Robotic Nation Evidence

Stephen Thaler's Creativity Machine

From the article:

Technically, Stephen Thaler has written more music than any composer in the world. He also invented the Oral-B CrossAction toothbrush and devices that search the Internet for messages from terrorists. He has discovered substances harder than diamonds, coined 1.5 million new English words, and trained robotic cockroaches. Technically.

Thaler, the president and chief executive of Imagination Engines Inc. in Maryland Heights, Mo., gets credit for all those things, but he's really just ``the man behind the curtain,'' he said. The real inventor is a computer program called a Creativity Machine.

What Thaler has created is essentially ``Thomas Edison in a box,'' said Rusty Miller, a government contractor at General Dynamics and one of Thaler's chief cheerleaders.

``His first patent was for a Device for the Autonomous Generation of Useful Information,'' the official name of the Creativity Machine, Miller said. ``His second patent was for the Self-Training Neural Network Object. Patent Number Two was invented by Patent Number One. Think about that. Patent Number Two was invented by Patent Number One!''

Supporters say the technology is the best simulation of what goes on in human brains, and the first truly thinking machine.

Others say it is something far more sinister -- the beginning of ``Terminator'' technology, in which self-aware machines could take over the world.

Also:

Carmakers and security industries want to use machines to identify obstacles, pedestrians or intruders. Some machines can identify certain objects, but change lighting conditions or mist the lens with water, and the system falls apart.

Thaler spins a collection of toy cars, trucks and planes on an old turntable in his office while a Creativity Machine watches. The computer learns to distinguish Hummers from pickups and F-18s from 747s, no matter if the object is lit by a searchlight or sits in shadow or if rain spatters the windshield. The technology could alert drivers to whether they are about to back over a boy or a bicycle. Battlefield commanders might use similar technology to assess damage and decide whether to send in more bombs.

Machines trained to detect dangerous objects could replace humans at baggage screening stations or watch for suspicious behavior.

And:

All of the possible applications for Creativity Machines make some people uneasy. The machines could easily supplant people for many mundane jobs, and Thaler predicts that some traditionally human-only jobs, including laboratory scientist, could be up for grabs. Computer chemists could soon design new compounds and figure out how to make them.

The Web site of Imagination Engines, Inc. is quite straightforward in its portrayal of where we are headed:

IEI's bleeding edge neural network technology represents "AI's best bet" at creating human level intelligence in machines. Inevitably, it won't be ordinary computer programs, genetic algorithms, or even advanced hardware innovations that will achieve the super-intelligent AI systems portrayed in science fiction. Instead, IEI's self-learning, contemplative neural systems will drive all forms of synthetic intelligence, whether they be embedded within household appliances or within large computational clusters that are relentlessly churning Nobel caliber discoveries.

Founded in 1997 by Dr. Stephen Thaler, Imagination Engines, Inc. (IEI) has pursued its long range objective of producing trans-human intelligence in machines, while supplying a range of more conventional neural network services to such customers as Gillette, Anheuser-Busch, Air Force Research Laboratory, Boeing, Booz-Allen & Hamilton, Raytheon, General Electric, Ladish, and Bekaert. After all, who would be in a better position to provide such services than the most prodigious inventor of foundational neural network paradigms in the world?

See Robotic Nation for details on where this is taking us.

Smart Software Gives Surveillance Eyes a ‘Brain’

This article discusses software that makes video surveilliance cameras far more useful. From the article:

the software would only focus on things for which it was trained to look—like a gun in an airport, or the absence of a piece of equipment in a lab. Nelson has even created a prototype system that helps a person find things around the house, such as where reading glasses were left.

Also:

For instance, CEO Paul Simpson is looking into using linked cameras covering a wide area to exchange information about certain objects, be they suspicious packages in an airport or a suspicious truck driving through a city under military control.

Each day machine vision gets a little more capable as new ideas emerge and high-speed computer hardware gets less and less expensive. In 10 to 20 years, computers will be able to "see" as well as human beings in many common tasks.

'I'm HAL; I'll Be Your Pilot'

From the article:

As you fasten your seat belt a "welcome aboard" announcement is made by a computer — because there is no captain.

While plane designers dream of a high-tech future, the aerospace industry is debating whether if it will become feasible to fly passengers without pilots.

The article has quotes from both sides of the aisle. However, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are already flying routinely for the military -- It is only a matter of time before pilot-free commercial aircraft take to the skies. Pilots will succumb to the same forces that will remove truck drivers from trucks:

• Pilots are incredibly expensive
• Pilots are prone to human error (as well as drunkeness, sickness, drowsiness, gropiness, etc.)
• Pilots need sleep, while robots can operate 24x7

The most telling quote in the article is this one from Boeing:

However, Boeing, the big U.S. plane maker, has refused to rule out UAV technology in its future airliners.

"We're evaluating the UAV concept. But we don't have any plans at this time to incorporate it into our commercial aircraft," said James Wilkinson, Boeing's manager of product analysis and communications marketing. "Following a review of the technology, if it makes sense, we probably would include it."

