SMARTS Update: Smart Sex Robots and The Grocer's Apprentice

A male friend sent me a bunch of links to robotics stories last week because my new book SMARTS tells stories about the founders of machine intelligence. The first was about an autonomous sex robot. Not only will 'she'-- of course it's a she -- be able to give pleasure, she'll be able to hold up her end of a smart conversation too, or so the story said. “Just what I need!” the friend said to me, knowing every feminist bone in my body would catch fire with outrage. The other link was to a story about a British internet grocery company, Ocado. (It claims to be Britain's Amazon of food though it serves only two biggish UK cities and took 15 years to turn its first profit.) Ocado announced its intention to aid the development of autonomous robots that will be smart enough to act as human workers' apprentices. These clever machines will know when to hand up the right screwdriver without being asked, even anticipating the workers' needs by body position.

Here's the problem: when and if such robots are deployed, what about those youths who want to enter trades? Where will they go to learn? Nowhere: they'll have to join the ranks of the forever jobless, or the Precariat. They might have plenty of spare time to play with smart sex robots, but they won't be able to afford them.
 
“Can't keep up with this”, my friend said.

No kidding.

Because the rise of smart autonomous machines is already exponential. Each clever system begets 10 more with better tricks. And as they rise, so does their dark side grow. This week, those hackers known as Anonymous, pissed off at the Government of Canada for passing Bill C-51 (which allows Canadian spies to do things under warrant from a federal court judge that the Charter of Rights and Freedoms forbids) used distributed denial of service attacks to shut the governments' websites and email systems down -- for hours. The government appeared to be unable to cope though the Minister in charge assured us no private or personal information had been taken. (How did he know? He didn’t.) This sort of thing could not have happened before this generation of smart machines and smarter networks. And yet, in all the stories floating around on the Net about the advent of autonomous robots, there is rarely a mention of what will inevitably go wrong. 

Start with the massive restructuring of capital that is already taking place around us, shifting from the investment bankers in New York to the libertarian billionaires of Silicon Valley. As control of capital moves to new hands producing autonomous machines, major political realignments will follow.  Why? Throughout the West, center and center- left political parties have long relied on organized labor to politically educate their members about their real interests and get their voters to the polls. But human labor is being replaced by ever smarter machines that don't strike and don't bargain. The unionized percentage of the labor force is being driven down from around thirty percent toward single digits. Soon the middle classes, whose administrative and intellectual skills have guaranteed good jobs at high wages, will also see their jobs evaporate--- as software that learns takes over everything from middle management decision making, to complex strategic analysis, to brain surgery. Unless we are willing to give the vote to machines, a greater concentration of political power will result. The numbers of those on the outside looking in will keep growing. So will the rivers of money already flowing from the obscenely rich to political action groups and third party campaigns. Lobbyists, supported by that money and working through organizations like ALEC, are already writing laws that legislators move through legislatures. These trends will become the norm.

For those who own the companies developing autonomous machines, putting a Smiley face on this future is critical. That’s why their marketing follows an old and proven pattern that goes right back to Renaissance Florence. Stories in the papers and on the Net usually frame autonomous robots as the means to solve really difficult human problems, such as caring for the sick and the old without going bankrupt or having deep conversations with your sex toy. In ancient Florence, the Medicis got their start in business selling useless pills to cure the ailments of the flesh: they sold gold pills to the rich, red pills to everybody else. Then they branched out into banking and soon they ran Florence. A similar cure-all come on was used by Nobel laureate James D. Watson to winkle $2 billion out of parsimonious governments for the human genome project. He made big promises about how sequencing all our genes would solve the mystery of cancer (as opposed to enabling the curiosity of the scientists getting the grants). Surprise: the genome was sequenced by the year 2000 yet cancer is still with us. We learned that ‘ genes’ are iffy constructs at best, and only tell part of the story of how bodies develop and how disease erupts. The number of those stricken with cancer is projected to grow by 40% in the next few decades. The same strategy was used with regard to stem cell research. Long before there was any evidence, we were constantly told that stem cell research will lead to a cure for Parkinson's disease, spinal cord injuries, etc.  Still waiting!

