Me, Robot
What we talk about when we talk about our robot overlords
Welcome to The Experiment, where this week we’re talking about a very human thing, which is being afraid of robots. Also, my friend Tom Ramsey takes us on a wild ride in “New Love and Near Death (In the Time of COVID)” and Jack Hughes is once again very smart about something very dumb in “Biden Bitten by Major Scandal.”
And as always we remember who we lost and offer recommendations on what to do, read, watch, and listen to.
But first, did I ever tell you about the time the police gave a ticket to a robot?
This was back when Google was testing autonomous vehicles on Austin’s streets, just driving around in regular traffic with us human drivers. And one day in March 2016, one of Google’s Lexus robot cars was stopped at a red light in Austin when a lady driving a Volkswagen Passat rear-ended the robot car. In fact, the vast majority of collisions involving robot cars in the United States are humans not paying attention and bumping into robot cars. She wasn’t going fast, so no real damage was done. It was a boring collision, except for what happened next.
The robot cars had humans riding in the “driver’s” seat, and this person, who was called the Google AV test driver even though he or she had no control over the robot car, called 911 because the woman driving the Volkswagen “appeared disoriented.” The arrival of the gendarme occasioned an impassioned appeal for justice by Lady Passat, who insisted that the robot car must have committed some sort of a moving violation, albeit while stationary, and so the police officer wrote out a ticket to the blameless Google AV driver.
What a robot car lacks in human frailty it more than makes up for in sensors and video cameras which provided evidence to prove itself innocent in the affair. Nevertheless, Austin, which became the site of the first fully autonomous vehicle trip in 2015, is also the first place a robot was ever given a ticket.
When I worked at the Mayor’s office, I used to tell people that more people got upset about wild peacocks in Austin than they did about Google running robot cars in traffic. And while it was true — there were two separate controversies involving peacocks that required government intervention when I worked at city hall — upon reflection my observation lacks the insight I once perceived. Because as long as that Google AV “driver” sat in the driver’s seat and didn’t fall asleep, few would have ever perceived that Lexus as a robot car. Without the Google AV driver, people in Austin would have freaked the heck out.
How do I know that? Because when it comes to robots — or thinking computational machines that perform tasks formerly reserved to humans — that’s what people do. We freak the heck out, and it’s not because we’re feeble minded. Alan Turing prophesied that machines would “outstrip our feeble powers” and “take control” of humanity. Stephen Hawking predicted that artificial intelligence “could spell the end of the human race.” Elon Musk called progress along these lines “summoning the demon” and “an immortal dictator from which we can never escape.”
Jeepers.
Add to that years of movies about inventions turning against us, from Dr. Strangelove to WarGames to The Terminator, and a fella’s liable to get the impression that humans reached a certain level of irreversible technological advancement and realized, “Whoops.” And from then on we’ve moved from robots on assembly lines to shouting “Refill a prescription!” to being offered ads for shoes we already purchased. We feel yanked into a future in which our robot overlords will grow us in pods as energy sources.
But we didn’t become afraid of robots. We started out that way. Do you want to hear the coolest thing I have learned this year? Almost exactly 100 years ago, R.U.R.: Rossum’s Universal Robots, by Czech playwright Karl Čapek, debuted onstage in Prague. That play invented the word “robot,” derived from the Czech robota, which means “forced laborer.” A mad scientist, funded by a corporation, creates an artificial life form to perform menial labor, but the robots, who can reproduce, overthrow and subjugate humanity. R.U.R. is Patient Zero for that science fiction nightmare.
In 1942, Isaac Asimov invented the word “robotics” in his short story “Runaround,” which later appeared in 1950’s I, Robot. “Runaround” marked the first appearance of the three laws of robotics, which posits a future in which robots are not allowed to hurt us and have to do what we say.
And then, a couple years after I, Robot’s publication, George C. Devol, an inventor from Louisville, Kentucky, invented and patented the first robot. He called it “Unimate,” from “Universal Automation.” He couldn’t find any industry takers, so in the late ‘60s he sold the patent to engineer Joseph Engleberger, who is known today as “the Father of Robotics.”
