Robots and Me

It’s rather thrilling to imagine bands of robots skulking in corporate corridors, waiting for humans to pop to the coffee machine so they can nip in and take their jobs. Just think: you could come back from lunch to find an algorithm sitting in your chair, working far more efficiently and effectively than you ever managed, for a fraction of your take-home pay! Or maybe not.   Looking at what the robots can currently do, and what most jobs consist of, we’re facing a messier – and largely incomplete – handover.   Right now, robots are brilliant at tasks: glorified spreadsheet calculations, data-mining, pattern-recognition, precision mechanical movements (fifteen years ago a robot surgeon cut out the lining of my left knee while the human surgeon sat at a computer in another room – I’ll post the video sometime when I’m feeling gruesome).  They plough through huge amounts of data almost instantaneously, they reproduce processes with precision and c...

I saw a fun spreadsheet last week.   Yeah, perhaps I should get out more…but this time I’m glad I stayed in, because this spreadsheet   was one of the most thought-provoking things I’ve seen in a while. It showcased idiot algorithms – coded robots given a task to complete that goes spectacularly wrong: game-playing bots that crashed the game or paused it indefinitely to avoid losing points; digital creatures bred for speed that, instead of refining their running technique, grew unfeasibly tall and generated high velocities by falling over. So far, so averagely-funny.   But once I’d got over my mean snickers of biological superiority, I noticed something else: these robots were acting exactly like people do.  If you’ve ever been a boss, or a parent, or worked with others, you’ll know how wretchedly difficult it is to get others to do what you want them to.   No, that’s not what I meant.   Why on earth did you put it there?   Did you even li...

Because we can’t live without each other, we’re struggling to make each other happy, and I really, truly want our relationship to work.   Think of this blog as couples’ therapy for the age of automation, and try not to mind too much that only one of the partners has bothered to turn up.   Could be the robots will join in due course, but until they get past the expletive phase and master the basics of placing an online order, I think it best to stay solo, trust to the process, open myself up to love and learning and try to resist bitter wisecracks, rehashing ancient arguments and harking back to my robot-free days when the closest machines came to Artificial Intelligence was the mis-sold RobotChef – not the Transformer-in-a-Toque I expected to see when my mother opened the box, but instead a clunky beige food-mixer with a range of sharp-edged accessories none of us ever figured out how to attach, let alone use. But enough about the past.   Let’s start with introd...