The Modern Day Taboo: Rise of AI and Robotics

Taboo... is a once prevalent and widely accepted fabric of a culture that is so deeply ingrained and efficient for the system that it manages to persist for long into it while the culture itself changes... when the culture fully transforms, this still persistent and accepted fabric becomes starkly visible as an alien or obsolete entity or the taboo. Thus as a matter of fact taboos are not a vile or erroneous outcome of the society, they are rather a well thought, profusely tested and once widely accepted part of the culture. But a point comes when the society takes a multifold leap and has to clutch to an altogether novel system, squeezing out the 'taboo' part of it off its new system. Moreover, the attorney of tagging a sub system as a taboo is generally bestowed to the ones in power or in majority (generally the newer generation). It's rarely a case when a minority or a weaker section or an older section comes out in the open and declares a subsystem of its era as a taboo.

Now why am I digging this deep into the asserted definition of taboo? Its so that we may behold the changed face of the taboo that is more complex and incorrigible this time. Its so that we, the transient generation of the digital era, may introspect for a moment to address the elephant in the room. A long ignored and subdued taboo waiting to be tagged as one.

Now before that, a quick headline:

A two-year study from McKinsey Global Institute suggests that by 2030, intelligent agents and robots could eliminate as much as 30 percent of the world’s human labour. The current debate centers not on whether these changes will take place but on how, when, and where the impact of artificial intelligence will hit hardest. McKinsey reckons that, depending upon various adoption scenarios, automation will displace between 400 and 800 million jobs by 2030, requiring as many as 375 million people to switch job categories entirely.

So the taboo that I want to refer here is: The surge of AI and its supposed threat to human supremacy, dominance and hence existence.  The taboo is our conviction toward keeping the machines and AI away from the driving seat.

Machines/ technology are manifestations of human imagination, that is destined to surpass the physical capabilities of human. Thus technology is bound to stay ahead oh humans, otherwise there is no use of creating such redundant technology at the first place. Knowingly or unknowingly, we are bound to create machines superior than us, be it in a narrow task sphere. It has not been more than even a century since AI and robots emerged, but we can already feel the heat. They are evolving much faster than us. At times, we also happen to discover such advance solutions that still haven’t been able to find a problem for them. For example the Da Vinci robotic surgery that involves minimal incision, struggled to find a suitable area for itself to be applied to. But finally found its place in prostate cancer treatment with better post treatment results. We being on the verge of a technological renaissance leading to an altogether different ecosystem of machines and humans, have arrived at such a point where the supposedly primitive entity is not a portion of our system external to us humans but rather this time, we lag behind, so as to be tagged under that hood of taboo, hindering the due transformation that needs to take place for evolution of the system as a whole. I have used all this redefinition and assertion just to recall and realise the journey of the 'taboo'. Just so that we know that taboo is not a stark phenomenon that surges out abruptly, it's rather a by-product churned out subtly and gradually over a long period of time and thought. This probably should at least open a pore in our minds to ponder over the possibility of living with such a potential taboo that we have been denying recognition for long. Maybe out of our personal interests we are still holding onto a supposedly primitive thought that should be thrown off as a taboo.

What I am talking about here is a paradigm shift. We take pride in being the smartest of all and the master of all in the ecosystem. This makes us conclude that we hold the autonomy to the system and our freedom as well, and hence this "supposedly" leads to the best possible way that our species can survive (both biologically and metaphysically). But let us hold on for a second and ponder over as to why don't we let the reigns fall off to the hands of someone superior to us(or someone potential of being superior). I feel we shall immediately conclude that it would lead to lack of our freedom and control and hence invite unforeseen and unwanted results.

On march 2018, a very unfortunate incident occurred in Tempe, Arizona wherein, a 49 year old lady fell prey to the nascent autonomous driving technology and left for abode in an accident. Amongst the interrogative studies, it was mentioned that the prediction system of the vehicle got confused that expected manual intervention from the passenger for an definitive action.

This had had obvious spurs and allegations around regarding the experimental run of the vehicles. Now let us look around, while we are still on the driving seat of the ecosystem, bestowed with the freedom to act as the master of all, do you think we have averted those "mishappenings". Empirical data for case in hand states that driverless cars are less prone to such unfortunate results. In India, where autonomous vehicles are yet a thing of fantasy, more than 1,50,000 people are killed each year in traffic accidents. That's about 400 fatalities a day. So why do we equate freedom to well-being or for that matter hijacked authority to sustenance. Just give it a second thought and let us replace discipline with freedom in the earlier sentence. I feel that may prove to be a better choice or at least be given a chance. Thus robots or AI governing or monitoring or keeping us in discipline doesn't seem to be an altogether unthought and weird idea.