We are being told now that smart autonomous machines will do the jobs no one likes to do, like changing an old person’s diapers. This apparently goes over well in Japan (where energy expended on the development of autonomous robots has been relentless). The Japanese population is rapidly aging and sufficiently xenophobic to preclude importing large numbers of poor people from other cultures to do this work.  The personal aide-type autonomous robots being advertised now are cute, toy-like, and will only cost about $10,000, way cheaper than the wages of a personal care worker. Now we are told they have been given ‘feelings’ too, or at least the capacity to simulate them. (If they had actual emotions, they might acquire real rights: no one will want to go that far.) These sweet little machines can laugh and even tear up at appropriate moments. That story made the CTV national news.

Robotics and artificial intelligence research are being marketed so hard because this is a critical time in their development. A great deal of public money has been used to get the basic research done. The European Union is one of the most aggressive funders. In the US, DARPA has led the way with grants and prizes given to very large and profitable companies. Google has been buying robotics companies funded by DARPA at a startling rate even as it tries to back-engineer the human brain to make these robots smarter. Yet no Congressional committees,  or House of Commons committees have been asking hey, wait, have you considered....? The failure of legislators to create a body of law and regulation to shape the intelligent robots of our future has caused even technology mavens such as Bill Joy, Elon Musk, and important scientists such as Stephen Hawking, to issue warnings. Yet these warnings are ignored by those with the power to act. Why? 

It’s the lure of future growth in GDP. The usual suspect economists argue that smart innovation is the way of the future. If we don’t build these machines, our competitors will, so we need to get out front and stay there. With the exponential rise of autonomous smart machines, they tell us, wealth will increase exponentially too. Funny thing though. The question, whose wealth, is rarely raised. 

So let’s raise it here. Those who stand to benefit most from the wealth that flows from autonomous machines are the largest shareholders of the companies that own the most important patents. Those shareholders do not want rules and regulations in place that might limit the possibilities for profit. Some may have been motivated to enter these fields for different reasons than getting rich. Several have said they just wanted to build the machines featured in the science fiction they read as children. But when one becomes responsible for a giant business whose shares trade to the public, other imperatives take hold.

It falls to the rest of us to think about what kind of society we want to live in and to insist that we must quickly make the decisions about changes that will affect us all. If we fail to do that, if we find ourselves on the trash-heap of history kowtowing to the overlords who own the smart machines, we'll have no one to blame but ourselves.

A footnote: In 200l, I published a book called Bones: Discovering the First Americans. It featured the story of an 8500 year old skeleton found at the edge of the Columbia River in Washington State and dubbed Kennewick Man. This skeleton had a skull that was characterized as "Caucasoid"  by the first physical anthropologist who studied it, James Chatters, giving support to others' suggestions that ancient Europeans were the First Americans, arriving on North American shores long before the peoples we call Native Americans immigrated from Asia. After examining what evidence was available then, I argued that we should pay more attention to the origin stories of Native Americans which seemed to place them here at the beginning of the Last Ice Age or in a period preceding its final melt. These stories make no mention of long sea voyages from distant shores. This week's issue of Nature reports on the sequence of ancient DNA taken from Kennewick Man and compared to a modern sequence derived from a sample from a member of the local Colville tribe. Shortly after the skeleton's discovery, this tribe claimed Kennewick Man as their ancestor and went to court to try and get the right to rebury him. They failed. The skeleton is still held at a local museum so it is available for study.

The DNA sequences of Kennewick Man and the Colville tribe member turn out to be closely related suggesting Kennewick Man is indeed a Colville ancestor. The leader of the study, a Danish scholar named Eske Willerslev, told reporters that he thinks more attention should be paid to Native American origin stories. He intends to pay more attention himself in future.

All journalists like to say I told you so if we get it right. So here it is: I told you so.

SMARTS Update: Boundary Crossing and the Wisdom of Solomon

In any human society, boundaries matter more than just about anything else, even the truth. This applies no matter who you are, or what you do. 

 

Here is a proof. This terrific little underwater video of an octopus was all over the web this week. The tiny octopus hauls around a split coconut shell, then climbs into it, using it as a house, for protection.  Tool use by an octopus! you will declare  as the footage rolls. But in the copy underneath, a scientist declares that this should not be called tool use at all. Why not?

"We have to draw the line somewhere," he says.

