The human-fueled automations I saw at Google are also largely out of sight in current international debates about the relationship between digital technology and the future of work. Will technology produce new jobs, new industries, and new forms of comparative advantage? Or will technology take away jobs and concentrate wealth among those who own the machines?
When we’re told what the future will look like, we always see the version where everyone lives like Minority Report’s John Anderton. Played by Tom Cruise, Anderton is a wealthy police chief, the kind of person who can afford a summer house on the lake or the newest Lexus model. But unfortunately, if the future is anything like the present, his will only be one side of the story.
“In the longer term, fully robotic soldiers may be developed and deployed, particularly by wealthier countries,” the paper says (thankfully, no plans to add ‘living tissue’ on the outside are mentioned). The study thus foresees the Pentagon playing a largely supervisory role over autonomous machines as increasingly central to all dimensions of warfare—from operational planning to identifying threats via surveillance and social media data-mining; from determining enemy targets to actually pursuing and executing them.
Hand in hand with the military-industrial complex, U.S. imperialism has created a massive prison-industrial complex that generates billions of dollars annually for businesses and industries profiting from mass incarceration.
'We have to make it happen'. Because Google operates the most widely used search engine in the world, and has hundreds of millions of Gmail, YouTube, and Android users as well, the company has a profound advantage when tuning its artificial intelligence approaches in response to people. It's as though every user of Google services is checking and rechecking Google's AI techniques, correcting the search company when it gets something wrong, and performing an action when it gets it right.
Smart machines probably won't kill us all—but they'll definitely take our jobs, and sooner than you think.
And guess who will own all these robots? People with money, of course. As this happens, capital will become ever more powerful and labor will become ever more worthless. Those without money—most of us—will live on whatever crumbs the owners of capital allow us.
It's easy to joke about our future robot overlords—R2-D2 or the Terminator?—but the challenge that machine intelligence presents really isn't science fiction anymore.
Like it or not, science fiction is becoming science fact. The Terminator was, of course, a work of fiction, but the idea of cyborgs and killer machines is not all that farfetched. In fact, the danger is becoming so real that the Obama Administration found the need to spell out explicit rules that specify under what circumstances machines are allowed to kill humans.
Under Nazi Germany, Dehomag leased and maintained the Nazis' collection of card punch machines. The use of this technology increased the efficiency of the Final Solution. IBM in New York established a special subsidiary, Watson Business Machines, to deal with railway traffic in the General Government during the Holocaust in Poland.
IBM expects to generate billions in new revenue by 2015 by putting Watson to work. The technology giant has already sold Watson to health-care clients, helping WellPoint Inc. (WLP) and Seton Health Family analyze data to improve care.