- 16 Nov 2016 15:24
#14738308
As an aspiring cognitive scientist, I might be able to weigh in on the question of whether robots will soon overtake the proletariat. I'll start by saying I doubt it. When people mention the "exponential progress of artificial intelligence" or what have you, they are unwittingly talking about only one sort of AI: narrow AI, which concerns the accomplishment of expert tasks like diagnosing a disease given a list of specific symptoms. Narrow AI's domain is the closed system with clear rules. Life, of course, is far from a closed system with clear rules—and industry is no different.
General AI, narrow AI's counterpart, concerns the smooth assimilation of unprecedented data and the accurate judgment of details as either relevant or extraneous. In other words, if I'm a basketball player and someone in the stands pulls out an assault rifle, my priority should not remain calculating the trajectory of my shot; I should instead try to avoid the trajectory of his. Millions of years of evolution have fine-tuned humans to accomplish these common sense tasks with singular ease, but robots are notoriously terrible at them. No basketball-player robot, as yet, knows how to play dead in a mass shooting—in the past fifty years, in fact, general AI has progressed little to none. Expecting scientists to achieve a sudden breakthrough amounts to wishful thinking.
Industry can't expect to do without both general AI and the proletariat, all the while avoiding disaster. At the very least, the proletariat will remain a needed part of industry if only to push the big button when the burgers come out green on the assembly line. While one might argue this is a laughable role, it is no less critical. What's more, Mark and Engels even predicted it, if my reading of the communist manifesto is correct. Labor will invariably become more "repulsive," according to Marx and Engels, but this won't prevent a revolution of the working class so much as stir one.
"Do not wait for the Last Judgment. It takes place every day."
Albert Camus, The Fall