Robots? Questions Answered

Well, hi guys, it's Tom Guarriello. So a few days ago I posted a video asking for some questions and thoughts or feelings, enthusiasms, anything that you might have to say about robots. I posted this on both YouTube and Facebook. Thanks very much to those of you who responded. If you didn't, come on, come on, I want to hear what you have to say. So I thought I'd take a shot at answering some of these thoughts, responding to them, answering questions, seeing what you guys might think about these issues as well. So the first response that I got had to do with relationships, and Tim Holmes, who has been on my podcast, by the way, I'll put a link in the show notes here, for his, uh, my conversation with Tim. But Tim wrote, when sex bots come to market, what will be the prognosis for real relationships? Relationships are really hard work, and women tend to want to keep us guys in line. Really? I haven't noticed that. Without the need for relating to real women in a secular age when other civilizing forces are so obviously also at ebb What's to keep some portion of the male species from just dropping off the edge of civilized behavior? Thanks for the prompt, Tom. Thanks for the thoughts, Tim. Um, you know, I think this question is one that's going to become pretty prominent for many people and many couples when sex bots become more common. Look, we've seen Westworld, and we've seen humans, and we know that there are real, uh, sex dolls that are roboticized now starting to show up in the marketplace. They are still relatively primitive and a little bit creepy for some people, although not for everyone. Now, some of these dolls are exhibiting some real lifelike characteristics And the emulation of humanity by a robot is going to become something that we have to get used to. Now, in regard to relationships with other people, I think what we're going to find is that while it might be, as Tim put it, maybe since relationships are hard work for us humans, um, it might be a little tricky for people to relate to one another rather than relating to a compliant subservient robot. But ultimately, the kind of relationships that we have with other people are impossible between humans and robots. Why are they impossible? Well, they're impossible because robots will never have the kind of existence that humans have. We share with one another the experience of being in the world at a common place and time. We have the knowledge of our mortality that is always with us, always a part of our lives. Robots, of course, even if they are programmed to have the abstract knowledge of mortality as a factor in their lives— quotes, in their lives— they will never know what it's like to know that one's life is going to come to an end and that that life is always headed towards some purpose. For humans, the purpose of life is deeply integrated with the lives of other people. We know that because we are fellows with all of the other humans who share the earth with us, that we have a common bond with one another. That bond is the basis for our relationships with one another, whether they are sexual relationships, friendly relationships, parental relationships, uh, transactional relationships. We all have these kinds of, um, common understandings of one another's lives. Fundamentally that understanding is rooted in our mutual embodiedness. Since we are all humans, since we all have bodies, we are all common in our lived realities. And as we find another person with whom we share a deep resonance with that shared reality, that's where relationships love come from. That's where they emanate from. They emanate from that sense of intimacy with another human being who shares with us the experience of being human. If we begin to lose that sense of commonality with one another, that fellow feeling we have with one another, What we end up with might be a relationship, in quotes, that has some elements of satisfaction built into it, but which will never have the kind of uplifting capacity that relationships with other humans have. So I think that we are going to have to explore what human relationships are like more deeply in order to distinguish them from the kinds of, uh, interactions that we're going to be able to have with robots. Um, and ultimately, I believe that human relationships will always be the most fulfilling, the most satisfying, of any relationships we can have. Just as now, while we may have relationships with our pets, those relationships are never quite the same as the relationships that we have with our loved ones. So, Tim, thanks very much for your, uh, for your question. Here's another one about work. Several of you were concerned about AI-generated unemployment, and u5021418 wrote, the problem is there are too many undereducated and underskilled people in the world, and even with training, they still won't have the capacity to make it to the minimum level. What scares me is, what do you do with millions of people that are incapable of adjusting? Yikes. Well, obviously this is a big question and it's not one that we're going to be able to certainly resolve in a, in a format like this. But what we can do is to think about work as a set of expanding capabilities that we generate with one another. Look, 100 years ago, Nobody was a social media manager for a brand. Nobody had hundreds of jobs that we have today 100 years ago. What we did have were jobs as blacksmiths, as seamstresses, as farmers. We had lots of work, and we're going to continue to have lots of work. The question becomes, what are we going to do when work becomes optional? Now, there's a lot of writing and thinking among economists nowadays about something called Universal Basic Income. Universal Basic Income is the idea that in the future, every member of a society would receive a universal basic income just for being a member of the society. That amount, it's being experimented right now in places like Sweden and other parts of the world. Finland is thinking about doing the same. A modest amount, not, let's say, an amount of money that would take care of bare necessities. Some have suggested something like $2,000 a month for every person, um, in our society. And that universal basic income would make work not as necessary economically