In Robotic Nation I predict that pilots will be out of their jobs by 2015. In Manna I propose one possible scenario that speeds up the process:

The first real robotic system installed in a human position of trust was in the airline industry. The terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in 2001 had been a wakeup call. In 2008 there was a run of six airline accidents, all attributed to pilot or ATC error, which made everyone nervous. Then in 2012 the unthinkable happened. Two airline pilots, both sleeper agents for an Asian terrorist organization, flew their planes into massive U.S. targets almost simultaneously and killed nearly 50,000 people. One hit a basketball arena full of spectators, and the other ripped through the Democratic national convention in Las Vegas. That was the end of human pilots in the cockpit.

As it turned out, the transition to robotic planes was remarkably easy. Airplanes were already controlled by autopilots while enroute. Radar systems on the ground and in the planes were already taking off and landing the planes automatically. An airplane did not need a vision system -- its "vision" was radar, and radar had been around for more than half a century. There was also a secondary backup system that gave airplanes a form of consciousness. Airplanes could detect their exact location using GPS systems. These GPS systems were married to very detailed digital maps of the ground and the airspace over the ground. The maps told the airplane where every single building and structure was on the ground. So even if the autopilot failed and told the plane to go somewhere unsafe, a "conscious" plane would refuse to fly there. It was, quite literally, impossible for a conscious plane to fly into a building -- the plane "knew" that flying into a building was "wrong." If the autopilot went insane, the conscious plane shut it off and radioed for help. If all the engines failed or fell off, the plane knew what was on the ground in the vicinity and did its best to crash into an unpopulated area.

By 2015, there were no human airline pilots and no human air traffic controllers in the system. Everything about flying through the air was automated. The cockpit was stripped out of airplanes and the space became a lounge or a seating area. With human beings out of the loop, the safety record of the airline industry improved and people came to trust the airlines again. No one cared at all that there was no human pilot in the cockpit -- people actually trusted machines more than human beings.

See Manna for details.

Tech execs look to expand--outside U.S.

This is not specifically a robotic article, but it does show how businesses behave when they have a cheaper source of labor available. From the article:

"Tech companies are seeing a rebound in business, but top executives said this week that any jobs added to meet growing demand will likely be in countries where labor is cheaper than the United States.

Executives speaking at the Reuters Technology, Media and Telecommunications Summit in New York said they see increased hiring in countries like India and China, but few jobs will be added in the United States.

Michael Jordan, chief executive of technology services provider Electronic Data Systems, said the company's employees in low-cost locations like India will rise from 9,000 now to 20,000 by 2006.

Bruce Claflin, chief executive of network products maker 3Com, said the company's joint-venture with Huawei Technologies of China will add 1,000 engineers, all supplied by Huawei.

Anne Mulcahy, chief executive of Xerox, which has about 40 percent of its 60,000 employees outside the U.S., expects little hiring. "I don't really think we'll be adding people the way we used to,''

In other words, as large U.S. technology companies grow in the future, they will not be adding any new employees in the U.S. All the jobs will be going overseas.

The same thing will happen as each new type of robotic technology starts to become available in the future. Companies will rapidly shed human workers in favor of much less expensive robotic labor.

The combination of offshore job loss and robotic job loss at approximately the same time means that unemployment rolls will saturate very quickly. We are seeing the leading edge of this trend in 2003/2004, which is why the job slump has lasted so long. See Robotic Nation for details.

How bad is the competition between automation and human workers getting? There was an article in the local paper recently entitled Garbage workers sound off that might give a hint as to where we are heading.

The city of Raleigh, NC is getting ready to buy a fleet of new, automated garbage trucks. In the process, 122 garbage collectors will lose their jobs. The city says it will give the displaced workers other jobs, but we all know what that means. That is what every employer tells workers when they install automation. Auto workers, for example, have heard that line for decades. As soon as a recession comes along, all of the workers replaced by automation -- the ones who were promised "other jobs" -- get laid off.

The article contains a wide variety of comments from the workers. Some of them make sense, some don't. That's really not the point. The point is, these guys are garbage collectors. They work, "for wages that force guys with families to take second jobs. Many of the guys cannot afford to live in Raleigh proper." So these garbage collectors are not getting paid tons of money. Yet, even though they are literally wading through garbage every working day and are not making much money, they took the time to call the reporter and talk with her about their jobs.

Why would they do that? Perhaps because they are worried. They are worried that if they lose their current jobs -- wading through garbage making not much money -- they may actually end up with even worse jobs once they are fired. It is hard to imagine jobs any worse, yet these guys have no trouble imagining it. Because of their fears, they are trying to save their current jobs. They don't want to be replaced by automated garbage trucks.

That tells you something about today's economy, today's job market, and the effects that automation is having on the employment landscape.

The article From programming to delivering pizza offers another perspective on the same problem. Understanding the severity of the current labor slump is also pertinent.

Many articles have come out this month discussing the robotic vehicles that will be competing in DARPA's Grand Challenge race in March:

• Clash of the Headless Humvees
  
• The Humvee is car and driver
  
• Robots, start your engines

According to the Wired article:

The challenge is posed by DARPA: navigate over 200 miles of obstacle-strewn desert, making decisions and plotting a course with absolutely no human intervention. When DARPA's Grand Challenge begins March 13, Sandstorm will be fed coordinates, then released into the wild to find its way to the finish line -- or fail -- on its own.