Why? Because line drawing  is what we do. Yet the octopus is in fact using a tool. If you want to know more about the remarkable intelligence of these invertebrates, visit the smart octopus website (http://www.thecephalopodpage.org/smarts.php).  There you will see a short essay on the findings of some terrific specialists, among them Jennifer Mather, a professor of psychology at the University of Lethbridge whose work is  featured in SMARTS.  Not only do octopuses use tools, they can always find their way home through what appears to us to be featureless space. They remember their path though they change locations frequently to avoid predators. They also remember people who are nice to them, and people who mess with them. The real question about the octopus is not whether or not they use tools, but how they teach themselves survival skills so quickly. They live alone from the time they hatch and must make their way in a dangerous world, where every smart bony fish considers them to be supper, without any parents to show the way. They learn incredibly fast yet they have no teachers. How does that work?

The scientists among us used to insist that we are the only creatures on this planet smart enough to make and use tools. When some (Jane  Goodall) observed that chimpanzees do this too, they were forced to redraw the boundary line dividing intelligent humans from mindless animals. They put chimpanzees inside the smart circle with us.  Over the last half century, they have had to redraw that boundary over and over again. Now the smart circle includes orangutans, dolphins, microbial cells, slime molds, pretty much everything alive. Soon it will also include all kinds of smart machines, because if machines can learn and adapt like intelligent living things, why not? Yet with all this change, one thing has not: in a world in which everything depends on everything else, humans continue to draw boundaries. We divide so as to conquer.


As my new book SMARTS: the Boundary-Busting story of Intelligence makes clear, we, like other primates, are obsessed with territories, hierarchies, celebrity, and the use of power. We use a big chunk of our intelligence to become winners in the power game or to get very close to winners. Winners are the only ones among us who are allowed to overstep boundaries. Everybody wants to be a winner’s friend and cross that boundary too-- that is, until the winner is exposed as a cheater. Our desire to snuggle-up-to-power can be seen in everything we do, but especially in fields where access to power makes all the difference, disciplines like politics, science, and journalism. This week, television journalist Evan Solomon of the CBC (the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) learned what happens when you think you have sufficient power to ignore the boundaries, but forget about the exposure problem.

Solomon began his journalism career right after university with magazines, first a literary one, then another he founded called Shift. It was supposed to be about the products of the onrushing digital age, yet it was a paper magazine only, best known for terrific design by the amazing Carmen Dunjko (who also art-directed SMARTS). Eventually Shift went to magazine Valhalla while Solomon moved on to the CBC. There he climbed the ladder ending up as the host of CBC radio's long time Saturday morning political show, The House, and Power & Politics, a daily CBC Newsworld public affairs offering.  Unlike CBC radio's As It Happens, or TheCurrent, or Canada's major newspapers, neither show has trouble getting members of the notoriously controlled Harper cabinet to appear. Both shows are about snuggling up to power. They permit Canadian office-holders to put their policies before the public without having to endure tough probing. It’s journalism that is just one step beyond reprinting the press release. Once, Solomon actually interviewed the Prime Minister's press secretary in place of the Prime Minister.

Most journalists know that we should place impermeable barriers between our personal business, our friendships, and our work, or face losing the trust of the audience.  In other words, journalism demands that we put our primate desires on the shelf. That’s why journalists tend to be friends with other journalists—there are fewer boundary issues to contend with. Or at least that’s the way things tend to be now.  Previous generations of Ottawa journalists were often very good friends with the powerful people they covered, going with them on canoeing trips, fishing trips, drinking together and then covering up for the winners in print or on camera with phrases like…“ The Minister appeared to be tired and emotional....”  (Code for my friend, the Minister, was drunk as a skunk.)

In the US, many journalists are behind-the-scenes friends with the powerful people they cover. That has been true for several generations. Ladybird Johnson invited one young journalist and his family to the ranch to swim, and that family-to-family relationship continued long after Johnson became the President and the journalist became a famous TV face: it was useful for both.  Great journalists such as Ben Bradlee covered up what they knew of Jack Kennedy’s outrageous and dangerous sexual behavior.  In Britain, many journalists are friendly to power to the point of obsequiousness. For decades in Brazil, the whole purpose of journalism was turned upside down by one of its main practitioners, the founder of the largest newspaper conglomerate in the country. That man climbed from nowhere to a position of great wealth and power by digging out scandals that should have made his front pages. Instead, he offered to keep the news out of his papers in return for a fat fee. Most people paid up. The same man became a major donor of great paintings that he bought through agents (from Nazis?) in Europe right after World War II . His collection now ennobles the walls of the Sao Paulo Museum of Art.