Now for some amongst those who are bearing with me, may find what I just said an offensive or threatening or for that matter a quixotic thought. But look around. According to a study, the average American adult spends 8 1/2 hours a day staring into screens. Which means a one third of our day(Though the figures are very conservative and I assure you that).Remove another 8 hours of the day for sleep and we are left with a lesser amount of time to interact with live humans, which I further believe we do not do. We are provided with devices to be integrated with our body (earphones/smartphones/smartwatches) which makes us communicate with the machine giving us a feeling that we are interacting with humans. And a yet another comparison, we have gathered the ability to talk to millions of humans together, millions of miles apart, by being associated with technology, and being almost a slave to it for harnessing that capability because we are left paralyzed when the media, the internet fails, we can't communicate any longer. Thus the compliance of humans with technology has already seeped in pervasively with an emerging trend of technology being behind the wheels.

Time for a quick headline; recent breaches in the cyber world:

Rank               Company                    Year                Accounts

1                      Yahoo!                        2016                3 billion

2                      Marriott                        2018                500 million

3                      Yahoo!                        2016                500 million

4                      MySpace                    2016                360 million

5                      Under Armour             2018                150 million

6                      Equifax                       2017                145.5 million

7                      EBay                           2014                145 million

8                      Target                         2013                110 million

Now what we just saw was just a morsel from an endless list of yet to occur mishaps (pardon me for that). The weird thing about this is that we know its not recoverable and is unavoidable but.... we still accept such a system that allows for such events as the reason behind such mishappenings ,the corrupted systems of hackers and extortionists , are humans and not automated machines. The event that we are afraid of to occur during the reign of AI is already taking place and we are fine with that as we opine that its controlled while still being done by us. Its like a placebo medication. We don’t actually need the treatment, we just need the assurance.

There have been similar hesitations and boos for automation of services in the past too, with luddites setting ablaze the machinery and hence the idea behind it. In the 1980s, the advent of personal computers spurred “computerphobia” with many fearing computers would replace them. There have been conflicting opinions floating over this topic among even the contemporaries too such as Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and so on.

But on the contrary, these leaps have proven to catapult the well-being as well as the intellect of the mass to a higher level by creating more jobs than destroyed. When primitive tasks are automated, novel ones are generated for producing in a better and quicker way.

During the Industrial Revolution substantial tasks in the weaving process were automated, prompting workers to focus on the things machines could not do, such as operating a machine, and then tending multiple machines to keep them running smoothly. This gave an exponential rise to the throughput. Hence, the cloth cheaper and increased demand for it, which in turn created more jobs for weavers. In other words, technology enhanced both the productivity and the value of the worker, while also increasing the accessibility and quality of the product.

“Simply put, jobs that robots can replace are not good jobs in the first place. As humans, we climb up the rungs of drudgery — physically tasking or mind-numbing jobs — to jobs that use what got us to the top of the food chain, our brains.” — The Wall Street Journal, The Robots Are Coming. Welcome Them.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and related technologies will generate as many jobs in the U.K. as they displace over the next 20 years, according to an analysis published by the audit firm PwC.

The pioneer of AI, Alan Turing, had suggested that instead of mimicking and adult’s intelligence we should focus on transforming the intelligence of a child to an adult one. In a similar way we may think of AI and robotics as a “new-born”. They possess a higher level of efficacy along with an equally higher chance of being influenced. Our guidance and involvement will destine the future of this new-born and ofcourse that of our own.   

We have by now seen the potential positive impact of letting AI and robotics seep into our system.

Now let us scour through a little bit of biology:

So there exists a pretty tiny animal, smaller than a human foot, by the name newt. Now this tiny little newt can be poisonous enough to kill a roomful of adults. What made such a little being wield such a lethal weapon. The secret lies in what may aid us too. Actually there exists the garter snake which preys on the newt and becomes resistant to its poison while doing so. But during a long course of time, there persists an arms race between the two for survival, each one increases its fatal/resistance power. Thus gradually the newt transforms into a deadly poison sack and the garter becomes more and more resistant. As a matter of fact, the most toxic newts are found in the same areas as highly resistant snakes, and areas without toxic newts house only non-resistant snakes.

This beautiful evolutionary practice is termed as coevolution wherein each of the members becomes a challenger to the other, resulting in a continuous enhancement of the demographic characteristics as a whole.

This is a very natural and efficient transaction system of evolution and sustenance. The problem aloft us is that we have held shackled the whole system in apprehension. What needs to be done is to embrace the upfront change and focus more on how we can adapt to latch on to it and benefit from it as in the earlier coevolution example. For example one of the pertinent measures should be to shift the focus of our learning model as a whole from maintenance to exploration, leaving aside the primitive chores for machines. Now leaving these chores behind means entrusting the machines to take over them. We don’t need to repeat the same learning curve with the same domain knowledge for each new entity, i.e., in simpler terms we should not be starting from the alphabets each time for a new kindergartner, the learning should also transform along with the learner. In the last two decades, computation has transformed drastically, becoming more viable (from the hands of experts having complex machinery to the hands of the commoners into embedded systems) the whole system thereby coevolving; but the coming era has to shift its stress upon knowledge enhancement and leveraging that computation power.