These vehicles competing in the Grand Challenge are true robots. They are totally autonomous. They do all their own thinking and make their own decisions. According to this article:

A screen on the dashboard came to life, showing the road ahead as seen by two cameras on the truck's roof: a tree here, a light pole there, a hedgerow up ahead. Hall typed a few commands into a laptop computer, eased the truck into gear and took his hands off the steering wheel.

Two tons of steel rolled forward and made a jerky left out of a parking lot in Morgan Hill. It gained speed and settled into a lane. It followed a curve to an intersection. It stopped. Then it turned right and continued down the road.

All by itself.

The article continues:

Military applications are just the start, they said; robotic vehicles will radically change transportation.

Commuting would be a snap. Rental cars could meet you at the airport door. Tractors would harvest crops on their own.

Most importantly, robot drivers mean that truck drivers will no longer be needed and they can all be laid off.

In the United States, there are over 1.5 million truck drivers operating tractor trailer rigs and heavy trucks (like dump trucks). There are nearly 3 million truck drivers total [ref]. Once the technology exists, all of these drivers will be out of a job very quickly for two reasons: 1) truck drivers are expensive, and 2) human error leads to a lot of accidents. In addition, a robotic truck can run 24 hours a day -- a robot never sleeps.

The same thing will happen to taxi drivers, and another 176,000 people will be out of work [ref].

If it takes the economy approximately 5 years to absorb 4,800 factory layoffs in North Carolina, how long will it take the economy to absorb two or three million unemployed truck drivers and taxi drivers? Unfortunately, at exactly the same time, millions of other workers will be getting replaced by robots as well. See Robotic Nation for details.

This list contains most of the teams that are competing:

• A.I. Motorvators
  
• Axion Racing
  
• CajunBot
  
• Carnegie Mellon red team
  
• CIMAR
  
• CyberRider
  
• Digital Auto Drive
  
• Ghostrider
  
• The Golem Group
  
• Insight Racing
  
• PVHS Road Warriors
  
• Rob Meyer Productions
  
• Rover Systems
  
• SciAutonics
  
• Team Arctic Tortise
  
• Team CalTech
  
• Team ENSCO
  
• Team LoGHIQ
  
• Team Overbot
  
• Team Phantasm
  
• Team Spirit of Las Vegas
  
• Team TerraMax
  
• Virginia Tech

It's fascinating to look at some of the technology they are using.

As with everything else robotic, the key feature is incremental improvement. Even if none of these teams reach the goal this year, they will have a year to improve and then they will be back at it next year. And then the next year. And so on. Just as chess computers eventually beat the best human chess players, robots will eventually beat the best human truck drivers. One day in the not-too-distant future we will have robotic drivers that are much safer than human drivers, much more reliable than human drivers, much less expensive than human drivers, and 24x7.

University Unveils Robot Receptionist



From the article:

Valerie is a drum-shaped contraption with a digitally animated face that appears on a computer display, perched in a custom-made booth at the entrance of a computer science hall.

With her ability to detect motion, she greets visitors as they approach. Type in a question on a keyboard and she dispenses directions around the Pittsburgh campus and fills visitors in on the weather.

Eventually her creators would like to install face and voice recognition, and make Valerie more lifelike by taking her "face" off a flat-screen monitor.

This first version of Valerie is rough around the edges. However, it is a start, and engineering refinement will make her better and better. Think about how many businesses have receptionists sitting at the front desk. Imagine, over the next 5 years or so, Valerie improving dramatically as voice recognition capabilities improve, software improves, etc. Now imagine most of those human receptionists being replaced by inexpensive robots.

That sounds far-fetched today because we've never seen it before. However, a receptionist has a fairly limited repertoire of necessary skills. The receptionist needs to:

• Handle customers as they arrive, ask which employee they wish to see and call that employee.
• Handle salespeople when they arrive and ask them to leave.
• Handle deliveries when they arrive, video tape the delivery and sign for the package.
• Handle any nut cases, vagrants, etc. when they arrive and call security.
• In high-end settings, offer the client a drink and have another robot fetch it.

Over the course of several years, a programmer can use standard technology to handle all of these different situations (and variations) to create a very effective robotic receptionist. With facial recognition software and a little tweaking, the robotic receptionist will likely be better than most human receptionists. Using something like Microsoft Speech Server, the robotic receptionist can also answer the phone.

Let's imagine that the first robotic receptionists that get deployed can handle 95% of the situations they encounter. That means that, for 19 out of 20 arriving customers, the robotic receptionist will be able to handle the situation autonomously and route the person correctly. On one out of 20 arriving customers, the robotic receptionist will say, "Hang on one moment while I call someone to assist you." Then the rate will improve to 97%. Then 99%. Then 99.8%. And so on. That ability to incrementally improve -- to get better and better over time -- is why robots will be able to take over so many jobs.

