TagAutomation
Preparing Students to Work in an Artificial Intelligence World
What Do Robots Find Hard? Sewing a T-shirt, For One Thing
Humans automatically and constantly adjust hand movements to the ever-changing alignment of cloth. Robots just freezeMenswear entrepreneur Harris Quinn wrote a thoughtful piece at Wired recently on the mixed success of efforts to automate sewing via Sewbots, for example, developed by SoftWear Automation CEO Palaniswamy Rajan: One reason that sewing lends itself so well to the grinding labor of sweatshops is that it is very difficult to automate. That’s because cloth is pliable and constantly moving. The Sewbots face unexpected hurdles: But no two batches of cotton are exactly alike, often varying from harvest to harvest; variations in the fabric and dyes further complicate matters. Each variation can necessitate recalibrating the system, interrupting operations, and SoftWear has to train its machinery to respond accordingly. “The biggest challenge we have faced getting to a production system Read More ›
Is Technology Running Backward?
Technology isn't adding value anymore. It's adding expense.I’ve been a computer nerd since I was a young child. My dad bought the family a TI 99/4A before I even went to Kindergarten, and I basically started programming when I learned to read. As I grew up, the thing that fascinated me most about technology was the ability to automate. Automation, in theory, is supposed to make people’s lives better. It’s supposed to take the drudgery out of work, to leave people to focus on the more creative aspects of their work. With a word processor, I can type, correct, spellcheck, rewrite, and reorganize in an instant. I can even maintain old drafts easily. With a spreadsheet, I can keep track of all my income, expenses, grades, goals, Read More ›
Will AI Ever Replace Human Beings? Why Do You Ask?
A better question might be: Why do we want to know the future of artificial intelligence?
A World Without Work? Don’t Hold Your Breath
Predictions of mass unemployment caused by robots continue to be wildly inaccurateWill we soon be sitting on couches watching reality TV shows while robots work 24/7 doing all of the work humans used to do? The idea that robots will replace most human labor has been around for almost 100 years and has become more popular with each new advance, from sensors and microprocessors to enterprise software, data analytics, and AI. The latest wave of robot hysteria was tweaked by The Singularity is Near in 2005, emboldened by Race Against the Machine in 2012, and sent over the top by The Second Machine Age and The Rise of Robots in 2016, and A World Without Work in 2020, all best sellers. A World Without Work was shortlisted for the Financial Times & McKinsey 2020 Business Book of the Year, in addition Read More ›
Sci-fi Saturday: When “The Workplace” Is Anything But
The short film (less than 10 min) starts with a woman reassuring herself, unsettlingly, “I AM the boss”“The Workplace” at DUST by Carlyn Hudson (April 1, 2021, 9:32 min) We’ve been warned: “You are very qualified.” For what though? “In a future economy subsumed by technological employment, humans continue to find meaning through their ‘work’ — where the lucky ones get to show up to an “office” from 9-5 and live out their mundane workplace fantasies.” This sci-fi short will appeal to many who have had a job at the corner of Rat and Race and sense that’s a blessing compared to the alternative. It starts with a woman reassuring herself, “I AM the boss,” and cuts to her interviewing a job candidate who seems off-putting at first but appears qualified — and then things get weird. Read More ›
Woke Medicine Is Very Bad for Everyone’s Health
The issues raised by Critical Race Theory are real but I believe that the diagnosis is deeply flawedCritical Race Theory and claims about structural racism in American society are infiltrating medical care and education. There is a major effort in medical education today to indoctrinate students and resident physicians into Critical Theory. This is, in my view, a deeply misguided approach.The issues raised by Critical Race Theory are real but I believe that the diagnosis is deeply flawed. The question we face is: how can we protect medical education and practice from this latest iteration of Marxism, and at the same time work to improve deficiencies in education and medical care that Critical Race Theorists correctly point out? It is undeniable that there are structural problems in medicine. Many of these problems impede good medical care, especially Read More ›
How Do You Know That Your “AI” Isn’t a Human Being?
