Machines of Loving Grace (46 page)

I
n his final act in the computing world, Steve Jobs had come down emphatically on the side of the forces of augmentation and partnership.
Siri was intended to be a graceful, understated model for the future collaboration between humans and machines, and it marked the beginning of a sea change at Apple that would take years to play out.
The project also came together in a furious rush, and sadly Jobs died the day after Siri’s debut.
The product launch event in October 2011 thus had to acknowledge a muted counterpoint in what was otherwise a glorious crowning moment to their rocket-fast three-year crusade.
Naturally, there was a shared feeling of triumph.
On the morning of Siri’s unveiling, Cheyer found himself back in an Apple Store.
He walked up to the store and next to the front door was a giant plasma display that read: “Introducing Siri!”

I
t was almost midnight in Grand Central Station on a spring night in 1992.
An elderly man wearing a blue
New York Times
windbreaker was leaning on a cane on the platform, waiting for a train to Westchester County.
I had been at the
Times
for several years and I was puzzled by the ghostly figure.
“Do you work for the paper?”
I asked.

Many years earlier, he said, he had been a typesetter at the
Times
.
In 1973 his union negotiated a deal to phase out workers’ jobs while the company implemented computerized printing systems in exchange for guaranteed employment until retirement.
Although he had not worked for more than a decade, he still enjoyed coming to the press in Times Square and spending his evenings with the remaining pressmen as they produced the next day’s paper.

Today, the printer’s fate remains a poignant story about labor in the face of a new wave of AI-based automation technologies.
His union first battled with newspaper publishers in
the 1960s and struck a historic accommodation in the 1970s.
Since then, however, the power of unions has declined dramatically.
In the past three decades, the unionized percentage of the U.S.
workforce has fallen from 20.1 to 11.3 percent.
Collective bargaining will not play a significant role in defending workers’ jobs against the next wave of computerization.
Printers and typographers in particular were highly skilled workers who fell prey to the technical advances of a generation of minicomputers during the 1970s, and the cost of computing plummeted as technologies shifted from transistor-based machines to lower-cost integrated circuits.
Today, the lone typesetter’s soft landing is an extraordinary rarity.

There is evidence that the 2008 recession significantly accelerated the displacement of workers by computerized systems.
Why rehire workers when your company can buy technology that replaces them for less cost?
A 2014 working paper released by the National Bureau of Economic Research confirmed the trend, and yet Henry Siu, an associate professor at the University of British Columbia and one of the authors of the report, clung to the conventional Keynesian view on technological unemployment.
He explained: “Over the very long run, technological progress is good for everybody, but over shorter time horizons, it’s not that everybody’s a winner.”
¹
It is probably worth noting that Keynes also pointed out that in the long run, we are all dead.

Indeed, Keynes’s actuarial logic is impeccable, but his economic logic is now under assault.
There is an emerging perspective among technologists and some economists that Keynesian assumptions about technological unemployment—that individual jobs are lost but the overall amount of work stays constant—no longer hold true.
AI systems that can move, see, touch, and reason are fundamentally altering the equation for human job creation.
The debate today is not whether AI systems will arrive, but when.

It is still possible that history will vindicate the Keynesians.
Modern society may be on the cusp of another economic transformation akin to the industrial revolution.
It is conceivable that social forces like crowdsourcing and the Internet-enabled reorganization of the workforce will remake the U.S.
economy in ways that are now inconceivable.
The Internet has already created new job categories like “search engine optimization,” and there will certainly be other Internet-enabled and unexpected new job categories in the future.

However, if there is a new employment boom coming, it is still over the horizon.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics projections now predict that U.S.
job growth will be primarily influenced by the aging of American society, not by technological advances that displace and create jobs.
The BLS predicts that of the 15.6 million jobs that will be created by 2022, 2.4 million of those jobs will be in the health-care and elder-care sectors.
It is striking that among new types of jobs, those based on technological advances and innovation will account for a relatively small portion of overall job growth according to the BLS, and of those, software developers were highest ranked at twenty-sixth, with just 139,000 new jobs projected by 2022.
²
The BLS projections suggest that technology will not be a fount of economic growth, but will instead pose a risk to all routinized jobs and skill-based jobs that require the ability to perform diverse kinds of “cognitive” labor, from physicians to reporters to stockbrokers.

Still, despite fears of a “jobs apocalypse,” there is another way to consider the impact of automation, robotics, and AI on society.
Certainly AI and robotics technologies will destroy a vast number of jobs, but they can also be used to extend humanity.
Which path is taken will be determined entirely by individual human designers.
Tandy Trower is a software engineer who once oversaw armies of software engineers at Microsoft Corporation, but now works from a cramped office in South Seattle.
The four-room shop might be any Silicon Valley garage start-up.
There are circuit boards and computers
strewn in every direction, and there are robots.
Many of them are toys, but several look suspiciously like extras from the movie
Robot & Frank
.
The idea of developing a robot to act as a human caregiver speaks directly to the tensions between AI and IA approaches to robotics.

How will we care for our elderly?
For some, integrating robots into elder care taps into a largely unmined market and offers roboticists the chance to orient their research toward a social good.
Many argue that there is a shortage of skilled caregivers and believe that the development of robots that will act as companions and caregivers is a way of using artificial intelligence to ward off one of the greatest hazards of old age—loneliness and isolation.