Now imagine a mobile receptionist -- one who can walk or roll around. Imagine that this receptionist knows about the location, price and in-stock status of every product in a large retail store. Imagine 20 of these robots roaming around the store to help customers. If you walk into the store looking for Guacamole dip, the robot immediately walks with you to the Guacamole dip location in the store. As we get used to interacting with these robots in our everyday lives, we will take them for granted (just like we take ATM machines for granted today), and they will seem completely normal when we interact with one sitting in the receptionist's chair at any local business.

Five Robots That Will Change Your Life

A good article with great pictures:



This particular robot is designed to help firefighters.

The mention of firefighters brings up this thought. You may recall, back during 9/11, that one of the big problems was getting firefighters up to the affected floors. To climb 80 stories of steps carrying all their equipment, human firefighters took over an hour to reach the crisis.

Once autonomous robots are available, it is easy to imagine robotic firefighters that are packed into closets on every floor. When a fire is detected, these robots instantly burst from their closets to fight the blaze and rescue the people in the building. This will save a lot of lives (343 firefighters died at the World Trade Center in 2001), but it will also be the end of human firefighters as a profession. 250,000 paid firefighters in the U.S. will be out of work.

From this article:

"To a surprising degree, firms seem able to continue identifying and implementing new efficiencies in their production processes and thus have found it possible so far to meet increasing orders without stepping up hiring,'' - Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan

It certainly is not surprising -- it is exactly what you would expect in a Robotic Nation. Someone needs to point Mr. Greenspan toward this blog.

From the same article:

The number of people continuing to collect state jobless benefits jumped to 3.186 million, the highest this year, in the week that ended Feb. 7 from 3.080 million a week earlier.

The insured employment rate, which tends to track the U.S. jobless rate, increased to 2.5 percent in the week ended Feb. 7 from 2.4 percent.

Since record keeping began in 1947, productivity gains have never outstripped gross domestic product when growth was faster than 4 percent, Labor and Commerce Department statistics show.

Productivity, or how much is produced for each hour worked, rose an average of 3.7 percent from 2001 to 2003, almost twice the economy's average 1.9 percent rate of expansion over the same period.

That's a direct result of automation and robots. And the pace is going to accelerate.

Attack of the Stuntbots

From the article:

Endorphin made its big-screen debut in December's The Return of the King, where it was used to animate a particularly tricky stunt. But that was just a sneak preview. In May, the company's bots will fight and die on the plains of Ilium, taking tumbles too tough for Brad Pitt in Wolfgang Petersen's film Troy.

And so begins the epic story of the demise of the stuntman as we know him. Reil's virtual actors react like real humans to whatever forces are applied to them, offering an infinite variety of lifelike movements that can be produced quickly on a desktop PC.

School hires robot librarian

Form the article:

There will soon be a new librarian at work at Valparaiso University. This librarian won't get any days off because it's a robot.

About half the library's collection is being been placed in steel bins, so robotic arms can fetch the books 24 hours a day.

I expect that libraries will begin the process of extinction at some point over the next 20 to 30 years. In the meantime, robots will be able to run the libraries that remain.

This same technology is allowing the automation of warehouses, and will also move into the stockrooms of retail stores to eliminate workers there.

Math and Marriage: A Match Made in Heaven? and Researcher uses math formulas for marriage

Elsewhere in this blog you can find posts that describe the vulnerability of fast food workers, pharmacists, teachers, truck drivers, nurses, lab assistants, umpires, actors, surgeons, factory workers, farm hands, convenience store clerks, air traffic controllers, etc. to robotic replacement. Now we can add marriage counselors to the list. From the article:

At first glance, the idea doesn't add up. How could a formula possibly predict which married couples are going to get divorced? But a team of mathematicians and a psychologist say they've figured out how to use numbers as a kind of crystal ball.

"Using the mathematical model, we can predict dissolution or divorce with 90 percent accuracy over four years," says Kristin Swanson, an adjunct research assistant professor of applied mathematics at the University of Washington.

This statement from the article is especially interesting:

"Before this model was developed, divorce prediction was not accurate," Gottman says in statement, "and we had no idea how to analyze what we call the masters and disasters of marriage -- those long-term happily married and divorced couples."

The implication is that, prior to this model, divorce prediction by human counselors was not accurate. So, not only will robots be able to replace human counselors, but they will do a better job -- they will be able to accurately predict divorce and then do something about it. The article describes the techniques a robotic counselor might use to steer a marriage down the right track:

After studying hundreds of videotaped conversations between spouses, the researchers came up with a mathematical formula to gauge the stability of the relationships... If the tests show that a relationship is troubled, researchers can make hypothetical revisions to the conversations, changing how the spouses react to each other, and then see if it changes the overall picture, Swanson says. Based on the results, counselors can make suggestions to the couple about how they should interact.

Robotic marriage counselors will revolutionize the industry. They will be able to predict divorce with 90% accuracy and offer useful solutions to problems in the relationship.

Humans with troubled marriages might have a problem "opening up" to a robot that looks like R2D2. Fortunately, they won't have to. We will be able to create robotic counselors that look completely human.