AI often depends not on geniuses, but on thousands of anonymous, toiling human workersMany people think that AI happens without human intervention. In reality, many toiling workers help make it possible. In a piece at Medium on ethical dangers of AI, Dorothea Baur (pictured) lists four concerns but one stands out. And it’s not science fiction: 4. AI hype downplays human contribution AI hype is also part of stories that exaggerate the capabilities of AI in the present when effectively humans are still doing most of the work — we have all heard about the thousands of ghost workers who are manually labeling data to feed algorithms under dire working conditions. So, presenting something as machine intelligence when it’s actually human intelligence, is also dishonest and it deprecates the humans doing the real Read More ›
COVID-19: Technology Trends That Are Sneaking Up on Us Faster Now
Most of these changes, for better or worse, are probably here to stayWe knew big changes were coming. And that COVID-19 has ramped them up. But when experts expound grand generalities and wave their hands a lot, it can be hard to clearly see what a change means where we live and work. One writing teacher, for example, learned how to massively adapt all of a sudden: Each spring, I teach Writing about Oneself, a class on first-person reading and writing, to 12 Yale undergraduates chosen from 100 or so… Every year I fill out the registrar’s Pedagogical Needs Request Form, leaving 14 of the 15 “Technological Needs” boxes unchecked. (No, I don’t need a SMART board. No, I don’t need a digital projector. No, I don’t need a Blu-ray player.) The Read More ›
Autonomous Vehicles Are Not a “Rich Person’s” Technology
A transportation expert tells Jay Richards, alternative transport may disrupt the transportation industry but only in the short termJay Richards talked recently with Tom Alberg, Founder of the Madrona Venture Group and Co-chair of the ACES Northwest Network, about ACES’ efforts to bring Automated, Connected, Electric, and Shared vehicle technologies to the Puget Sound region: The Benefits of ACES Vehicle Technology A partial transcript follows: Jay Richards: Well, you were chairing the panel on autonomous vehicles and you’re part of an initiative here in Seattle. What do you think is the most important takeaway from that? Tom Alberg: I think that it’s really a combination of technologies. It’s both new technologies and it’s changed business models. So we formed a group here in Seattle called ACES, Autonomous, Connected, Electric, and Shared. “Shared” is really kind of the Uber Read More ›
Beware of Geeks Bearing Formulas—It’s Often Pseudoscience
Pseudoscience based on data without theory and theory without data undermine the credibility of real science, which is the key to human progressElsewhere I have warned of the perils of making decisions based on data without theory. For example, the patterns discovered by data-mining computer algorithms are often nothing more than meaningless coincidences. It is also perilous to go to the opposite extreme—to make decisions based on theory without data. Once upon a time, for example, economists were fond of sketching labor demand and supply curves and assuming that the economy was at their intersection. That is, labor demand is equal to supply, so that everyone who wants to work is working. The unemployed have chosen to be unemployed because they value leisure more than income. True believers were fond of this theory and little troubled by reality. Between 1929 and 1933, Read More ›
Bingecast: Jay Richards on The Human Advantage
Will machines take over human jobs? Jay Richards discusses artificial intelligence, virtue, job displacement, and collaboration using technology with Larry L. Linenschmidt. This interview is about Jay’s book, The Human Advantage: The Future of American Work in an Age of Smart Machines. This interview was originally aired by the Hill Country Institute and is included here in its entirety. This Read More ›
Will the COVID-19 Pandemic Promote Mass Automation?
Caution! Robots don’t file for benefits but that’s not all we need to know about themI understand the panic many business leaders experience as they try to stay solvent while customers evaporate. Panic, however, is a poor teacher: AI-based automation will not only not solve all their problems, it may very well add to them. AI is not a magic box into which we can stuff them and make them disappear.
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Random Comments on the Passing Scene: Carbon Computing and Much More
Child porn traffickers arrested despite their attempts to hide using high tech and BitcoinAlso, McDonald’s doubles down on self-ordering kiosks, acquires automation firm.
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Pizza Robots Get the Pink Slip
True, the doughbots didn’t make good pizza. But is the message about them or something else?I have nothing against robots. (I am against bad pizza.) I do, however, get very tired of the science fiction-fantasy of humanity-squashing robots. And that’s all it is: A fantasy.
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Boeing Workers, Please Don’t Kick the Robot on Its Way Out
The jetliner manufacturer’s decision to give the robots’ job back to machinists underlines the hard realities of automation. For example, it doesn’t always workRobot error turned out to be a bigger problem than human error.
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Should AI-Written News Stories Have Bylines? Whose?
Like it or not, AI is here to stay. So, how do we make the best use of it in writing?Automation can help some aspects of writing. But media outlets get tech “google”-eyes and too often fail to ask the hard questions about what they are automating, how, and why.
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Jay Richards: Prepare For AI, But Don’t Panic — Part II
Will machines take over human jobs? Larry L. Linenschmidt discusses Artificial Intelligence, job displacement, and collaboration using technology with Jay Richards. This interview is about Jay’s book, The Human Advantage: The Future of American Work in an Age of Smart Machines. This interview was originally aired by the Hill Country Institute and is included here in its entirety. This rebroadcast Read More ›
Tech Entrepreneur Peter Thiel says Silicon Valley is losing its touch
Peter Thiel also compared universities today to the Catholic Church at its worstAbout the Big Tech companies, he says, “The story is not that they have done a lot of bad things but that they have not done enough good things. That remains the core challenge of Silicon Valley.”
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