Smart robots will take over a third of jobs by 2025, Gartner says

Pirocco said:
SilverPete said:
Pirocco said:
Robots cannot be less limited and smarter than their software writers and users.
If 33% jobs get wiped instead of replaced, then it won't be due to robots, but due to the theft committed by the lazybutters, including governments.
Does this smell abit more as reality?
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Is it impossible for humans to build a machine that can travel faster than humans? Is it impossible for humans to build a machine that is stronger than humans? Is it impossible to build a machine that is smarter than humans?
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I talk about the "thinking" of robots, not about mechanical speed and whatever.
Smartness sits in the brain not in the legs. Your next sentence doesn't read different so why this sentence?
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What you're really arguing here is that "thinking" is something fundamentally special, that it is not an emergent property of the underlying physical properties or states of the material system. This is dualism. I was assuming a monist position where building a smarter-than-human machine would ultimately be an engineering problem.

The dualism vs. monism debate goes back thousands of years.

In philosophy of mind, dualism is a view about the relationship between mind and matter which claims that mind and matter are two ontologically separate categories. Mind-body dualism claims that neither the mind nor matter can be reduced to each other in any way. Western dualist philosophical traditions (as exemplified by Descartes) equate mind with the conscious self and theorize on consciousness on the basis of mind/body dualism. By contrast, some Eastern philosophies draw a metaphysical line between consciousness and matter where matter includes both body and mind.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_mind
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SilverPete said:
The dualism vs. monism debate goes back thousands of years.

In philosophy of mind, dualism is a view about the relationship between mind and matter which claims that mind and matter are two ontologically separate categories. Mind-body dualism claims that neither the mind nor matter can be reduced to each other in any way. Western dualist philosophical traditions (as exemplified by Descartes) equate mind with the conscious self and theorize on consciousness on the basis of mind/body dualism. By contrast, some Eastern philosophies draw a metaphysical line between consciousness and matter where matter includes both body and mind.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_mind
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I don't see how dualism can be taken seriously as an idea at all.

There's an entire thread discussing this in terms of free will and determinism in General Discussion.
 
SilverPete said:
What you're really arguing here is that "thinking" is something fundamentally special, that it is not an emergent property of the underlying physical properties or states of the material system. This is dualism. I was assuming a monist position where building a smarter-than-human machine would ultimately be an engineering problem.
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No I didn't.
Thinking is not special.
I said that the biological system, brain AND body, is way more adaptive to changing situations than a programmed (whatever way) robot computer and mechanical parts.
Why everytime changing what I said?
Stop bicycling around what was said. :D
 
Pirocco said:
SilverPete said:
What you're really arguing here is that "thinking" is something fundamentally special, that it is not an emergent property of the underlying physical properties or states of the material system. This is dualism. I was assuming a monist position where building a smarter-than-human machine would ultimately be an engineering problem.
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No I didn't.
Thinking is not special.
I said that the biological system, brain AND body, is way more adaptive to changing situations than a programmed (whatever way) robot computer and mechanical parts.
Why everytime changing what I said?
Stop bicycling around what was said. :D
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Sorry Pirocco, I must have misunderstood you.

I pointed out that we have been able to engineer machines that exceed the limitations of human biology in other areas: "Is it impossible for humans to build a machine that can travel faster than humans? Is it impossible for humans to build a machine that is stronger than humans?"

So, if thinking is just an emergent property of biology then why should it be impossible to build a machine that is smarter than humans? I say it is therefore possible and that we can (even though it is a tremendously difficult).

If the brain is just a (biological) machine that provides a substrate for the process of thinking, then why can't we engineer a non-biological substrate that is equivalent or better?

Now we're back to where you were originally with the argument that "a brain... is way more adaptive to changing situations than a programmed (whatever way) robot computer and mechanical parts."

Your key objection seems to be based on the assumption that knowledge and responses embodied in a computer program are set in stone at the time of creation through a set of rules. But this assumption is incorrect.

As mentioned earlier, machine learning systems are built without such constraints. They are systems for learning new rules, new knowledge, and new responses rather than following explicitly programmed rules.

Machine learning is a subfield of computer science and statistics that deals with the construction and study of systems that can learn from data, rather than follow only explicitly programmed instructions. Besides CS and Statistics, it has strong ties to artificial intelligence and optimization, which deliver both methods and theory to the field. Machine learning is employed in a range of computing tasks where designing and programming explicit, rule-based algorithms is infeasible.
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We already have systems that are faster and more adaptive to changing situations in extremely narrow domains. Over time we can build systems that are more generally adaptive and more generally intelligent.
 