In Robots get friendly, the work of "Sculptor roboticist" David Hanson is described. From the article:

Later this month Valerie will go on duty behind the reception desk at Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Sciences. Besides doling out information and directions, she'll chat about her ever-changing personal life. If you introduce yourself, she'll remember you. If you ask about the weather, when she meets you again she may bring up the subject.

Valerie, in case you haven't guessed, is a robot - one in a long line of increasingly sophisticated machines.

Keep in mind that this is all happening in 2004. Imagine what robots will be like 25 years from now. Hard to imagine? Compare computer games from 1980 (Remember Pac Mac? It was introduced in 1980) to today's (e.g. Half Life 2). Pac Man had little pixelated icons moving around in a square maze. Half Life 2 is a fully immersive DVD-quality gaming experience. The same thing will happen with robots over the next 25 years. Today Valerie will be a little rough around the edges. In 25 years, she will seem completely human. And she will be able to fix your marriage.

ChessBrain Community :: We did it!!!

From the article:

ChessBrain has become the first Distributed Computing network to play an actual game against a single human opponent. Over two thousand computers (2070) participated during the game! Our prior record involved only 846 machines.

From the ChessBrain site:

The ChessBrain project is devoted to exploring distributed computing using the ancient but still vibrant game of Chess. On January 30th 2004 ChessBrain made history by becoming the first distributed network to play a game against a single human opponent.

Since 1950 or so (see this chronology), people have been predicting that computers would be able to beat human beings at chess. It took perhaps 40 years, but this did come to pass. In the 1990s, personal computers became fast enough that chess software could beat many human players. However, Grand Master players could easily defeat simple chess software.

It took a team of people at IBM and millions of dollars in equipment to develop a chess computer that could compete with the best human players. But in 1997, the computer named Deep Blue was able to defeat Garry Kasparov in a well-publicized match. IBM discusses the Deep Blue machine on this page:

IBM has designed a system that can search through a century of chess moves at speeds up to four hundred million positions per second. But why build a system that plays chess? Other than Kasparov, who would be interested in such a computer?

By learning from a "friendly" chess match -- an extremely complex and strategic game -- the computer playing against Kasparov may be programmed to solve complex but common problems which, historically, have been very costly in terms of both time and money. The technology developed by the Deep Blue experiment explores a new computing paradigm: combining both specialized software and hardware with general purpose machines to more effectively tackle problems. The power behind Deep Blue is an IBM RS/6000* SP* system, finely tuned with customized processor chips designed by IBM Research. This combination, in addition to expert knowledge, enables users to take on larger problems by analyzing a greater number of possible solutions. As a result, industries from express shipping and air transportation to health insurance, financial investment, cosmetics manufacturing and retail distribution could benefit from the Deep Blue system architecture.

The ChessBrain project takes a completely different approach. It is using CPU time from normal computers "donated" by people around the world. The software distributes the processing load of a chess game across those thousands of computers. The advantage of this approach is that the ChessBrain project can amass a very large amount of computing power when necessary from its network of donors. The other advantage, of course, is that this distributed chess computer is free.

The ChessBrain project also shows that, perhaps in 20 years, a desktop PC costing $500 will be able to beat the best human players. In 20 years, a single desktop machine will have the power of the thousands of computers in today's ChessBrain project.

Chess is a very complicated game, but computer scientists understood how to create a chess-playing computer decades ago. Then they simply had to wait as the computer hardware got more and more and more powerful. Eventually there was enough CPU power available for chess computers to beat the best human players.

In that same way, we will be able to wait 30 to 40 years or so and we will have $500 desktop computers that have the CPU power of the human brain. It just will not be that long. Then, 20 years later, a desktop machine will have the power of 1,000 human brains. 20 years after that, a desktop machine will have the power of 1,000,000 human brains, and so on. This CPU power will fuel the robotic revolution. See Robotic Nation for details.

Most Pillowtex workers jobless months after layoff

Here in North Carolina last year, we lost a major employer -- a textile factory run by Pillowtex. The mill employed nearly 5,000 people. The closing of Pillowtex was the largest mass layoff in North Carolina history. Although these jobs were lost to textile competition from China rather than directly to robots and automation, the effect is exactly the same. A large block of employees lost their jobs. Therefore, this mass layoff lets us ask and answer an important question about what will happen as robots begin to take over very large blocks of jobs in the U.S. economy.

The question is simple: When an industry rapidly automates and dumps thousands of workers onto the unemployment roles in today's economy, what will happen? How long will it take for the economy to absorb the unemployed workers?

Here's what the article has to say:

Nearly seven months after textile giant Pillowtex shut down, wiping out 4,800 jobs in the largest mass layoff in North Carolina history, the hunt for work is growing more pressing.

Job hunters are growing nervous. For most, benefits will expire this summer.

"When they first came in, they were probably still in shock," said Linda Burton, an Employment Security Commission officer who works in a small office just a few hundred yards from the shuttered Pillowtex mill.

"Now it's really coming home that time is ticking away, and at some point they're not going to have any money. Folks are getting a little bit more anxious and a little bit more demanding," she said.

