I Tried Reading a Book About Automation
Dec. 30th, 2017 10:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
walkitoutIt isn't a good book. Here are my live-notes from the first fraction of the book. It is not likely I will return to the book, altho you never know. Sometimes I hate read. I don't like it when I hate read, but I do sometimes do it.
Notes for Humans Need Not Apply
Car approaching narrow bridge. “Suddenly” bus full of school kids. Both won’t fit. [Author thinks this is a conundrum for an autonomous car. Should it leap off the bridge to save the kids?]
1. Didn’t you notice the bridge was narrow?
2. Why wasn’t there signage telling you the bridge was narrow?
3. Why are you and the school bus driver both approaching a bridge two narrow to accommodate to vehicles side by side at too high of a speed to stop in time to reverse, back up to a place where passing is safe?
This kind of narrow, single lane situation arises all the time in reality. The reality is usually a driveway, private road, forest access road, etc. There are usually turnouts along the way, and generally people drive slowly enough so that if someone becomes visible, there is time to backup or proceed to a pullout before a crash occurs. As soon as someone becomes visible, everyone slows down.
You can park in a location for 2 hours but that’s it. What if an autonomous vehicle surfs these locations?
1. People already do this. Meters deter it somewhat, however, people just move their cars. As an autonomous car would.
2. Some metering systems are now area based — they don’t care if you move, as long as you’ve paid for the time.
3. If time is the constraint, there are two existing systems for monitoring. One is tire marks, which humans already get around by going down and rubbing the tire mark off their vehicle. Usually there is a fine if you get caught doing this. The other involves writing down license plates. All of these could be readily automated. Booting and towing are the two major strategies for dealing with people who either don’t pay by surfing free spots or who don’t move their vehicle when they are supposed to. Both involve substantial fines. An escalating charge / fine system would solve the supposedly “ethical” dilemma he describes, and it would be far easier to implement than autonomous cars. It would also catch humans who do all this stuff, which means we probably will see this kind of system soon if it doesn’t already exist.
One per customer is commonly got round by having employees go out and buy the max, if the idea is to scalp / resell at a markup. See concert tickets; robots in the online sense to auto-buy tickets and resell already exist, and we already have various True Fan systems designed to give humans an edge.
“Should it [my personal electronic assistant] be required to report me if I direct it to serve my twenty-year-old daughter wine at Thanksgiving dinner?”
I don’t know what state the author lives in. Two of the three states I have lived (WA and MA, but not NH) permit parents to give their children alcohol at home as long as they are present.
https://drinkingage.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=002591
These are all presented as open-and-shut, people do it one way, the law covers it, robots open up a new field. In NONE of these cases is it open and shut (or is open and shut in an opposite direction, with the wine at T-dinner, depending on state of residence).
“How would you feel about a dog-walking robot that fails to save your child from being mauled because it is obeying a “Keep off the grass” sign?
I’m having a little trouble imagining the details, but whatever. Here’s how I would feel about it. Someone owns the dog. That person sent it out with the robot. When I sue (or arrange to have someone punished because I wasn’t satisfied with the actions taken by the police or the outcome of my lawsuit), I will sue the owner of the dog AND the creator(s) of the dog walking robot, because that’s just good legal strategy. Ultimately, if the dog mauled my child, I’m going to make absolutely certain the dog dies (but this won’t require action on my part — the police will make sure that happens). Depending on what I find when I research the owner of the dog, I may also make sure they die. Signs on the grass and other details are largely irrelevant to me, other than that I might take measures to further punish the creator(s) of the robot, if they don’t modify their robot appropriately.
“An autonomous car that refuses to speed you to the hospital to save you from a heart attack”
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_examiner/2010/05/highspeed_care.html
Ambulances are not magic. They do not have SF shielding. People die in ambulance as a result of traffic accident who were highly unlikely to die otherwise of whatever they were being transported for. I would need to know a lot more details — and then I would wonder why I wasn’t in an ambulance if I was having a heart attack.
Again, presented as “against the wider interests of society in a whole new way”. None of this seems particularly new.
The balance of the argument is, yeah, but workers will need new jobs. This is true! And yet that is not considered a valid argument against using a machine to grind peanuts vs. grinding the peanuts by hand. But it is not different.
“We’re all workers, even managers, doctors, and college professors.”