The counterpoint to this argument is that there is not really a shortage of caregivers but rather a shortage in society’s willingness to allocate resources for tasks such as caregiving and education.
“Of course we have enough human caregivers for the elderly.
The country—and the world—is awash in underemployment and unemployment, and many people find caregiving to be a fulfilling and desirable profession.
The only problem is that we—as a society—don’t want to pay caregivers well and don’t value their labor,” writes Zeynep Tufekci, a social scientist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
³
Tufekci was responding to an essay written by Louise Aronson, a gerontologist at the University of California, San Francisco who argued that there is an urgent need for robot caregivers to perform tasks that range from watching over the health of elder patients, organizing their lives, and serving as companions.
She describes making house calls and staying much longer than she should for each patient as she is forced to play the dual role of caregiver and companion.
⁴
Tufekci envisions a society in which a vast army of skilled human doctors will be trained to spend time with the elderly.
Sadly, as she notes, we live in a world that places more value on the work of stockbrokers and lawyers than nursing aides and teachers.
In
the end, however, this argument is not about technology.
Once, in agrarian communal societies, families cared for their elders.
In Western society, that is frequently no longer the case, and it is inconceivable that we will return to any kind of geographically centralized extended family structure soon.

Still, Tufekci’s challenge poses several questions.

First, will robots ever approximate the care of a human stranger?
There are many horror stories about elder-care treatment in modern nursing homes and care facilities.
Tufekci argues that every elder deserves the attention of an educated, skilled, and compassionate Dr.
Aronson.
However, if that doesn’t happen, will increasingly low-cost robots make life for elders better or worse?
The vision of an aging population locked away and “watched over by machines of loving grace” is potentially disturbing.
Machines may eventually look, act, and feel as if they are human, but they are decidedly not.

However, robots do not need to entirely replace human caregivers in order to help the elderly.
For example, there could be a web of interconnected robots that make it possible for elders who are isolated to build a virtual human community on the Internet.
Perhaps shut-in elders will be the most loyal users of augmented reality technologies being designed by Magic Leap, Microsoft, and others.
The possibility of virtual caregivers is a compelling idea for those who are physically infirm.

Today Tandy Trower places himself squarely in the augmentation camp.
He came to robotics as a member of Bill Gates’s technical staff at Microsoft.
Gates was touring college campuses during 2006 and realized that there was an intense interest in robotics at computer science departments around the country.
Everywhere he went, he watched demonstrations of robotics research.
After one of his trips, he came back and asked Trower to put together a proposal for a way that Microsoft might become more active in the emerging robotics industry.
Trower wrote a sixty-page report calling on Microsoft to create a group that built software tools to develop robots.
Microsoft
gave Trower a small group of researchers and he went off to build a simulator and a graphical programming language.
They named it the Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio.

Then, however, Gates retired to start his foundation, and everything changed at Microsoft.
The new chief executive, Steve Ballmer, had a very different focus.
He was more concerned about making money and less willing to take risks.
Through Microsoft veteran and chief strategy officer Craig Mundie, he sent Trower a clear message: tell me how Microsoft is going to make money on this.

Ballmer was very clear: he wanted a business that generated one billion dollars in revenue annually within seven years.
Microsoft had industrial robotics partners, but these partners had no interest in buying software from Microsoft—they already had their own software.
Trower started looking for different industries that might be interested in purchasing his software.
He looked at the automotive industry, but Microsoft already had an automotive division.
He looked at the science education market, but it didn’t have much revenue potential.
It seemed too early to pitch a telepresent robot.
The more he looked, the more he considered the problem of aging and elder care.
“Wow!”
he thought to himself.
“Here is a market that is going to explode in the next twenty or thirty years.”
Today in the United States more than 8.5 million seniors require some kind of assistance, and that number will increase to more than 21 million in the next two decades.

There was an obvious need for robotic assistance in elder care, and no major players were angling for that market.
Despite his enthusiasm, however, Trower wasn’t able to persuade Mundie or Ballmer that Microsoft should invest in the idea.
Ballmer was interested in shrinking the range of Microsoft investments and focusing on a few core items.

“I have to do this,” Trower thought to himself.
And so in late 2009, he left Microsoft after twenty-eight years and founded Hoaloha Robotics—the word
hoaloha
translates from Hawaiian
as “friend”—with the intent of creating a mobile elder-care robot at a reasonable cost.
Half a decade later, Trower has developed a four-foot-tall robotic prototype, affectionately known as Robby.
It isn’t a replacement for a human caregiver, but it will be able to listen and speak, help with medicine, relay messages, and act as a telepresence when needed.
It doesn’t walk—it rolls on a simple wheel assembly that allows it to move fluidly in any direction.
Instead of arms, it has a tray whose height it can adjust.
This allows Robby to perform certain tasks, like picking up dropped items.

Trower does not think that Robby will displace human workers.
Rising costs and a shrinking supply of workers will instead create a situation in which a helper robot can extend the capabilities of both human patients and helpers.
Human caregivers already cost $70,000 or more a year, Trower argues, and a low-cost robot will actually extend assistance to those who cannot afford it.

Ignoring Tufekci’s fears, Trower has focused his engineering skills on extending and assisting humans.
But when will these machines meet our expectations for them?
And how will those who are cared for greet them?
These remain open questions, although there is a wealth of anecdotal evidence that suggests that, as speech recognition and speech synthesis technologies continue to improve, as sensors fall in cost, and as roboticists develop more agile machines, we will gratefully accept them.
Moreover, for an Internet-savvy generation that has grown up with tablets, iPhones, and Siri, caregiving machines will seem like second nature.
Robots—elder-care workers, service workers, drivers, and soldiers—are an inevitability.
It is more difficult, however, to predict our relationship with these robots.
Tales such as that of the golem weave the idea of a happy slave that serves our every desire deeply into our psyches as well as our mythology.
In the end the emergence of intelligent machines that largely displace human labor will undoubtedly instigate a crisis of human identity.