Solomon’s behavior is a mere foible when compared to that standard.

According to Kevin Donovan , investigative reporter for the Toronto Star, in 2013 Solomon set up a contractual relationship with an avid art collector who wanted to get rid of some of his pieces but apparently did not want to use the usual methods-- such as selling them to dealers or at public auction. (The Star has apparently not pursued why that might have been the case, but it definitely should.) Solomon's role was to use his position to set up meetings between the collector and the powerful, such as Jim Balsillie, the co-founder of RIM (now Blackberry) and Solomon’s friend Mark Carney, formerly the  Governor of the Bank of Canada, now Governor of the Bank of England, who might like to buy. The art collector was looking to unload pieces ranging from a Doig (worth millions ) to a Dorland (worth much less) to ceremonial masks (which, if genuine, are spiritual objects that are priceless and should be returned immediately to the Native American tribes they were taken from). For every sale, Solomon was to get a 10% commission. He did not reveal to Balsillie that he was being paid for making an introduction to his partner. The secret commission business is known as shilling. Sales were made to Balsillie and Carney. 

In February, the two partners fell out over a sale that in Solomon's view should have netted him more than $1 million while his partner was only willing to pay $200,000 as a finder's fee. They lawyered up.They settled the dispute. The terms are confidential.

About a month ago, the Toronto Star got wind of these dealings, and somehow got access to a draft contract and emails between the partners. Kevin Donovan would not say who his source, or sources, were but from the story he wrote it can be concluded that they were very close to the deal. When he confronted Solomon, he was met with denials. The CBC at first declared everything was in order because Solomon had informed the CBC about his art business in April, 2015. The CBC had said it was fine as long as it didn't cross the line into his work. But the emails made clear that this business certainly did cross that line—his position as an on camera/ on air journalist seemed to be the raison d'etre for the business relationship. When Donovon pressed harder with CBC officials, the result was a public firing just before the story went to press.

How could a smart journalist get himself into a fix like this? Surely he knew that he shouldn't be in a business that hinged on his access to powerful persons he had interviewed or tried to interview? Why didn't he become concerned when Global's news anchor was ejected from his job after the Star revealed that he had set up a PR business and had interviewed his own clients on his show? Wasn't he rattled by the fuss made when it was revealed that the CBC`s senior business correspondent, Amanda Lang, was in a personal relationship with a banker whose employer she covered and who had paid her to speak?  And when he threatened to sue, didn't Solomon realize that a lawsuit could leave a paper trail for all to see?

Apparently none of the above troubled him. He was a winner: boundaries didn’t matter.

SMARTS Update: Intelligence and the Politics of Genocide

My new book SMARTS is about the nature of intelligence and who or what displays it. At base, it is really about human politics because both of these questions--who is smart, what is smartness made of-- have produced horrifying political answers for the last 150 years. (And troubling ones for millennia before that). Often, the answers enabled genocide.

The work of early anthropologists, at least in the Americas, aimed at demonstrating that different races have different intellectual capacities and that First Nations' are intellectually inferior to whites. In Brazil, they were so sure that native people are worthless that their last Emperor, Pedro II, gathered heaps of human skulls sent to him as gifts by farmers and ranchers who shot native people like big game. These skulls still reside in a museum in Rio. The first tool used to measure intelligence was a tape measure. Size of the head was assumed to be a proxy for the level of smarts within it.  Things got better (and worse) after IQ tests were invented by psychologists at the beginning of the 20th Century. IQ tests are also proxy measures of  ill-defined brain processes (they refer to something called fluid intelligence which they call "g"). Nevertheless, school systems and governments and corporations worldwide continue to rely on these tests to predict future intellectual performance. In Brazil, some who would like to return to the last century’s dictatorship, once muttered to me that "we cannot be ruled by these people because the average IQ in Brazil is 85!”  In the early days, IQ tests given in Canada and the US were mainly written in English, yet they were given to immigrants who were non-English speakers. Surprise! They did badly. In the US, legislation was proposed to prevent such inferior groups (East Europeans, Slavs, etc.) from immigrating. Native children, learning English as a second language, did badly too. Through these means, anthropologists and psychologists acted as willing handmaidens to racism. In fact, you could say that scientists invented racism. Psychologists continued to rank racial and ethnic groups by IQ test results for many years after all racial categories were disowned by the anthropologists who had first defined them. A Canadian scholar with tenure at the University of Western Ontario, J. Philippe Rushton, did such so-called studies well into the 2000s. You remember him: he insisted the Chinese are the smartest and have the most sexual self control due to smaller weenies.