as it is now, because robots would be doing much of the work that is currently done by people who are doing repetitive work, work that can be written as an algorithm, as a formula, which then means that robots may very well be able to perform those duties in the future. And we're not just talking about the dull, dirty, and dangerous jobs that robots have been doing up to now. We're also talking about jobs in fields like law and medicine. Uh, I read today that 600 Goldman Sachs investment professionals have been replaced by 200 computer engineers who are writing software that now does the work of the 600 investment banker types who were working at Goldman Sachs before. Now, what are the economic con— consequences of these kinds of changes, they're going to be dramatic. The question is, what kind of a society do we want to have? Do we want to have a society in which if one is not engaged in an economic activity that is, um, that has been— if one is in that kind of activity that's been replaced by a robot What do we do about that? Do we simply say, "Well, sorry, you know, tough luck. You should have never been a radiologist. You should have been something else. You should have been a tap dancer. You should have been something that can't be replaced by a robot." No, we're going to try, as we always do, we're going to use our imagination to find other ways to be valuable and productive. Do we know what those ways are today? No. Did the farmers who were replaced by technology at the early part of the 20th century, did they know what they were going to do when they were no longer plowing fields? No. We are going to— we are entering into now this period where lots of experimentation is going to take place around the kinds of work that will be productive and that will add value to people's lives. Remember, while robots, AI-equipped robots, may be able to carry out much of what we do today, let's say that the kind of strong value-added activity that we think of today as premium, You know, great customer service, great recommendations, great understanding of us that people demonstrate when we are in a high-quality kind of transactional relationship. Those things will all be the purview of people for the foreseeable future. Robots, AI-equipped robots may very well be able to to perform many of the tasks that are involved in work, let's say, as a salesperson in a store. Lots of showing the customer to the right shelves and making sure that shelves are fully stocked and being sure that the customer doesn't have any questions that can be answered quickly. Yeah, an AI-equipped robot may very well do that. We're seeing that at Lowe's now in, uh, in Palo Alto. There's an experiment going on there with that. But the kind of interaction with customers that makes us feel like coming back to a store, that sense of being understood of being helped, genuinely helped by another person, those are going to continue to be the purview of people for some time. And as we are going through the next, let's call it 20 years, 30 years, where the transition to highly automated kinds of commercial interaction starts to develop. As we're going through that, we are going to find additional ways to add value for one another, which are going to add up to economic benefits. This is what happened with the internet. Nobody knew what the internet was going to become only 15, 20 years ago now. No one knew that there were going to be the kinds of commercial opportunities that the internet has provided, but But imagination, one of the things that we do best as humans, is going to help us to find a path to a future. We are going to do so not all at once, just like we never do all at once, but a step at a time as we find our way into this new world where work is no longer the same as it's been since the beginning of human history. Um, let's take a look at one more. Paul Robinette, my old friend Renetto. Hey Paul, how you doing, brother? Asked, how long will it be before we take advice from AI? And he said, as an example, Alexa, who should I vote for and why? Paul, that's a great question. I can't find the answer to the question I heard. Right now Alexa can't find the answer to the question she heard, and that's a demonstration of where we are. Right now with these kinds of AI assistants that we're developing. But it's not going to be long before I have access to an AI assistant that is going to know my preferences, my history, my way of making decisions about things because I've empowered that AI assistant to know those things. Let's assume we're working in a world of permission where I'm able to, to say, okay, I want you to get to know me as well as you can possibly get to know me. Why? Because I'm going to want you to give me suggestions and advice about things that are interesting and important to me. Now, how long is it going to be before that happens? I think that that kind of development is going to take place a lot faster than the development of AI replacement workers across the board. I think that we are seeing the machine learning applications work on big data, like for example my Amazon purchase history or my Google search history, and to analyze that data and, and develop insights based on that data. I think that within 5 years I'm going to be getting recommendations from my AI assistant that are going to be generated based on my history, based on my preferences, but which will be new to me. Things that I didn't know I wanted to know. Discoveries. Things that I will now be able to rely on my AI assistant to be able to develop. I see those coming quickly, let's say relatively quickly, sometime in the next 5 years or so. Finally, I think one viewer said she hopes, she or he, I'm not sure, the YouTube name was a little difficult to understand, believes that robots are gonna help us to understand ourselves better. What she wrote or he wrote was, if robots can experience the same range of emotions as humans, can we truly consider them as simple objects anymore? That's a great question, and I'm gonna leave that one for my next video on robots. Thanks a lot, and thoughts, questions, fears, feelings, enthusiasms, things you're interested in about robots and AI, leave your thoughts in the comments section below, and I'll see you out there.