Researchers in MIT are working towards the so called cyborg system wherein prosthesis will be integrated with body in a natural way allowing communication both ways. This would require entrusting the artificial portion of the body rewarding in return the removal of human limitation. Pat Quinn(the ice bucket challenge guy) was diagnosed with ALS, a kind of sclerosis that faded his voice away. An AI based project has helped him get his artificial voice back by using the computational power of the system.

Along these lines now let us imagine the newer picture as follows:

Maybe artificial intelligence is the corrigendum to human intelligence. It may be the further evolution of the human race. Maybe humans are the premature state of robots and robots lie ahead in the evolutionary timeline of life starting right from the Big bang. Thus in order to coexist we need not supress this counterpart but rather gradually let it seep into our system and mutate or evolve us.

The disruptive view of the next dimension by the pioneers has led to the advancement of human race physically and metaphysically. Humanity has embraced these advancements with grace and vigour. But still, Artificial Intelligence has been a topic attracting contrasting views with a major chunk being that of sceptics addressing their insecurities to the association of intelligence to a "non-human" thing. It is said that such a kind of intelligence is vulnerable and is prone to corruption. But look around, is human intelligence flawless? Hasn't it been corrupted too and rendered dark at times? Anyways, it seems pretty obvious to have such an unwelcoming opinion when you are able to observe yourself fade away in the oblivion in the "life cycle". When a physically and mentally competent entity(robots/ artificial intelligence) is right at your doorstep to take you over and render you dispensable to the universe; such kind of hostile opinion to their introduction to the universe itself seems justified. But; wait.....

Are we learned enough to assume this opinion as a conclusion, that too on behalf of the universe?? Has our mind expanded enough to contain and conclude the entire ethos?? I guess not... Lets see it this way.. Right from the childhood, we are taught about the evolution chart... of species. Our stature within our ancestors and among other species is fed to us through that; and by the end of this story, generally we are made to believe that we, the humans lie at the ultimate end of this evolution timeline and we are the utmost state of evolution. But, not even a morsel is being told to us about what lies further and we are never able to realise that maybe we are the penultimate state of evolution or maybe we lie somewhere in the middle. We have not been the only humans to have lived on earth, there have been our counterparts as well such as the homo erectus who survived longer than we have lived yet. As a matter of fact, it has been found in certain studies that human evolution has slowed down. Still we think of ourselves as the torch bearers of the evolutionary parade.

This kind of teaching gives rise to the notion of "I". This I... makes us attach all our focus and attention to us and to others of our kind. All our decisions made henceforth, become righteous only if they increase the chances of our existence in the "universe". But won't such a kind of a centered approach lead to the collapse of the ever expanding universe? As the nature of the universe is to expand and not to focus on a particular point. So for that, we need to understand what is I. What makes "me" the "I" and the person or the dog or the machine sitting next to me in a bus a not "I". This I is.... consciousness and form. It makes me stay behind my eyes as "I" and behold the universe from there...as the "else". It is due this residence/ entrapment of the consciousness to ourselves that we are unable to associate ourselves to anything apart from our own physical/ bodily bounds. This entrapment of consciousness to the form, limits the realisation of self to the shelf life of the physical form. Once the physical form ceases to function, the consciousness vanishes and and along with it goes all the memories and the knowledge attained. Isn't it such a wastage, that we are dependent on the container of the precious entity and once the container expires, we simply let go of the entity nurtured and kept in?

For this reason I feel that knowledge, consciousness and form should be contiguous and a shared one. It should be uninterrupted. It should be transferable and should be shared with other entities of our world, rendering it a more evolved profile. For a naïve instance deep learning is able to accomplish the most intricate tasks without even allowing us to realise how it did it. DARPA launched an ‘explainable AI’ program known generally as the third wave AI that will adapt to novel situations and most importantly explain its decisions. In an another supposedly far-fetched vision, Elon musk, referring to his venture ‘Neuralink’ aptly said that “to achieve a democratization of intelligence such that its not monopolistically held in purely digital form by agencies, if we have billions of people with high-bandwidth link to the AI extension of themselves, it would eventually make everyone hypersmart”, that he aims to achieve through a so called internet of brains and machines. That way we can share tasks and capabilities amongst each other without demarcating the control rigidly. Though we must have mechanisms to preserve and transfer consciousness from one form to the other so that we inherit the evolved characters as well. This would free us from the enslavement of the physical form. We would be able to leverage our own 'artificial creations' by engaging closely with them in our evolutionary process. The physical form would just be a mode of experience and communication. Under such a scenario, we would be able to push our bounds further and make ourselves ubiquitous. This would align us with the true nature of the universe, i.e. expansion. And "I" would ultimately contain the universe... and not a dispensable particle of it.

I feel artificial intelligence and robotics is a channel to such a journey and we should embrace them not as a taboo with an insecurity of our extinction but as an opportunity of our expansion.