Of the 4,300 Pillowtex workers in Cabarrus and Rowan counties who lost their jobs, ESC officials estimate that 400 have found work.

According to the conventional wisdom, the economy will create new jobs for all of the people unemployed by automation, robots and off-shoring. Also, our current economy is "booming" according to the White House. Yet here we find that only 400 out of 4,300 unemployed workers, or 9.3%, have found work after 7 months. At that rate, it will take 5 years or so for the economy to absorb this block of workers.

This paragraph from the article is telling:

Burton gives Cruey a lead on a job. It's a position loading and unloading trucks at a Shoe Show warehouse in Kannapolis for about $9 an hour. The ESC has referred 45 other job seekers to Shoe Show in the past week.

There just are not that many jobs available.

The article also indicates that the jobs these workers end up taking are worse than the jobs they lost. For example, many try (unsuccessfully) to apply at a place like Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart jobs "pay less and offer fewer benefits than jobs at the mill." The Pillowtex factory offered "good jobs". For example, one employee profiled in the article was making $500 a week (approximately $12.50/hour or $26,000 per year gross) and now receives $184 per week (approximately $9,600 per year gross) in unemployment benefits. Those benefits are obviously quite meager (well below the poverty level) and run out after a year. If it takes the economy 5 years to absorb several thousand unemployed workers, what exactly are these workers going to do after the year of benefits expire?

Now imagine what will happen as robots reach critical mass, and multiple industries are experiencing mass layoffs at approximately the same time. For example, the airlines automate and lay off tens of thousands of pilots and air traffic controllers. Simultaneously the construction industry starts to automate and lays off hundreds of thousands of roofers, painters, brick layers and carpenters. Simultaneously the retail industry begins the mass installation of automated checkout lines, kiosks and stocking robots, laying off millions of employees. Simultaneously the fast food industry starts introducing completely robotic restaurants, laying off millions more. And so on. This will all start at approximately the same time, beginning in 2015 or 2020.

As those millions of displaced employees flow into unemployment offices, they will face the same situation these Pillowtex workers face, except there will be 10 million of them instead of 5,000. As their benefits run out, will they end up in Terrafoam?

See Robotic Nation for details.

Robot boosts chances of selecting winning stocks

The future of intelligent robots

Radical Warship Takes Shape

This article from the Washington Post describes the next generation of stealth destroyers that the U.S. Navy plans to build. The project is called DD(X). The ships will be 600 feet long (100 feet longer than current destroyers) and travel at 30 knots.



From the article:

Instead of the 350 officers and enlisted men and women aboard destroyers, the DD(X) will sail with a crew of 150, or fewer, because of automation. It also will have 80 missile launchers and two main deck guns whose 155mm ammunition will be loaded, moved, stored and fired without ever being touched by human hands.

In other words, the staffing needs of the new destroyer are reduced by more than half because of robots.

That same level of staff reduction will be happening simultaneously throughout the U.S. economy over the next 15 years. From the Robotic Freedom article:

Companies like Wal-mart, K-Mart, Target, Home Depot, Lowes, BJ's, Sam's Club, Toys R Us, Sears, J.C. Penny's, Barnes and Noble, Borders, Best Buy, Circuit City, Office Max, Staples, Office Depot, Kroger's, Winn-Dixie, Pet Depot, etc. will all switch to robots at approximately the same time. They will dump 10 million or so workers onto the unemployment rolls at approximately the same time. Other industries like fast food, construction, transportation, warehousing, etc. will be automating as well, dumping millions more.

We need to start thinking about the implications of this transformation now. See Robotic Nation for details.

Robotic kiosks proliferate

IHT: Self-service speeds check-in
NYT: Speeding Flight Check-In at Self-Service Kiosks

From the article:

Since the fall of 2001, when new security rules slowed passenger check-in to a crawl, airlines have doubled the number of self-service kiosks, to 3,000. Make that 3,001: Today, JetBlue Airways plans to introduce the first of 150 self-service kiosks it will install around the country at its hub terminal at John F. Kennedy International Airport. JetBlue, whose passengers book about 75 percent of their tickets online, worked with I.B.M. to develop a kiosk with extra large interactive screens.

Self-service kiosks have been a boon to rushed travelers, cutting check-in times, and have saved the industry millions of dollars in labor costs. The machines have proved so successful at airports that two major hotel chains are testing automated check-in systems at some locations.

The phrase, "saved the industry millions of dollars in labor costs" is a euphemism for firing people.

Also:

The airlines are reaping benefits. A study in November by Forrester Research showed that self-service check-in costs the airlines 16 cents a passenger, compared with $3.68 using ticket-counter agents.

This example demonstrates why every corporation will be acquiring robots as quickly as possible -- the economics of robots are impossible to ignore.

Automation that reduces costs like this would normally be seen as good, except that the rate at which these kiosks will start to unemploy people will be startling. From the article:

Hilton Hotels has scheduled tests of self-service kiosks at the Hilton New York and Hilton Chicago. On the basis of the results, it will decide whether to introduce kiosks throughout the chain. Hilton is talking with several airlines to see if the self-service machines can be enhanced with airline check-in systems, according to Thomas Spitler, a Hilton vice president.

