Robots Compilation Dr. Thomas Lairson

Time to Talk Robots

Emma Roller JAN. 5, 2016

Manufacturing — that is, the business of making stuff — has changed significantly over the past half-century. Perhaps you’ve noticed. While America’s share of industry has constricted, with fewer people needed to perform the same amount of work as in the past, it’s not quite time to start eulogizing.

But the way the presidential candidates have been talking about reviving manufacturing jobs has not been very enlightening, and in some cases they have been willfully obtuse. Their statements are meant to appeal to disaffected workers, but they both oversimplify the problems and ignore the real source of trouble.

Donald J. Trump, the Republican front-runner, has promised to bring manufacturing jobs back to American workers from abroad. “They can’t get jobs, because there are no jobs, because China has our jobs and Mexico has our jobs,” Mr. Trump said in his campaign announcement speech in June. (He neglected to mention that his own line of neckties is fabricated in China.)

Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor, seems to regularly misconstrue the state of American manufacturing — more than any other candidate. At the undercard debate in Milwaukee on Nov. 10, Mr. Huckabee explained that the United States has lost five million manufacturing jobs since 2000: “The reason they don’t have jobs is because their jobs are in Mexico, they’re in China, they’re in Indonesia,” he said, referring to American workers. While that is certainly true for some of the jobs lost, outsourcing is not the main driver of domestic job loss.

Marco Rubio, left, touring an equipment manufacturing facility in Iowa. Credit Charlie Neibergall/Associated Press

Republicans aren’t the only ones obsessing over reclaiming these factory jobs. Last month, Hillary Clinton mentioned factory closings when she released her own plan to restore manufacturing jobs through a network of tax credits and federal funding for research. Senator Bernie Sanders, meanwhile, in criticizing the Trans-Pacific Partnership, has argued that such international trade deals are to blame for the loss of manufacturing jobs in this country.

The problem with this sort of rhetoric is that a lot of the manufacturing jobs the United States lost over the past 50 years didn’t go overseas; they simply disappeared with the advent of new technology.

James Sherk, a research fellow in labor economics at the Heritage Foundation, said the trend in machines taking over factory work that was previously done by humans has been going on since the 1950s. But for presidential candidates, it’s a lot easier to blame other countries rather than robots.

“It’s those basically rote, repetitive tasks where you’re fixing the same thing,” he said. “It’s very hard to imagine any of those positions coming back. Basically, a robot is a lot more affordable than a human employee.”

The skills needed to work on a factory floor today are quite different than they were 20, 10 or even five years ago. Don’t blame stingy companies or over-regulation by the government; blame the rapid progress of technology.

Mark Muro, the policy director of the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program, said candidates should recognize that because of advances in technology, manufacturing simply does not employ as many people as it once did. Then again, that level of honesty doesn’t make for as much of a feel-good message.

“My fear is that the Republicans to date may not fully understand what modern advanced manufacturing is,” he said. “It’s not necessarily thousands of people pouring into the plant as in the old days.”

Instead of talking down to blue-collar workers, candidates should admit that trying to restore manufacturing to what it once was in this country is not an attainable, or even a desirable, goal. This is not to say the government should not work to bring jobs back to the United States, or that manufacturing as an industry is not valuable to the American economy. But many of the jobs politicians want to restore aren’t on the table anymore.

Unfortunately, when talking about how they would increase manufacturing, most of the candidates have not reached beyond platitudes and into the realm of reality. And some of the points they have made have been baffling. At the November Republican presidential debate in Milwaukee, Senator Marco Rubio stressed manufacturing’s role in the economy, while espousing a curious notion of how the new economy works. “If you raise the minimum wage, you’re going to make people more expensive than a machine,” he said. “That means all this automation that’s replacing jobs and people right now is only going to be accelerated.” (He went on to wax poetic about welders versus philosophers.)

It sounded as if Mr. Rubio believed employers should suddenly realize that machine labor is cheaper than human labor — though that’s been the case for a long time. Machines are cheaper than people, marginal wage increase or not. Yet Mr. Rubio has a point: Automation has fundamentally changed the manufacturing industry. We don’t, however, need to respond to the shrinking manufacturing job market by becoming all-out technophobes.

A few examples of solutions currently underway: In Delaware, high school students can participate in a program aimed at preparing them for modern manufacturing jobs. Some academic hubs like Cambridge, Mass., and Raleigh-Durham, N.C., are set up as innovation districts, where companies and research institutions can commingle with smaller start-ups and job seekers.