Well, I’m not a worker. At least, I’m not paid for the work I do. I really am a capitalist. A highly skilled and highly paid worker is still a worker, if they are paid for their work. Duh. Marx did NOT characterize conflict as between workers and _paid_ managers. He characterized conflict as between workers (including paid managerial, clerical, etc. help) and _owners_. “The real problem is that the wealthy will need few, if any, people to work for them at all.” Yeah, this is probably not true on any level. I mean, we’ve been through a lot of automation, and it isn’t true yet. Most automation “deskills”. It doesn’t completely reduce the need for labor at all. Similarly, butt wiping. Nose wiping. Etc. He thinks that somehow, even the owning 1% will become non working, left behind, etc. Which makes no sense at all. Note: this is what happens when you conflate “high salary” with “high income”, and then further conflate “high income” with “high wealth”. Then you think that the 1% are people who have high salaries. this is not true. The 1% do not make their money from salaries. Hasn’t ever been true and is not now. (OK, it is actually the .1 or .01% that this is true of, but I’m fairly certain that’s what he is talking about.)
“The obvious simple solution, to redistribute the wealth from the rich to the poor, is a nonstarter in our current political environment.” And yet “I will present a framework that applies free-market solutions to address the underlying structural problems we are creating.”
“Our current sequential system of education of work — first you go to school, then you get a job — was fine when you could expect to do more or less the same thing for a living throughout your working life.” I _assume_ he means that we need to iterate on this? Which of course most people _do_, through certificate programs, professional masters, etc.
He proposes a “job mortgage”. Yay, debt servitude! Yikes.
He also misunderstands home mortgages. “The way your home mortgage is secured exclusively by your property.” Um, no, in a lot of states, you still owe on the part not recovered by selling the property.
“Non binding letters of intent to hire you if you acquire specified skills”
If it isn’t binding, what good does it do? “Certain payroll tax breaks if they ultimately follow through.” But the idea would be to better direct training programs. Not sure we need this letters of intent, thing. This is just a distributed feedback system, and I’m unconvinced it is useful.
He seems to think that Social Security owns stocks.
“Average Joe and Jane ... own more than you might expected, in the form of pension funds and Social Security — they just don’t know it because an opaque system of fiduciaries manage their wealth instead of them. We need to give people more visibility and control over their nest eggs”
Oh that is a BAD idea. That way even more people will sell at the bottom and buy (near or) at the top, making inequality even worse.
“The temptation to riot and loot the local department store is greatly diminished if you know you are a stockholder.”
OK, so the local department store is basically toast in most places, so maybe not the best analogy. Also, if you have good visibility into your nest egg and you see it dramatically lose value, wouldn’t that INCREASE the incentive to vandalize? “You screwed me, I’ll screw you!”
Unspecified corporate tax breaks for stocks that are widely owned. Seems pointless: startups — where growth occurs — are not widely held but also make zero profits to tax. By the time a company makes money that can be taxed and therefore breaks might apply, they are big, they are not growing much any more (very occasional exceptions). So, wide ownership would be associated with slow / no growth. Also, you would wind up not collecting like any taxes at all. To the extent that this isn’t true, you’d wind up giving disproportionate tax breaks to people who are the big winners anyway (fang stocks are big, widely owned, have significant revenue and in some cases profits)
I wonder what he thinks _should_ have been done differently during the Industrial Revolution(s) of yore?
Oh, those were the days! “Amazon dominates book retailing.” Well, yes. But. “Little attention is paid to the resulting destruction of livelihoods and assets because there’s no incentive to do so.” OK, so, what _should_ be the tradeoff when contemplating the destruction of horse breeding vs. the creation of the automobile? How do we count TB deaths? How do we count authors who can now self pub and write instead of working a day job vs. people in NYC based publishers who get laid off? How do we count popular authors who self pub and write vs not popular authors who were once subsidized by NYC based publishers, who now have to get a day job?
“You can buy a robot that can vacuum your floors”
You just have to groom the house so it doesn’t destroy it.
“Already in commercial development are robots that can weed a garden”
Packed wide passages between beds only, not in a lawn, not on gravel, not in a too tightly packed garden. Tertill
“Load and unload randomly shaped boxes from delivery trucks”
Wynwright RTU. No news since 2016. Not sure if this thing works or not?
“Follow you around carrying your bags”
https://www.thememo.com/2017/07/13/5-robot-bags-battling-to-carry-your-luggage/
Some were supposed to ship this year; follow up later
“And pick crops”
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/604303/apple-picking-robot-prepares-to-compete-for-farm-jobs/
This we desperately need; it will not create any unemployment at all.
“Soon, just about every physical task you can imagine”
Butt and nose wiping not mentioned. Bummer.