This week, in Canada, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission which spent seven years examining the tortured history and lingering impact of residential schools on native Canadians, produced a summary report. The report declared that the Canadian government’s residential school policy was one of cultural genocide. How could a government of Canada create such a policy? It’s a testament to the power of the disgraceful--but so useful-- scientific theory that First Nations' were intellectual inferiors. 

As Canada expanded its territory west, during and after Confederation, the problem of what to do about the native people who lived there, and moved around a lot, had to be addressed. Our governors came up with a Canadian solution: we could not conquer native people in war as the Americans were doing. We couldn't afford a war. (In the US, the Surgeon General demanded that soldiers send the heads of native men killed in battle to Washington so their skulls could be measured and their inferiority demonstrated.) Instead of war and beheadings, Canada used treaties to expunge land rights in exchange for cheap promises. One particular promise was that the government of Canada would educate native kids. In return for accepting a small reservation, first nations' children would get the benefit of western education. This seemed like a fine idea to native elders of the day. But the government's idea of education turned out to be very different from theirs. The government intended to use education to take the Indian-ness out of the Indian. That meant stripping away language, culture, history, spiritual beliefs, and especially contact with families. That meant instilling shame and a profound sense of inferiority about being Indian. The government did a fine job of that: and it also paid as little as possible for the program, leaving the children to the tender mercies of Catholic and Anglican missionaries who took on their task with fervor and didn’t expect much remuneration. 

Children as young as five were taken from home by force, pulled away from their parents, packed off to boarding schools where food was scarce and fear was constant and children were punished for speaking their own languages. There was very little government supervision of these schools and no parents showing up daily to see how their kids were faring. With unchecked power went unchecked cruelty. Weren’t these children inferior? What did it matter if they ended up in a small grave. There was rampant sexual abuse, physical abuse, mental suffering, starvation, medical experiments and untreated diseases, and many, many deaths. The Commission found at least 6000 out of 150,000 children who endured these schools died, a figure totally out of whack with death rates in the rest of Canada. The few officials who visited these schools found rampant TB and other pernicious diseases and practices. They raised these issues with governments of the day, but the governments ignored them. Why? Because it could. These people were described by science as inferior to whites. The IQ tests said so, didn't they? And of course, imprisoned on their reservations as a never-enfranchised minority, native people had no political power to change any of it.
 
This week, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada also used the word cultural genocide to describe what has gone on in this country. You'll hear the phrase a lot in the days and years to come because it is the truth, and the truth has been finally been written down in black and white and published. Though we have examined these issues many times in the past, though the government has apologized for these deeds as part of a class action lawsuit settlement, though churches have been bankrupted for their failures to reign in their missionaries, this is the first time Canadians, as opposed to the Canadian government, will be presented with some of the vast documentary record detailing who did what and to whom. This is the first time we have had to face exactly what was done in our name, exactly what we have to apologize for and somehow fix it.

There is a picture of the summary’s presentation ceremony held at Rideau Hall, the Governor General’s residence, that appeared in my morning paper. The Prime Minister attended, representing the government. The Prime Minister did not speak. It has been suggested by the usual pundits that the Prime Minister intends to say nothing about any of this until after the next election.
 
He can do that because he has power. Maybe we need to do something about that.



As SMARTS also points out, the electronic computer was first built in order to find out what the Nazis were planning: it lies at the root of our smart era. Smart computing machines that interact with us and now learn from us make it possible for the powerful to keep tabs on everybody. This week we saw what happens when even a small element of these surveillance powers slips from those who like to wield them. They grab it back as fast as possible. Section 215 of the US Patriot Act, which had been illegally interpreted to permit the NSA to gather and hold all the private communications data from telephone companies' customers under warrant from the FISA court, failed to be extended by the US Senate. Panic ensued! But the House of Representatives', happily, had passed their own bill that stood ready to replace it. The House bill ties only a few new strings around section 215- style surveillance practices, yet it is titled the USA Freedom Act. The Senate passed it and the President signed it into law in one day. Are ordinary Americans now free from scrutiny? Read the bill and you will see the answer is no.
 
And what about the rest of us around the world?  

It’s still open season.