There’s no easy answer on how best to foster innovation, though. Even the most enticing tax incentives are unlikely to make companies fire their robots and hire back assembly-line workers. Some of the burden lies with American companies to bring production back home — which actually could be less of a burden than they might think, according to some economists.

The manufacturing sector drives 69 percent of all business-related research and development in the country. The findings of that research and development — like innovations in 3-D printing and the so-called Internet of things — ripple across industries. Employing more American workers also gives them more buying power, which is good for the economy as a whole.

Americans are world-class consumers. Since the recession, our appetite for buying stuff has grown. In the last quarter of 2014, consumer spending in the United States rose 4.3 percent — the fastest rate of growth since 2006 — though spending has slowed since then. And the University of Michigan’s index of consumer sentiment rated consumer confidence in 2015 at 92.9, the highest rating posted since 2004. Still, it’s unclear whether Americans would be willing to shell out more money for a product made by their neighbors than one made halfway across the world.

“We have yet to prove that American consumers are willing to pay a premium for products sourced in the U.S.,” said Willy C. Shih, a professor at Harvard Business School and a co-author of the book “Producing Prosperity: Why America Needs a Manufacturing Renaissance.” “The bottom line is, what product do they put in their shopping basket in the store?”

No candidate wants to be painted as anti-manufacturing, which may account for this lack of honesty about where all the manufacturing jobs have gone. When the moderator Sandra Smith dared to suggest during the Nov. 10 undercard debate that the United States is moving away from “a manufacturing economy to a services-based, technological economy,” Mr. Huckabee quickly shot her premise down. “I don’t know why we have to move away from manufacturing,” Mr. Huckabee replied. The audience applauded.

Mr. Huckabee is right; the United States doesn’t “have” to move away from manufacturing. It’s just that advancing economies like this one inevitably sacrifice some labor for innovation, just as the United States and other developed countries did over the past century when it came to agriculture.

If we’re going to move away from anything, let’s leave behind stock stump speeches on factories. They’re not going to get anyone a job — especially not in the White House.

Emma Roller, a former reporter for National Journal, is a contributing opinion writer.

Robots Video @ http://nyti.ms/1QExM5z

Smart Robots Make Strides, but There’s No Need to Flee Just Yet

By CLYDE HABERMANMARCH 6, 2016

U.S. & Politics Retro Report By RETRO REPORT 11:40 The Terminator and the Washing Machine

Continue reading the main story Video

The Terminator and the Washing Machine

What the legendary matches between supercomputer Deep Blue and chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov reveal about today’s artificial intelligence and machine learning fears.

By RETRO REPORT on Publish Date March 6, 2016. Watch in Times Video »

It may not strike everyone as the loftiest ambition: creating machines that are smarter than people. Not setting the bar terribly high, is it? So the more cynical might say. All the same, an array of scientists and futurists are convinced that the advent of devices with superhuman intelligence looms in the not-distant future. The prospect fills some of our planet’s brainiest specimens with dread.

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They include certified smart men like Bill Gates of Microsoft, the physicist Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk, head of SpaceX. Messrs. Hawking and Musk have been especially grim. “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race,” Mr. Hawking told the BBC in 2014. At about the same time, Mr. Musk worried that “with artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon,” a fiend that he feared would become “our biggest existential threat.”

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When people of their caliber speak, it seems reasonable to listen. And so, alarms about a computer-spawned apocalypse are a backdrop to the latest installment in the Retro Report series, video documentaries that explore major news events of the past and their continuing effects.

Men of science are not alone in the hand-wringing over the possibility of machines running wild. Asked what they feared most, Americans interviewed by researchers at Chapman University in Southern California ranked the consequences of modern technology near the top. Even death did not rattle them as much; it was way down on their list of worries, at No. 43.

While not discounting that doomsayers may prove someday to be right, Retro Report offers more reassuring views from computer specialists who sense that the end is not nigh — if only, they say, because machines are not nearly as clever, or necessarily as pernicious, as the fretters believe.

Jitters over humanity’s falling victim to various creations are as old Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein monster and the Golem of Jewish tradition. Hostile robots have been on the scene since at least the 1920s with the play “R.U.R.,” by the Czech writer Karel Capek. The initials stood for “Rossum’s Universal Robots.” Indeed, this work introduced “robot” into the language. Since then, run-amok machines have been a science-fiction staple in books and films like “Colossus: The Forbin Project,” “I, Robot,” “2001: A Space Odyssey,” “Transcendence,” “Ex Machina” and the seemingly inexhaustible supply of “Terminator” movies. One sure bet about those films is that, like the Terminator itself, they’ll be back.