What all this means is that not only have have we been afraid of robots before robots even existed but that the word “robot” and the concept of robotics were invented to express our cultural anxiety about technology.
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Catastrophizing technological progress is not hard, nor is it particularly surprising. We worry that robots are going to steal our jobs, and not just those so repetitive and boring that we call the work “robotic.” AI will become smarter than humans and have no reservations about hurting us. There is a good bit of this “We’re all going to die” thinking, which, to be fair, we are. If a person’s basic fear is mortality, then we’ll find ways of expressing that whether we’re looking at a tiger, a free climber, or a robot.
What’s more interesting is how we apply our fears of technology such as recognition. The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act “would ban the use of facial recognition technology in both the [body] cameras and the footage” because of justified (no pun intended) problems with correctly identifying faces for people of color. In fact, 13 U.S. cities have made it illegal for police to use facial recognition technology. And if you’re concerned about the 35% error rate across the industry or are concerned that Big Brother is tracking you, this sounds like a good thing.
Facial recognition, though, isn’t going anywhere. Increasingly, we use our faces to unlock phones, to check identities in buildings and airports, even to pay for dinner in Pasadena. And while the industry is not good at reliably identifying faces that aren’t white dudes yet, your mileage may vary. Companies are competing madly to crack this code in facial recognition and to responsibly develop AI. Soon this won’t be a problem.
As the technology improves, the only thing that we’re accomplishing by banning police from using technology to identify people is that we’re returning all power to the police, whose cognitive challenges in identifying Black faces are hardwired. Multiply each individual officer’s embedded challenges across an institution with systemic problems, and racism becomes the norm.
This reminds me of my friend Eric, who was once placed in handcuffs and shoved into the back of a patrol car because he fit the description of a suspect. That description? A Black man, 25-55, 5’ 8” to 6’ 2”, 150-220 pounds. In other words, any adult Black man without gray hair. We are correctly concerned about false positive IDs of Black faces, but no one ever thinks to mention how more accurate facial recognition could help rule out innocent people who would otherwise be rounded up with the “usual suspects.”
The bans that cities have imposed and that Congress is considering do not allow police to use facial recognition even after attaining a desired level of accuracy. Instead, they assume the technology will never change and that it will always be used to round up innocent Black people, ignoring the fact that technology companies have every incentive to solve a problem that is universally agreed to exist.
Part of the reason we think of machines that can learn as inherently dangerous is that they seem to reveal themselves as such when they come into contact with humans. Remember Tay, Microsoft’s AI chatbot? In 2016, it took less than 24 hours of interaction with Twitter for Tay to start spewing racism like a Trump Cabinet Secretary. The easy conclusion was that AI was dangerous, but with the benefit of hindsight having survived 2016 and the four subsequent years, isn’t the more logical conclusion that Twitter is inherently sociopathic?
Racism and other forms of discrimination are not inherent in robotics, AI, or any other technology. A robot doesn’t show aggression, sociopathy, racism, or anything else if we don’t program it there first.
So what are we actually afraid of? When facial recognition technology treats women and people of color worse than white men, we’re not afraid of the machine. We’re afraid of weaponizing our own racism. When we’re fearful of a technologically superior army violently enslaving humanity, it’s possible that we’re not actually afraid of our robot overlords but our own inhumanity. And when we’re angry at the robot car we just ran into, maybe we’re feeling defensive because we’re a crappy driver.
Humans have been doing all the things we’re afraid robots might do for far longer than we’ve been afraid of robots. We are on the cusp of an age in which machines make people capable of more than ever before. We’re not afraid of the robots. We’re afraid of building them in our own image. Let’s work on us while we build a better robot.
New Love & Near Death
by Tom Ramsey
My friend Tom Ramsey is my favorite reason to go to New Orleans. I knew him back from my political days. Since then, he went into banking before returning to his first love, cooking. He’s a chef at a five-star restaurant, but lately that is the least-interesting thing about his life. Since the first of the year, he’s gained a daughter and nearly lost his life.
