Que Faire Note:
It Works
16 March 2015

The weather warms by inches. It has ceased to be too cold to spend more than a minute on the balcony, and I have straightened things up out there. If it were warmer, I’d clean it up as well, so that we could sit out there in comfort. That will happen in due course. For the moment, it’s enough that the balcony doesn’t look like a dump — which it did, for most of the winter. If in doubt, put it out(side) — that was our policy. It must have been a dispiriting spectacle for our neighbors across the street. I hope that, what with our just having moved in and the frigid air &c, they haven’t minded too much. We also hope that they won’t notice, when the weather turns balmy and we can sit on the balcony in the dark, that we’ll be going into full rear-window mode, spying on everything that we can see through their windows. (Technical note: all the windows that are visible from that end of our apartment face front.) The building across the street, which is older than ours, has fire escapes, despite its size, but no balconies. So our neighbors won’t be sitting outside in the dark spying on us while we’re spying on them. Awkwardness averted.

***

The quiet weekend was clouded by sniffles that intimated colds, either past or to come, and by two pieces, one in the New York Review of Books, one in the London, concerning the third phase of the Industrial Revolution. The first phase introduced steam-powered factories and railroads. The second phase brought us the modern conveniences (electricity, telephones, and indoor plumbing). In the third phase, the capitalists will finally attain their holy grail, which is zero human employment. Robots are about to replace us all, where they haven’t done so already. In the London Review of Books, John Lanchester, a novelist who seems to have given up fiction in order to write about economic dislocations that are stranger than fiction, tells us about robots that are both designed by robots and capable of repairing themselves. If these marvels have not quite yet been realized, it won’t be long before they take their place beside drones that, for the moment, require remote human pilots, but that any day may graduate to the status of autonomous mobile weapons. In the New York Review, Sue Halpern critiques a rather sanctimonious open letter, signed by Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking among others, that calls upon AI developers to bear human consequences in mind when they develop their projects. Halpern and Lanchester are both perfectly aware that nothing — under current socio-economic arrangements — is going to prevent capitalists from developing any and all machinery capable of replacing human labor, no matter how dangerous, and no matter how destructive to the social fabric.

The only question is whether the political will to resist these developments can be brought to bear before it has been so fueled by toxic grievance and resentment that it is incapable of moderation. Forget “capitalism” as a system; the deployment of hefty capital investments is an essential part of economic life. Who is to own, and who is to direct, this capital? We have seen enough to know that governments are even worse than plutocrats — just as craven but vastly less competent. We also know that small businesses, which require capital investments, too (if rather modest ones), function better if they are operator-owned. I would venture to add that small-business owners would be more inclined to provide their human employees with robotic tools than to replace their human being altogether. And I would suggest further that such robotic tools would be best designed, or at least perfected, by cooperatives or not-for-profit organizations funded by small-business owners — and not, that is, by large mass-producers.

There I go again, sketching ideas on the back of an envelope. What good does that do? Well, I may say something that inspires someone else to think of something not only better but also more effective.

Optimism wilts, however, whenever I consider the social scene in which something better and more effective would have to be implemented. The last paragraph of Sue Halpern’s piece is enough to chill any hope.

We live in a technophilic age. We love our digital devices and all that they can do for us. We celebrate our Internet billionaires: they show us the way and deliver us to our destiny. We have President Obama, who established the National Robotics Initiative to develop the “next generation of robotics, to advance the capability and usability of such systems and artifacts, and to encourage existing and new communities to focus on innovative application areas.” Even so, it is naive to believe that government is competent, let alone in a position, to control the development and deployment of robots, self-generating algorithms, and artificial intelligence. Government has too many constituent parts that have their own, sometimes competing, visions of the technological future. Business, of course, is self-interested and resists regulation. We, the people, are on our own here—though if the AI developers have their way, not for long.

The problem is not business or government or the National Robotics Institute so naively established by the President. The problem is “we.” If it is true that we live in a technophilic age, that does not necessarily mean that we are technophiles. It does not seem to me that anyone is terribly mature about what “our digital devices” “can do for us.” The smartphone, the top device of the day, reminds me of Hollywood: it’s high school with money. The smartphone is an adolescent toy that permits users to play games and to exchange gossip. (The Apple Watch will open a gym wing, accessing all sorts of physical data that ought to be of no concern to healthy young people.) Sure, I have one. I use it as a phone, and to send the occasional text (usually telling someone where I am and when I’ll get to where I’m going). I check the weather, and I practice Mandarin character recognition. I take the odd photograph and post it at Facebook. At the end of the day, though, my battery is still 90% charged. I don’t read email on it, nor do I see what other people are up to at Facebook. I don’t look up movies on IMDb or search Wikipedia for information. These are things that I do at my desk, where serious thought is unlikely to be disturbed — and I am much less likely to post a fatuous comment at Facebook. It’s true that I’m having a hard time building the habit of registering questions that occur to me throughout the day, whenever I am not at my desk, on an iPhone Evernote. But I’m working on it.

In another NYRB review, this one of William Gibson’s new novel, I learned that it is already the case that, according to reviewer Lagaya Mishan, “people have hired stand-ins to play the tedious early rounds of games as a shortcut to higher levels.” (Ew!) How long before those stand-ins are replaced by robots?