One of the greatest book titles ever is that of Philip K Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? In an age when we are learning all about the predilection of AI to hallucinate, it’s an even more poignant existential question. And the word existential is used advisedly here.
You might be more familiar with the movie version, unhappily renamed Blade Runner. Without digging too deeply into it, the basic premise concerns whether androids — physically indistinguishable from humans — should be considered human, and whether they can consider themselves human. The central protagonist is Rick Deckard, a bounty hunter who finds rogue androids and destroys them.
One of the beguiling elements to the story is that it’s difficult to tell what’s robot and what’s human. How do we define the difference? In Do Androids Dream, one way is to apply an empathy test. Androids, it seems, don’t do empathy. Humans do, but what happens when they start to feel empathy for robots?
As we’ve seen trumpeted in the popular press this year, the robots are coming for our jobs. In many cases, such as receptionists, customer service representatives, translators or designers, they’ve already taken our jobs. But we can at least be relieved that one part of science fiction’s dystopian worldview of robots hasn’t come true. They’re not actively out there trying to kill us yet.
Or are they? No, they’re not, I just wanted to try some clickbait fodder. But there are cases of them at least inadvertently trying to kill us.
If you’re run over while crossing the busy highway of progress, it’s all in a good cause
One of the jobs that AI is coming for is that of taxi driver. In California, the Cruise self-driving car company (one of whose founders is called Dan Kan, which I find deeply suspicious) received California’s first driverless deployment permit, and became the first company to offer rides without a driver in a major public city.
Fast-forward a few months, and General Motors’ Cruise autonomous vehicle (AV) unit is recalling all 950 of its cars to update software after one of them dragged a pedestrian to the side of a San Francisco street.
This is how Cruise described the crash: “In the incident being reviewed by the DMV [department of motor vehicles], a human hit-and-run driver tragically struck and propelled the pedestrian into the path of the AV. The AV braked aggressively before impact and because it detected a collision, it attempted to pull over to avoid further safety issues. When the AV tried to pull over, it continued before coming to a final stop, pulling the pedestrian forward.”
According to NPR (National Public Radio): “Driverless cars run by Cruise, which is owned by GM, and Waymo, which is owned by Alphabet, have been involved in numerous mishaps in the city over the past several months. They’ve run red lights, rear-ended a bus and blocked crosswalks and bike paths.
“San Francisco’s police and fire departments have also said the cars aren’t yet ready for public roads. They’ve tallied more than 55 incidents where self-driving cars got in the way of rescue operations. Those incidents include driving through yellow emergency tape, blocking firehouse driveways, running over fire hoses and refusing to move for first responders.”
Still, if you’re run over while crossing the busy highway of progress, it’s all in a good cause. We need driverless cars for some very important reason, which I’ve temporarily forgotten.
According to The Guardian, Harmeen Mehta, head of technology at telecom company BT, “has suggested workers whose jobs are threatened by AI accept their fate as ‘evolution’, comparing them to horses replaced by the car”.
All I know is, it’s super important. I don’t want to be one of the media people who is, to quote Mehta, “creating a level of paranoia that’s going to paralyse this country”.
She was talking about the UK, but I imagine she would happily extend the sneer to the rest of the world. She urged workers across the UK to “wake up, reinvent yourself and get ready”.
In an interview with the business website Raconteur, quoted in The Guardian, Mehta said: “I don’t know how horses felt when the car was invented, but they didn’t complain that they were put out of a job; they didn’t go on strike. It’s part of evolution. Some jobs will change, some new ones will be created and some will no longer be needed.”
She also said, showing that amazing empathy that enables us to differentiate humans from robots: “Why is it my job to make every person in the company relevant for the future? It’s their responsibility to put themselves on the map.” (She did also say, “[it’s] mine to create an opportunity for them to do that. It takes two to tango.”)
I’m not sure how I feel about being compared to a horse.
In Dick’s story, real animals are rare owing to mass extinctions and most people can’t afford real pets. Poor people can only afford realistic-looking and -acting robot animals. People own these robot animals because of the cultural emphasis on showing empathy, a byproduct of the confusion between androids and humanity.
According to BT’s crass technology chief, we’re the animals going extinct in this scenario.
We’ve already got robots killing people because they can’t recognise them as human, which is a delicious irony. A week or so ago a robot crushed a man to death in South Korea after the machine failed to differentiate him from the boxes of produce it was handling. According to the Yonhap news agency: “The industrial robot, which was lifting boxes filled with bell peppers and placing them on a pallet, appears to have malfunctioned and identified the man as a box.”
Some further, perhaps unnecessarily grim detail. “The robotic arm pushed the man’s upper body down against the conveyor belt, crushing his face and chest. He was transferred to the hospital but died later.”
Ah well, such will be the fate of all we horses due for the knacker’s yard. As NPR reports, Shamann Walton of the San Francisco board of supervisors said at a rally protesting against driverless cars: “We need actual people behind the wheel with a pulse and a brain that know how to manoeuvre in sticky situations. These Cruise vehicles are dangerous on our streets. When they see tragedy or see danger or there’s an obstacle in their way, all they know how to do is freeze.”
That’s probably what the horses thought. These cars will never catch on, they don’t know how to stampede when they see a snake on the road.
And here’s a local example of robot mayhem from 2007. As Wired magazine reported at the time: “Many advanced military weapons are essentially robotic — picking targets out automatically, slewing into position, and waiting only for a human to pull the trigger. Most of the time. Once in a while, though, these machines start firing mysteriously on their own. The South African National Defence Force is probing whether a software glitch led to an anti-aircraft cannon malfunction that killed nine soldiers and seriously injured 14 others during a shooting exercise.”
A story on the Daily Star, with the totally not sensationalist headline “The Curious Case of Killer Robots”, reports that in 1979 the first human to be killed by a robot was one Robert Nicholas Williams, 25, a factory worker at a Ford plant in Michigan. He was crushed to death by a “1t transfer vehicle with mechanical arms”.
I don’t know how horses felt when the car was invented, but they didn’t complain that they were put out of a job; they didn’t go on strike. It’s part of evolution
— Harmeen Mehta
But sensationalist claptrap aside, it does look as if technology is going to kill us. New analysis has just shown that plastic waste is spiralling out of control across Africa, growing faster than in any other region. Apparently, “enough plastic waste to cover a football pitch is openly dumped or burned in Sub-Saharan Africa every minute”, The Guardian informs us.
And, if the trend continues, the publication notes, we’re projected to end up with 116Mt of plastic waste annually by 2060, six times more than the 18Mt of waste produced in 2019. An unforeseen byproduct of our very young population is that “the main driver of rising plastic consumption in Sub-Saharan Africa, where 70% of the population is under 30, is demand for vehicles and other products amid rising income and population growth”.
As you might expect, “in the absence of global rules and regulations, people living in developing countries and the waste pickers who collect the waste, disproportionately bear the brunt of the environmental and health impacts of plastic pollution”.
According to the UN Environment Programme, the equivalent of 2,000 garbage trucks full of plastic are dumped into the world’s oceans, rivers and lakes every day. “Every year 19Mt-23Mt of plastic waste leaks into aquatic ecosystems, polluting lakes, rivers and seas, [altering] habitats and natural processes, reducing ecosystems’ ability to adapt to climate change, directly affecting millions of people’s livelihoods, food production capabilities and social wellbeing.”
Turns out it’s not the robots we need to be worrying about, it’s the packaging in which they’re delivered.
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