Folding laundry is. Ha! Not happening soon at all.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/24/business/entrepreneurship-laundroid-self-folding-laundry-machine.html
ETA: Unrelated, mostly. School bus fatality analysis. As I expected, most school bus crash fatalities involve people not in the bus. So that makes the above should my autonomous car leap to my death to avoid killing the kids in the school bus extra special stupid. Because if the autonomous car hits the school bus, the kids will get jostled, and the person in the autonomous car might well die.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0386111214000375
Notes for Humans Need Not Apply
Car approaching narrow bridge. “Suddenly” bus full of school kids. Both won’t fit. [Author thinks this is a conundrum for an autonomous car. Should it leap off the bridge to save the kids?]
1. Didn’t you notice the bridge was narrow?
2. Why wasn’t there signage telling you the bridge was narrow?
3. Why are you and the school bus driver both approaching a bridge two narrow to accommodate to vehicles side by side at too high of a speed to stop in time to reverse, back up to a place where passing is safe?
This kind of narrow, single lane situation arises all the time in reality. The reality is usually a driveway, private road, forest access road, etc. There are usually turnouts along the way, and generally people drive slowly enough so that if someone becomes visible, there is time to backup or proceed to a pullout before a crash occurs. As soon as someone becomes visible, everyone slows down.
You can park in a location for 2 hours but that’s it. What if an autonomous vehicle surfs these locations?
1. People already do this. Meters deter it somewhat, however, people just move their cars. As an autonomous car would.
2. Some metering systems are now area based — they don’t care if you move, as long as you’ve paid for the time.
3. If time is the constraint, there are two existing systems for monitoring. One is tire marks, which humans already get around by going down and rubbing the tire mark off their vehicle. Usually there is a fine if you get caught doing this. The other involves writing down license plates. All of these could be readily automated. Booting and towing are the two major strategies for dealing with people who either don’t pay by surfing free spots or who don’t move their vehicle when they are supposed to. Both involve substantial fines. An escalating charge / fine system would solve the supposedly “ethical” dilemma he describes, and it would be far easier to implement than autonomous cars. It would also catch humans who do all this stuff, which means we probably will see this kind of system soon if it doesn’t already exist.
One per customer is commonly got round by having employees go out and buy the max, if the idea is to scalp / resell at a markup. See concert tickets; robots in the online sense to auto-buy tickets and resell already exist, and we already have various True Fan systems designed to give humans an edge.
“Should it [my personal electronic assistant] be required to report me if I direct it to serve my twenty-year-old daughter wine at Thanksgiving dinner?”
I don’t know what state the author lives in. Two of the three states I have lived (WA and MA, but not NH) permit parents to give their children alcohol at home as long as they are present.
https://drinkingage.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=002591
These are all presented as open-and-shut, people do it one way, the law covers it, robots open up a new field. In NONE of these cases is it open and shut (or is open and shut in an opposite direction, with the wine at T-dinner, depending on state of residence).
“How would you feel about a dog-walking robot that fails to save your child from being mauled because it is obeying a “Keep off the grass” sign?
I’m having a little trouble imagining the details, but whatever. Here’s how I would feel about it. Someone owns the dog. That person sent it out with the robot. When I sue (or arrange to have someone punished because I wasn’t satisfied with the actions taken by the police or the outcome of my lawsuit), I will sue the owner of the dog AND the creator(s) of the dog walking robot, because that’s just good legal strategy. Ultimately, if the dog mauled my child, I’m going to make absolutely certain the dog dies (but this won’t require action on my part — the police will make sure that happens). Depending on what I find when I research the owner of the dog, I may also make sure they die. Signs on the grass and other details are largely irrelevant to me, other than that I might take measures to further punish the creator(s) of the robot, if they don’t modify their robot appropriately.
“An autonomous car that refuses to speed you to the hospital to save you from a heart attack”
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_examiner/2010/05/highspeed_care.html
Ambulances are not magic. They do not have SF shielding. People die in ambulance as a result of traffic accident who were highly unlikely to die otherwise of whatever they were being transported for. I would need to know a lot more details — and then I would wonder why I wasn’t in an ambulance if I was having a heart attack.
Again, presented as “against the wider interests of society in a whole new way”. None of this seems particularly new.
The balance of the argument is, yeah, but workers will need new jobs. This is true! And yet that is not considered a valid argument against using a machine to grind peanuts vs. grinding the peanuts by hand. But it is not different.
“We’re all workers, even managers, doctors, and college professors.”