How can you design a machine that processes information better than a human brain when we don't fully understand the capacities of our own brains?
 
mmm....shiney! said:
How can you design a machine that processes information better than a human brain when we don't fully understand the capacities of our own brains?
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The Wright Brothers built an aircraft before fully understanding the science of aeronautics. But the point is not that we can't build it now, but that it should be theoretically possible sometime in the future given everything we currently know.
 
SilverPete said:
mmm....shiney! said:
How can you design a machine that processes information better than a human brain when we don't fully understand the capacities of our own brains?
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The Wright Brothers built an aircraft before fully understanding the science of aeronautics. But the point is not that we can't build it now, but that it should be theoretically possible sometime in the future given everything we currently know.
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The machinations of the human brain are far more complex than theories of flight though. Every advance in design and technology not only unlocks a previously unattainable achievement, but serves to expand our knowledge, thus increasing the capacity and realised potential of our brains. I think it's because our thought processes are organically based that a machine will never be able to function better than a human brain.

Then again "never" is a strong word. But I'm more confident with "never" than "possibly". :/
 
mmm....shiney! said:
...Every advance in design and technology not only unlocks a previously unattainable achievement, but serves to expand our knowledge, thus increasing the capacity and realised potential of our brains...
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Its interesting to speculate on that point and where it will take us. Technology can be viewed as an intelligence amplifier that multiplies our potential.

"Machines don't just replace what we do, they change the nature of what we do our tools change us. By extending our capabilities they set new expectations for what's possible"

The Future of Human Machine Interaction
We make our technology, but our technology also make us. Anytime we invent a new tool, a new machine, a new system, we have the opportunity to learn something about how we humans relate to one another, our world, our technology. New machines not only make us see technology in new light, but also make us consider who we are. So, what's the future of human-machine interaction?

...While machines will replace humans in some tasks, they'll also amplify us, enabling us to do things we never dreamed of doing before. We'll enter into a partnership with them that will build on our respective strengths, resulting in a new level of human-machine collaboration and codependence.

http://cherokee-webzine.com/people-technology/the-future-of-human-machine-interaction/
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Broad changes have already been noted thanks to being able to "outsource" storage and retrieval of knowledge.

Is Technology Making Us Stupid (and Smarter)?
How the internet makes life more complex by making complex things simple

...Life has become more complex but we hardly ever notice it because technology has made complexity simpler than ever. Psychologists explain this dichotomy in terms of two distinct aspects of human intellect, namely fluid and crystallized intelligence. Fluid intelligence refers to the ability to acquire and process information. ...Evidence suggests that in humans fluid intelligence has been increasing for decades (what psychologists refer to as the Flynn effect). The average child from 1950 would be handicapped by today's standard IQ tests, and the average child today would be gifted by 1950s standards... but that JUST in terms of their fluid intelligence or ability to process complex information quickly and effectively.

The second aspect of intellect crystallized IQ refers not to our ability to gather info but what we actually know; in simple terms, crystallized intelligence means knowledge. Unsurprisingly, with all the knowledge of the world being now outsourced, crowdsourced, and cloudsourced, the individual storage of information is minimal (at least in comparison). Humans today are like most smartphones and tablets - their ability to solve problems depends not on the knowledge they can store but on their capacity to connect to a place where they can retrieve the answer to find a solution. This is what some have labelled the "hyper-link" economy... the only knowledge we need to have is the knowledge of where to find stuff. Notice that the traditional meaning of crystallized IQ referred to knowledge stored "inside our head" (this probably peaked with Leonardo, Voltaire and the encyclopaedists). Luckily, we have not yet seen research evidence that we are becoming more stupid from a crystallised IQ perspective... but one wonders whether we really need to see the research evidence.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/mr-personality/201305/is-technology-making-us-stupid-and-smarter
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The advantage that humans have in "designing" a "better" brain compared to nature is that we can experiment far more easily. Just like evolution, you only need to hit on a design/system that works once. In my very general opinion, at heart it's probably more about flexible learning routines that can interact with it's own hardware in new, unpredictable ways. Both of these elements already exist independently and I think it's just a matter of the hardware getting better and better.