On occasion, machines are cast as a benign presence, as in the 2013 film “Her,” in which a man finds intimacy with an operating system that is guided by artificial intelligence (not to mention made alluring by the voice of Scarlett Johansson). In Japan, some people have closely bonded with robot dogs, to the point of holding funerals for automated pooches that cease to function.

More typically, though, the machines — robots, cyborgs, androids, clones — are depicted as threats to human survival. As Retro Report recalls, fear of them in real life grew in 1997 when a chess-playing IBM computer, Deep Blue, defeated the world champion, Garry Kasparov. Apprehension deepened for some in 2011 when two stars of the quiz show “Jeopardy!” were soundly defeated by a new IBM gizmo. (What is Watson?) This week, artificial intelligence will again challenge the human brain as Google’s DeepMind competes in South Korea against a champion in Go, the Chinese board game with trillions of possible moves.

Arguably, there is no reason to lose sleep over those souped-up gadgets. Sure, Watson and its brethren are good at games and other sorts of data processing. But contemplating a takeover of the world’s nuclear arsenals? Not a chance. Nonetheless, some experts foresee a time, not far off, when artificial intelligence, A.I., will match and then exceed human intelligence, at ever-accelerating and frightening speeds.

“Shortly after, the human era will be ended,” Vernor Vinge, a computer scientist and science fiction author, wrote in 1993. That moment, he predicted, would come “within 30 years.” In other words, check your calendars — a mere seven years remain until the arrival of this “technological singularity,” as it was called.

Another A.I. expert, Raymond Kurzweil, has pinpointed 2045 as the due date. Still another student of the subject, James Barrat, also says that once the machines blow past us, man’s reign is through.

“We humans steer the future not because we’re the strongest beings on the planet, or the fastest, but because we are the smartest,” Mr. Barrat has said. “So when there is something smarter than us on the planet, it will rule over us on the planet.”

A -- perhaps the -- central problem with high-level automata is that we expect them to do what they are advertised to do even in fog-of-war...

Horrific scenarios abound. Superintelligent computers will cause global financial systems to collapse. They will wage war on humans with killer robots far more lethal than today’s drones. They will control nuclear weaponry — think Skynet in the “Terminator” series — to dominate humankind or, worse, wipe it out.

In these grim predictions, the machines always seem to be anthropomorphic: Their instincts are essentially the same as those of humans at their worst; just as people have run roughshod over lower life forms, artificial intelligence networks will abuse their supremacy. Possibilities for them to do good — figuring out how to regenerate human cells, for instance, or creating immunities against disease, or gobbling up carbon dioxide in the atmosphere — tend to get short shrift.

For some analysts, any worry about human survival is theoretical and certainly less immediate than more prosaic, yet vital, concerns. Technological advances have enhanced the ability of governments to spy on their citizens. How to shape policy is now reflected in the struggle between Apple and the Obama administration over access to the iPhone of one of the terrorists in the mass shooting in San Bernardino, Calif., in December.

Economic issues are unavoidable as well. Lawrence H. Summers, president emeritus at Harvard University and a former Treasury secretary, noted that unemployment is disproportionately higher among those whose duties “in various ways have been mechanized.” There are “important consequences for the way the economy is organized and for how fair the economy is,” Mr. Summers said in an interview with Retro Report.

There is, too, a question of how smart robots truly are and whether they can develop superintelligence at the blinding speed envisioned by the more pessimistic forecasters. “Things that are easy for humans are hard for computers,” Guruduth S. Banavar, the director of cognitive computing research at IBM, told Retro Report, “and things that are easy for computers are hard for humans.” Yes, a computer can multiply two numbers of 1,000 digits each in a matter of seconds. But it cannot hold a candle to a toddler when it comes to recognizing faces or performing a task as simple as climbing steps.

Perhaps it is human nature to assume the worst with something new. “Humans often converge around massive technological shifts — around any change, really — with a flurry of anxieties,” Adrienne LaFrance, who covers technology for The Atlantic magazine, wrote a year ago.

But it is too soon for hyperventilating, Fei-Fei Li, a professor of computer science at Stanford University, told Retro Report. With A.I., she said, “we are closer to a washing machine than a Terminator.”

CIO

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Opinion

The future of jobs in a machine world

Visitors to the Hilton Hotel in McLean, Va. meet “Connie,”a robot concierge Credit: IBM

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