Well, I’m not a worker. At least, I’m not paid for the work I do. I really am a capitalist. A highly skilled and highly paid worker is still a worker, if they are paid for their work. Duh. Marx did NOT characterize conflict as between workers and _paid_ managers. He characterized conflict as between workers (including paid managerial, clerical, etc. help) and _owners_. “The real problem is that the wealthy will need few, if any, people to work for them at all.” Yeah, this is probably not true on any level. I mean, we’ve been through a lot of automation, and it isn’t true yet. Most automation “deskills”. It doesn’t completely reduce the need for labor at all. Similarly, butt wiping. Nose wiping. Etc. He thinks that somehow, even the owning 1% will become non working, left behind, etc. Which makes no sense at all. Note: this is what happens when you conflate “high salary” with “high income”, and then further conflate “high income” with “high wealth”. Then you think that the 1% are people who have high salaries. this is not true. The 1% do not make their money from salaries. Hasn’t ever been true and is not now. (OK, it is actually the .1 or .01% that this is true of, but I’m fairly certain that’s what he is talking about.)
“The obvious simple solution, to redistribute the wealth from the rich to the poor, is a nonstarter in our current political environment.” And yet “I will present a framework that applies free-market solutions to address the underlying structural problems we are creating.”
“Our current sequential system of education of work — first you go to school, then you get a job — was fine when you could expect to do more or less the same thing for a living throughout your working life.” I _assume_ he means that we need to iterate on this? Which of course most people _do_, through certificate programs, professional masters, etc.
He proposes a “job mortgage”. Yay, debt servitude! Yikes.
He also misunderstands home mortgages. “The way your home mortgage is secured exclusively by your property.” Um, no, in a lot of states, you still owe on the part not recovered by selling the property.
“Non binding letters of intent to hire you if you acquire specified skills”
If it isn’t binding, what good does it do? “Certain payroll tax breaks if they ultimately follow through.” But the idea would be to better direct training programs. Not sure we need this letters of intent, thing. This is just a distributed feedback system, and I’m unconvinced it is useful.
He seems to think that Social Security owns stocks.
“Average Joe and Jane ... own more than you might expected, in the form of pension funds and Social Security — they just don’t know it because an opaque system of fiduciaries manage their wealth instead of them. We need to give people more visibility and control over their nest eggs”
Oh that is a BAD idea. That way even more people will sell at the bottom and buy (near or) at the top, making inequality even worse.
“The temptation to riot and loot the local department store is greatly diminished if you know you are a stockholder.”
OK, so the local department store is basically toast in most places, so maybe not the best analogy. Also, if you have good visibility into your nest egg and you see it dramatically lose value, wouldn’t that INCREASE the incentive to vandalize? “You screwed me, I’ll screw you!”
Unspecified corporate tax breaks for stocks that are widely owned. Seems pointless: startups — where growth occurs — are not widely held but also make zero profits to tax. By the time a company makes money that can be taxed and therefore breaks might apply, they are big, they are not growing much any more (very occasional exceptions). So, wide ownership would be associated with slow / no growth. Also, you would wind up not collecting like any taxes at all. To the extent that this isn’t true, you’d wind up giving disproportionate tax breaks to people who are the big winners anyway (fang stocks are big, widely owned, have significant revenue and in some cases profits)
I wonder what he thinks _should_ have been done differently during the Industrial Revolution(s) of yore?
Oh, those were the days! “Amazon dominates book retailing.” Well, yes. But. “Little attention is paid to the resulting destruction of livelihoods and assets because there’s no incentive to do so.” OK, so, what _should_ be the tradeoff when contemplating the destruction of horse breeding vs. the creation of the automobile? How do we count TB deaths? How do we count authors who can now self pub and write instead of working a day job vs. people in NYC based publishers who get laid off? How do we count popular authors who self pub and write vs not popular authors who were once subsidized by NYC based publishers, who now have to get a day job?
“You can buy a robot that can vacuum your floors”
You just have to groom the house so it doesn’t destroy it.
“Already in commercial development are robots that can weed a garden”
Packed wide passages between beds only, not in a lawn, not on gravel, not in a too tightly packed garden. Tertill
“Load and unload randomly shaped boxes from delivery trucks”
Wynwright RTU. No news since 2016. Not sure if this thing works or not?
“Follow you around carrying your bags”
https://www.thememo.com/2017/07/13/5-robot-bags-battling-to-carry-your-luggage/
Some were supposed to ship this year; follow up later
“And pick crops”
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/604303/apple-picking-robot-prepares-to-compete-for-farm-jobs/
This we desperately need; it will not create any unemployment at all.
“Soon, just about every physical task you can imagine”
Butt and nose wiping not mentioned. Bummer.
Folding laundry is. Ha! Not happening soon at all.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/24/business/entrepreneurship-laundroid-self-folding-laundry-machine.html
ETA: Unrelated, mostly. School bus fatality analysis. As I expected, most school bus crash fatalities involve people not in the bus. So that makes the above should my autonomous car leap to my death to avoid killing the kids in the school bus extra special stupid. Because if the autonomous car hits the school bus, the kids will get jostled, and the person in the autonomous car might well die.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0386111214000375