? What about when we can make the drones or robots think? Before jumping to the idea that robots can think and the philosophy that comes with that statement, let’s define “think” as programmed to understand motivation, learning and curiosity. Since 1990, Professor Jürgen Schmidhuber has been doing research in Switzerland and from that we can see the beginning of programming cognitive states in artificial intelligence. Schmidhuber has been creating emotions like curiosity and motivation through artificially intelligent agents where “active reinforcement learners translate mismatches between expectations and reality into curiosity rewards or intrinsic rewards for curious, creative, exploring agents which like to observe / create truly surprising aspects of the world, to learn novel patterns”.
So basically we can create drones that want to learn and will continuously solve problems for us. Predicting the future is near impossible. But, when I hear the word future I usually go straight to the movie I-Robot, which depicts a futuristic world in 2035 where robots have completely changed the way society functions. These robots are as common as household appliances, with everyone having them. The robots assist the elderly, compose the army, and are used all across the world doing services that humans would normally do today. In terms of their understanding, the robots are programmed to follow three laws consisting of: 1) A robot must never harm a human being or allow a human to be hurt; 2) A robot must obey his orders given unless it violates the first law; 3) A robot must protect its own existence unless it violates the first or second laws. These laws are created to justify the decisions the robots make, forcing them to follow a strict set of rules to guide their decision making.
Now I’m not going to ruin the movie, but there is that possibility of Robots becoming too smart and…well you know—try conquering the world.
Where it becomes interesting is that although it may seem like these robots speak and understand English, they truly do not (with the exception of sonny…because he’s different). They are capable of hearing what language we are speaking, and executing the appropriate command that is programmed in response if it is in accordance with the three rules. The robots fail to understand the semantics or have feelings, and purely base their decisions on statistical probabilities in accordance with the three laws. In I-Robot, Will Smith was in a car accident that sent him and a 12-year-old girl into a river. The robot was able to save Will Smith at the expense of the girl, because he had a higher probability of survival. However, Will Smith feels guilty of this, as he believes a human would have saved the girl and not him, a rational decision when describing the value of life and how much life an individual has left. However, because the robots fail to understand emotion or feelings, they concluded that it was more appropriate to follow statistical probability of survival.
Imagine how this will affect science and the problems that our world faces. R2D2 and C3PO will be running around the world saving cats that are stuck in trees and trying to cure cancer. By creating a functioning robot with an intrinsic reward system, and providing it with the appropriate resources, we can see a situation where robots begin to solve the problems we currently face. And the impact these drones may have will only further separate the rich from the poor in our society. No longer will companies be willing to pay humans to do mundane tasks when a drone can complete the jobs quicker, with higher efficiency. Soon we will see drones replace humans across all industries; without a college degree and a wide range of tangible skills, we are no better than the machine we created. We are actually worse, and as a manager with the responsibility to maximize shareholder value, it makes no sense to further employ humans. Sure there will be jobs that we wont replace because of the human “feel” behind them such as medicine, law, and business and industries that will take longer to disrupt. But customer service or in the food industry? We already have robots beating the best human chess players, and winning The Turing Test. We can’t tell the difference between a human and a robot through the screen anymore, and with the trend of big data and access to the right data at their uh…robot fingertips, their speed and ability to solve our problems will increase exponentially.
Witness the end of the middle class. Society will separate into two. People with degrees and skills that can’t be replicated by machine, and people who can’t. I’m afraid of what our economy will look like, as we already have a poor outlook on unemployment. If you think the growth of technology is going to create more jobs, I have a sad story for you. It might at first, as we employ people to fill the voids in these new companies, but at some point the robots these companies are making will be able to take your job.
Within the last twenty years, look at what we have accomplished in progressing technology and see how far we have come. Today, we are seeing the rise of smart devices and the ability to make smart houses. We are making significant progress in our understanding of the brain and are continuously conquering technological obstacles in our path. If we are capable of modeling curiosity and motivation, what characteristics and cognitive states will we not be able to build algorithmically? Recently, at the Global Future 2045 International Congress, Dmitri Itskov announced that he believes he will be able to create a simulated mind in a robot machine, and transport our consciousness into robot replacement bodies within the next ten years. He also announced that this would keep him on pace for his ultimate goal of achieving humanly conscious holograms in the next thirty years. We are living through a fast paced time in the middle of the technology revolution; philosophy and science around us will change. For those lucky enough to be in our early twenties, there is a possibility that we are faced with a question no one can currently answer: do you want to live forever?