I think it was Richard Dawkins who discussed a processor that Intel (or someone) built that had flexible gates that could be modified into thousands of possible hardware configurations. They overlaid evolutionary-style software on top where a task was given based on a starting configuration. The software then created random "mutations" of the starting configuration, selected a couple that moved it closer to achieving the task and randomly "mutated" those and kept repeating for a few hundred or few thousand iterations until the task had been achieved. From memory, of the final configurations of the processor that solved the task, a couple were already known. One was noticeably more efficient than the researchers had ever devised, but once they saw the solution they knew how it worked. And then there was a special one that worked but (at the time) they had no idea why as <in my crappy layman's terms> a pathway that should exist from the input signal to the output simply didn't exist. In the book it was postulated that there was some form of electro-magnetic connection across different parts of the chip that enabled it to function. Whatever the exact details, it was an example of a method that provided not just a better solution by experimentation and learning, but also provided a solution that would never have been guessed as it was <seemingly> dependent on a physical property intrinsic to the hardware itself in the presence of the input that solved the task that probably wouldn't work with a slightly different processor (or input).

If anyone else knows this story, please correct/elaborate :)
 
SilverPete said:
Its interesting to speculate on that point and where it will take us. Technology can be viewed as an intelligence amplifier that multiplies our potential.

"Machines don't just replace what we do, they change the nature of what we do our tools change us. By extending our capabilities they set new expectations for what's possible"
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I can't wait to get my cyborg chips implanted. What a step change that would be :)
 
Robots will never take over human labour entirely.

It's counter productive. In fact my guess is that robots will be reduced in years to come.

You can increase productivity all you like with robots, you can cut cost by reducing the human work force to a minimum.

It's the human with a job that needs to purchase products.
 
Even when robots do, say most of a medical operation there will still be human supervisors. Robots will have to be all but human in order to do everything that humans are capable of. Entertainment is a good example. Humans will provide far better entertainment products than any robot for quite some time. And just look at the way that the entertainment industry has expanded in the last 50 years and how many jobs have been created as a result. That's because a lot of menial tasks have been automated allowing for people to take on higher level work for better pay and have more money to spend on such products thereby creating entire industries.
 
This topic makes me think about the space age predictions of the future.
It's now nearly 50 years later and look at the 'sissy part of the predictions' that actually happened, and what remains of even that sissy part.
That's what happens if you focus and ignore the rest / the whole of reality.
 
Put clothes on a robot and it looks creepy:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFrjrgBV8K0[/youtube]

And then there's this f*(ker that throws concrete besser blocks:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jvLalY6ubc[/youtube]
 
TeaPot&ChopSticks said:
I would question why a free society would need this application of technology ? And what about those mandated ethics subjects at university?
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Law enforcement and keeping the community safe is the most obvious application:

New Law Enforcement Robot Can Wield Excessive Force Of 5 Human Officers
NEWS Police Jun 6, 2014

12844_exforce_s.jpg


HOUSTONIn an effort to enhance the agency's capabilities while reducing the burden on its existing force, sources confirmed Friday that the Houston Police Department has developed a new line of law enforcement robots capable of wielding the excessive force of five human officers.

First dispatched by the HPD earlier this month, the tactical robotic units, known as the AP-12, are reportedly equipped with on-board mechanisms to target both criminals and innocent bystanders, and possess a variety of retractable instruments that allow them to effortlessly subdue and restrain up to four individuals at once. According to sources, just a dozen of the new robots will be able to collectively carry out the physical and psychological abuse typically spread out amongst the officers of an entire precinct.

"We have done extensive testing with the AP-12 and we can say that these units are capable of carrying out everyday police work just as proficiently as any member of our force," said police spokesman Gerald McClintock, who explained that the machine can be deployed to nearly any scene to which law enforcement officials typically respond, be it dispersing peaceful protesters by blasting a 14-nozzle pepper spray cannon or reacting to reports of suspicious behavior by immediately striking the knees, face, and throat of a potential suspect up to 10 times harder than its human counterpart. "Thanks to these robotic units, our deputies can rest assured their work will be performed to the same standards we have always expected of our patrolmen."

"In many ways, these robots' actions are indistinguishable from those of our brave men and women in uniform," McClintock added.

...

Sources say the AP-12 represents a vast improvement over previous incarnations of the law enforcement robot, pointing to the inherent deficiencies in such models as the AP-5, released in 1999, which was disastrously unable to distinguish between whites and non-whites.

"We're confident that the AP-12 has what it takes to keep our streets safe," McClintock said, noting that approximately 1,000 fully automated units will be deployed throughout Houston in the coming months, with the majority of them set to patrol the city's poorest and most urban areas. "A secure, healthy community depends on a law enforcement body that is able to take whatever measures are necessary to maintain law and order. And these machines are fully equipped to do just that."

"I'm confident that members of the community won't notice any difference in police quality and performance as these new robotic units begin patrolling our streets," he added

http://www.theonion.com/articles/new-law-enforcement-robot-can-wield-excessive-forc,36220/
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