7 things we should be talking about

efficiency privacy stupidity security vulnerability robot ethics malice

thesis: whenever machines become more efficient at doing something than people, people will be replaced.

efficiency privacy stupidity security vulnerability robot ethics malice

»Two hundred years ago, 70% of American workers lived on the farm. Today automation has eliminated all but 1% of their jobs, replacing them (and their work animals) with machines.« Will a robot take your job? [New Yorker]

efficiency privacy stupidity security vulnerability robot ethics malice

among others: › soldier › journalist › farmer › pharmacist

10 jobs robots already do better than you [MarketWatch]

efficiency privacy stupidity security vulnerability robot ethics malice

Robots replacing factory workers at faster pace [LA Times]

efficiency privacy stupidity security vulnerability robot ethics malice

Cheaper, better robots will replace human workers in the world's factories at a faster pace over the next decade, pushing labor costs down 16%, a report Tuesday said.[…] Robots will cut labor costs by 33% in South Korea, 25% in Japan, 24% in Canada and 22% in the United States and Taiwan. The cost of owning and operating a robotic spot welder, for instance, has tumbled from $182,000 in 2005 to $133,000 last year, and will drop to $103,000 by 2025

thesis: whenever machines become more efficient at doing something than people, people will be replaced.

observation: automation is a self-enhancing process

efficiency privacy stupidity security vulnerability robot ethics malice

conclusion: people will be replaced almost everywhere.

efficiency privacy stupidity security vulnerability robot ethics malice

Man vs. Machine: Are Any Jobs Safe from Innovation? [Spiegel]

efficiency privacy stupidity security vulnerability robot ethics malice

»›There are approximately 4 million truck, taxi, limousine and bus drivers in the United States, not to mention gas station attendants and traffic policemen,‹ writes Posner, the University of Chicago scholar, in his essay on automation and employment. ›Not all these jobs will be eliminated overnight,‹ he says, ›but they could go quite fast.‹«

efficiency privacy stupidity security vulnerability robot ethics malice

»›I don't think we have to worry about autonomous cars, because that's sort of like a narrow form of AI. It would be like an elevator. They used to have elevator operators, and then we developed some simple circuitry to have elevators just automatically come to the floor that you're at ... the car is going to be just like that« So what happens when we get there? Musk said that the obvious move is to outlaw driving cars. ›It’s too dangerous. You can't have a person driving a two-ton death machine.‹«

Elon Musk: cars you can drive will eventually be outlawed [Verge]

efficiency privacy stupidity security vulnerability robot ethics malice

efficiency privacy stupidity security vulnerability robot ethics malice

»Will Googles own Executives buy their self-driving car? Never!« [Bruce Sterling]

efficiency privacy stupidity security vulnerability robot ethics malice

»Surveillance as a Business Model« [Bruce Schneier]

»It shouldn't come as a surprise that big technology companies are tracking us on the Internet even more aggressively than before. If [that doesn’t] sound particularly beneficial to you, it's because you're not the customer of any of these companies. You're the product, and you're being improved for their actual customers: their advertisers. Surveillance is the business model of the Internet«

efficiency privacy stupidity security vulnerability robot ethics malice

efficiency privacy stupidity security vulnerability robot ethics malice »Robots and Privacy« [Ryan Calo]

An extensive literature in communications and psychology demonstrates that humans are hardwired to react to social machines as though a person were really present. […] People cooperate with sufficiently human-like machines, are polite to them, decline to sustain eye-contact, decline to mistreat or roughhouse with them, and respond positively to their flattery. There is even a neurological correlation to the reaction; the same ›mirror‹ neurons fire in the presence of real and virtual social agents.

efficiency privacy stupidity security vulnerability robot ethics malice

efficiency privacy stupidity security vulnerability robot ethics malice malware in personal computers

Report: 48% of 22 million scanned computers infected with malware [ZDnet] 32% of computers around the world are infected with viruses and malware [dotTech] Malware infects 30% of computers in the U.S. [InfoWorld]

efficiency privacy stupidity security vulnerability robot ethics malice

example: cryptolocker oct 2013 – mid 2014

malware in personal computers

efficiency privacy stupidity security vulnerability robot ethics malice

efficiency privacy stupidity security vulnerability robot ethics malice

»In the world of malware threats, only a few rare examples can truly be considered groundbreaking and almost peerless. What we have seen in Regin is just such a class of malware. […]it is one of the main cyberespionage tools used by a nation state […]many components of Regin remain undiscovered and additional functionality and versions may exist.«

[symantec.com]

efficiency privacy stupidity security vulnerability robot ethics malice

efficiency privacy stupidity security vulnerability robot ethics malice

efficiency privacy stupidity security vulnerability robot ethics malice Three Laws of Robotics [S. Lem]

1 A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2 A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 3 A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

efficiency privacy stupidity security vulnerability robot ethics malice

Why it is not possible to regulate robots [Cory Doctorow]

A robot is basically a computer that causes some physical change in the world. We can and do regulate machines, from cars to drills to implanted defibrillators. But the thing that distinguishes a power-drill from a robot-drill is that the robot-drill has a driver: a computer that operates it. Regulating that computer in the way that we regulate other machines – by mandating the characteristics of their manufacture – will be no more effective at preventing undesirable robotic outcomes than the copyright mandates of the past 20 years have been effective at preventing copyright infringement (that is, not at all).

efficiency privacy stupidity security vulnerability robot ethics malice

thesis: automation is a vicious circle that we need to break. goal: human-compatible automation.

thesis: technology seldom plays out as planned.

thesis: it is impossible to regulate computers. this also applies to AI and robots.

»The progress in AI research makes it timely to focus research not only on making AI more capable, but also on maximizing the societal benefit of AI.«