"The airlines,'' Mr. Spitler said, "have really trained customers to look for alternatives to human agents."

You will soon find these kiosks not only in airports, but in hotels, fast food restaurants, etc. Hundreds of thousands of people will be losing their jobs at approximately the same time. Simultaneously, automated check out lines will be dismissing workers from retail establishments. At the same time, robots and off-shoring will be eliminating the remaining factory jobs. At the same time, software and offshoring will eliminate most call-center jobs. At the same time off-shoring will be eliminating the majority of IT jobs in the U.S. At the same time...

See Robotic Nation for details.

Extreme monitoring

Mood Ring Measured in Megahertz

From the article:

Your computer -- that auxiliary brain that lives outside your skull -- soon may be issuing public updates on what's happening inside your body.

Using tiny sensors, transmitters and some software, researchers at Sandia National Laboratories have turned personal computers into advanced polygraph machines that they say are capable of monitoring people's emotions and abilities.

Here's how it would work: You're in a meeting, and each person in attendance is hooked up to a computer that's monitoring their perspiration and heartbeat, reading their facial expressions and head motions, analyzing their voice tones and then presenting them with a running account of how they are feeling. This information will also be transmitted to everyone else in the meeting.

This seems like it would be a logical extension of Manna in white-collar environments. In minimum-wage environments, it would be a way for Manna to infer that the employee might be performing in a sub-par way or is doing something wrong. On airplane flights it might be a way to detect that someone is thinking evil thoughts.

There is a quote later in the article: "I honestly can't see corporations daring to use this monitoring system on their employees. People would not accept this -- it's just plain spooky." This quote neglects the "power of situation". For example, if you are told, "you will lose your job unless you let us wire you up," or "you cannot fly on airplanes unless you let us wire you up", then you will comply.

How many people in 1980 would "accept" the security measures seen in airports today, where you are required to take off your shoes and belt, you are told to unbutton your pants during personal screening, etc.? We accept it today because it happened incrementally and we have no choice -- no one can fly unless he/she submits to this level of intrusion.

Or think about what is happening in Utah. According to
Dossier program alarms Utahns:

It sounds like a sci-fi thriller: a super computer program that gathers dossiers on every single man, woman and child — everything from birth and marriage and divorce history to hunting licenses and car license plates. Even every address you have lived at down to the color of your hair.

It sounds surreal, but former Gov. Mike Leavitt signed Utah's 2.4 million residents up for a pilot program — ironically called MATRIX — that does just that.

This is happening now, and the citizens of Utah appear to have little or no control over it.

As robots and automation control more and more human systems, it becomes easier to implement these types of systems. This section from Manna describes one logical conclusion of the process:

Manna informed me on Friday afternoon that I was to be fired. But the Manna network also knew that my bank account was close to zero and there was no way I would be able to make the next rent payment. The Manna network also knew that there were no job prospects for me, since it knew the employment status of everyone. Like most people, nearly everything I owned was leased. I wouldn't be able to make the payments on any of that either. I was unmarried and all of my relatives were in Terrafoam already. Manna knew that. No one I knew in the city had offered to take me on as a guest, so that was out and Manna knew it.

So Manna put it all together and took the liberty to unplug me. As I finished the dismissal interview and left the building, I had two robotic escorts. The robot on my right addressed me as a robotic bus pulled up. The bus looked to be about half full.

"Jacob Lewis105, you are now unemployed. Do you have other means of employment?"

Of course it knew the answer, but this formality could not be avoided. "No."

"Do you have guest status with any resident?" The robot asked.

"No."

"Do you have means of support unknown to me?"

I suppose I could have stashed a cache of gold under my mattress, and this question allowed me to declare it. Such a cache would, of course, be grounds for arrest, so I was screwed either way. "No." I was without any means of support.

"In accordance with ordinance 605.12b, you have been assigned room 140352 in building 16, resident quant C. This assignment provides you with suitable housing and nourishment to sustain your life. Please board the bus."

That was how you ended up in Terrafoam. The system knew you had no means of support, so it "gave" you one. You could leave terrafoam once you regained a means of support, but there really was no way to do that unless Manna gave it to you.

See Manna for details.

Concentration of Wealth

Reich’s Reprimand

Robert Reich's view of the concentration of wealth in America today:

We now have more national income and national wealth concentrated in fewer hands than we’ve had since the gilded age of the late nineteenth century. This poses a fundamental threat to democracy.

Also:

Throughout the post-war era, at least up until the 1980s, we had a very strong social contract in this country. We all assumed that anyone who worked full time should earn enough to bring his or her family out of poverty. We assumed that corporations owed their employees at least some duties, particularly if the companies were profitable; corporations should keep employees on and give them a share in the increasing profitability....

Jobs are less secure today than they have ever been before. More than 40 million Americans have no health insurance, but over 140 million Americans are facing soaring health costs in terms of their employer-provided benefits as the shift more and more of the costs onto employees. Retirement savings are at a historic low. And most of the giant baby boom is unprepared for retirement.