Biden Bitten by Major Scandal
by Jack Hughes
Jack Hughes, who is smartest about the dumbest stuff, applies himself here to Joe Biden’s first (apologies) Major crisis. The White House press corps turned a man-bites-dog story into a man-bites-dog scandal.
Who we’ve lost
This graduate of Port Angeles HS
How we’re getting through this
Making fried rice
Creating civilization to drink beer
Donating to Turning Tables in NOLA
Practicing Warren Buffett’s 4 habits of success (h/t Elie Jacobs)
What I’m reading
Russell Gold: “Texas Overcharged $16 Billion for Power During Freeze, Monitor Says” - My man Russell is killing this beat.
An independent market monitor said the Texas power-grid operator made a critical mistake that resulted in $16 billion in electricity overcharges last month, and recommended that the charges be reversed.
Tom Jones: “Oprah Winfrey’s brilliance shows in a stunning interview with Harry and Meghan” - I think I’m going to need to start reading this column regularly.
Winfrey’s conversational and nonaggressive style comes off less like an interview and more like two people just shooting the breeze. Yet, that style allows Winfrey to ask tough questions without putting her subjects on the defensive. In fact, it does just the opposite. It gets them to open up even more.
Josh Jones-Dilworth: “The Four Mother Value Props (and a new Fifth)” - My friend Josh is low-key one of the smartest people I know, and he started a newsletter.
Hope is in fact (to be cheesy) a form of viral marketing. It's contagious. It anticipates, and requires, sharing and being a part of it. Hope, to be truly harnessed, has to carry an implicit call to action: join us.
Jenny Lumet: “Will Woke Go Up in Smoke?” - Lena Horne’s granddaughter is a helluva writer. The kicker left me bent over in pain.
…the only thing I know for sure is that virtue usually flowers when you’re vulnerable.
Delmore Schwartz: “Calmly We Walk through This April’s Day” - Read this out loud.
Many great dears are taken away,
What will become of you and me
(This is the school in which we learn ...)
Besides the photo and the memory?
(... that time is the fire in which we burn.)
Maggie Smith: “Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change” - I’m going to be writing about this short book next week.
Revise the story you tell yourself about starting over. … Consider this time an opportunity to make a new and improved life.
What I’m watching
Liberal Redneck’s take on the monarchy is high-larry-us. (h/t Sonia Van Meter)
Len and Company was unusually bad. A hash of horrible editing, cinematography, and directing. It does not deserve its 70% Rotten Tomatoes score.
The Washington Post’s Ann Hornaday said I Use to Go Here has “modesty, precision and wry compassion,” and if you’re essentially a first-time writer with a book coming out, let’s just say I might have been uniquely situated to enjoy this one. It’s a lovely ramshackle of a movie.
Linda Holmes of NPR found Modern Love, the anthology series on Amazon Prime, to be too pat. We found them exactly pat, full but not stuff with pat, OK in the pat department. If you want something gentle about people, you will like Modern Love.
What I’m listening to
Here’s a playlist of all the songs we’ve recommended dating back to the very beginning.
What’s that, you say? You’re in the market for a fusion tuba player? Well, have you met my friend Theon Cross? He’s playing at this year’s virtual SXSW.
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If your new year’s resolution was to lose weight, try Noom, and you’ll quickly learn how to change your behavior and relationship with food. This app has changed my life. Click on the blue box to get 20% off. Seriously, this works.
Headspace is a meditation app. I’ve used it for a couple years and am absolutely shocked at how much it’s taught me about managing my inner life. Try it free for a couple weeks. Don’t worry if you’ve never done it before. They talk you through it.
I now offer personal career coaching sessions through Need Hop.
We set up a merch table in the back where you can get T-shirts, coffee mugs, and even tote bags now. Show the world that you’re part of The Experiment.
We’ve also got a tip jar, and I promise to waste every cent you give me on having fun, because writing this newsletter for you is some of the most fun I’ve had.
Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of the American Myth by Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson, and myself comes out June 8 from Penguin Random House. There is no better way to support this book than to pre-order a copy. You’re going to love reading what really happened at the Alamo, why the heroic myth was created, and the real story behind the headlines about how we’re all still fighting about it today.