As discussed in Robotic Nation and Robotic Freedom, robots fuel the concentration of wealth. The trends we are seeing today are the tip of the iceberg unless there are fundamental economic changes to protect everyone who is automated out of their jobs in the short term.

See this page for a wide variety of concentration-of-wealth examples.

Robotic Prediction

The Robots Are Here

Rodney Brooks has weighed in with his predictions for our robotic future. From the article:

I am convinced robots today are where computers were in 1978. That’s about the year that computers started to appear around us in the way that robots are cropping up today. Of course, it was another 15 years before computers truly became pervasive in our lives. I think that 15 years from now, robots will be everywhere, as e-mail and the Web are now.

But we’re also just a couple of research advances away from even bigger growth in a whole new set of markets—growth that will look like what happened in the computer industry over the last 25 years. Take farming. Agriculture in Western Europe and North America relies on vast numbers of migrant laborers to manipulate individual plants. Polish laborers flock to Germany to push dirt up around asparagus to make the spears white. North Africans travel to Italy to pick grapes. And workers from Latin America toil on farms across the United States. All these workers use their eyes to identify the plants and their locations and their hands to manipulate them. In short, a multibillion-dollar market awaits robots that perform these kinds of tasks. Such markets will likely emerge first in Japan, where far higher labor costs make the economics more compelling. Same goes for a broad array of manufacturing jobs. Fabricating home appliances, toys, clothes, and electrical goods requires visual perception coupled with manual dexterity. This could be yet another multibillion-dollar robot market.

Also:

True, robots today are still not very good at either recognizing generic objects or readily manipulating them. But Moore’s Law has been very, very helpful in chipping away at both problems. Computer vision, while still lagging far behind the average two-year-old, is getting less fuzzy. For example, programs in the lab have gotten very good at tracking motion and recognizing faces. And right now our robots are not particularly adept at grasping objects with varying sizes, shapes, and surface properties. But new sensors enabled by microelectromechanical systems and nanotechnologies—and fueled by plenty of embedded computational horsepower—make the time ripe for researchers to tackle robot dexterity, too. It will help that military funding for advanced information-systems research is likely to shift from navigation to logistics and resupply—which will require better robotic vision and dexterity.

Robots with the vision capabilities of a two-year-old and the manipulation capabilities of a six-year-old will be more disruptive to our way of life than any robot portrayed by the governor of California. They will reorder the world labor markets that have developed over the last 50 years. They will change immigration patterns and the massive shift of labor from developed to developing countries.

Rodney A. Brooks is Director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and is the Fujitsu Professor of Computer Science. He is also Chairman and Chief Technical Officer of iRobot Corp.

For details, see Robotic Nation.

Robotic Military Vehicles

Robots for No Man's Land

From the article:

Stryker, one of the U.S. Army's newest infantry vehicles, is fitted with a "ladar" scanner, the equivalent of a mounted pair of eyes that see by emitting 400,000 laser and radar beams and snap 120 camera images every second. Its brain -- a 40-pound computer system tucked inside its body -- processes that data, and makes instant judgments on how to act and where to go.

Also:

The idea is to teach Stryker to accomplish a mission on its own, as a robot. By 2010, robotic Strykers and similar contrivances are slated to be in use as all-purpose battlefield vehicles, surveying battlegrounds, sniffing for land mines, or transporting supplies and troops to the front line.

An unmanned Stryker is part of the military's effort to move more machines into battle to save both money and lives. "Well before the end of the century, there will be no people on the battlefield," said Robert Finkelstein, a professor at the University of Maryland's School of Management and Technology.

On the one hand, it makes sense to remove people from the battlefield and replace them with robots carrying machine guns and launching bombs. A battlefield is a deadly and disgusting place -- a place where millions of lives have been lost in the most atrocious ways.

On the other hand, one purpose of war is to murder human beings. Do we want intelligent machines in charge of mass murder?

If machines are given the right to murder humans, here is one scenario. Imagine that an intelligent, autonomous robotic soldier circa 2040 costs $50,000. In 2040, the U.S. invests $200 billion in robotic soldiers (about one half of today's defense budget). $200 billion would buy about 4 million troops. In 2041 the U.S. does the same thing, and buys 4 million more. In 10 years, the U.S. would own 40 million of these robotic soldiers. That is more soldiers than the entire planet has today. They would be supported by robotic ships, robotic aircraft, robotic vehicles, etc.

This entire robotic military force would be commanded by a handful of people -- the Commander in Chief, the Secretary of Defense and a small collection of generals and admirals. That is identical to today's military command structure. The key difference is that a robotic army, unlike a human army, can easily be programmed to have no conscience.

Let's take an extreme example of where this lack of conscience could lead. It would likely be impossible for the President today to decide to use the army to kill all 35 million of the citizens in the state of California. We would like to believe that at some level in a human army, the human soldiers would rebel against the command. A robotic army would have no such reaction, and would simply carry out the order.

On the other hand, let's imagine that we do program robotic soldiers with a conscience. The robots would end up ignoring many commands as unconscionable. In other words, robots with a conscience would not make very good soldiers.