Science, Technology & Health: September 2013 Archives
I think that most researchers and commentators are too timid when predicting the rise of automation. People tend to look at how a human does a job and then ask: could a robot do that? But that's the wrong question. Instead of looking at "jobs", which are a social construct, look at the need that the human in the job is fulfilling and ask yourself if a robot could fill that need. When it happens, it's likely that the robot's "job" will look very little like the human "jobs" that were displaced.
Obvious example: Amazon has probably destroyed at least 100,000 retail jobs, but none of what Amazon's computer system does looks like the job of a retail clerk. A modern robot would be terrible at chatting with customers, stocking shelves, working a cash register, setting up displays, and pointing people to the restroom. If you were were to look at the job requirements of a retail clerk you might think, "this job is safe from robots!" And don't forget that Amazon has destroyed the white-collar jobs of store managers and owners as well.
Frey and Osborne focus on "engineering bottlenecks" in AI and robotics, and compare these stumbling points with the requirements of jobs in order to determine which are most and least likely to be vulnerable to automation. The biggest bottlenecks are perception and manipulation, creative intelligence, and social intelligence, all of which computers struggle mightily at (but Rosie the Robot excelled at, by the way). While the trend in recent decades has been towards a hollowing out of "middle-skill" jobs and an increase in low-paying service sector jobs and high-paying, highly educated jobs, Frey and Osborne expect that automation in the future will mainly substitute for "low-skill and low-wage" jobs.So who, specifically, should be worried? They write:
Our model predicts that most workers in transportation and logistics occupations, together with the bulk of office and administrative support workers, and labour in production occupations, are at risk. These findings are consistent with recent technological developments documented in the literature. More surprisingly, we find that a substantial share of employment in service occupations, where most US job growth has occurred over the past decades (Autor and Dorn, 2013), are highly susceptible to computerisation.This may turn out to be correct, though I'd note two reservations I have. First, the model uses (in part) the notoriously unreliable subjective estimates of AI researchers to assign values to whether tasks can be automated or not, and second, it uses lists of job requirements, that the authors acknowledge are not written to assess whether a job can be easily automated. Indeed, job ads don't list things that are universal (or nearly so) across humans, such as rudimentary social intelligence, language understanding, and commonsense. As AI researcher Ernest Davis points out, there has been "only very limited progress" in equipping robots with commonsense reasoning skills.
This is one of the craziest things I've read in a long time: each human can contain multiple genomes. I've actually wondered about genomic variation in a single human before, but I guess I figured that the body somehow prevented if from happening. Apparently not.
Chimerism, as such conditions came to be known, seemed for many years to be a rarity. But "it can be commoner than we realized," said Dr. Linda Randolph, a pediatrician at Children's Hospital in Los Angeles who is an author of a review of chimerism published in The American Journal of Medical Genetics in July.Twins can end up with a mixed supply of blood when they get nutrients in the womb through the same set of blood vessels. In other cases, two fertilized eggs may fuse together. These so-called embryonic chimeras may go through life blissfully unaware of their origins.
One woman discovered she was a chimera as late as age 52. In need of a kidney transplant, she was tested so that she might find a match. The results indicated that she was not the mother of two of her three biological children. It turned out that she had originated from two genomes. One genome gave rise to her blood and some of her eggs; other eggs carried a separate genome.
Women can also gain genomes from their children. After a baby is born, it may leave some fetal cells behind in its mother's body, where they can travel to different organs and be absorbed into those tissues. "It's pretty likely that any woman who has been pregnant is a chimera," Dr. Randolph said.
If that doesn't blow your mind, how about this?
As scientists begin to search for chimeras systematically -- rather than waiting for them to turn up in puzzling medical tests -- they're finding them in a remarkably high fraction of people. In 2012, Canadian scientists performed autopsies on the brains of 59 women. They found neurons with Y chromosomes in 63 percent of them. The neurons likely developed from cells originating in their sons.In The International Journal of Cancer in August, Eugen Dhimolea of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston and colleagues reported that male cells can also infiltrate breast tissue. When they looked for Y chromosomes in samples of breast tissue, they found it in 56 percent of the women they investigated.
Your mom kept some of your DNA and incorporated it into her own body.
Maybe this acquisition somehow contributes to lengthened female life expectancy?
What the heck do we do with this information now? Along with all the research into how our gut bacteria affect our health it looks like the human body is still quite a mystery.
I'd love a software adviser to give me statistically supported suggestions for improving my life. I completely disagree with the final thought, that such advisers would make us feel like puppets. Wealthy, powerful, and important people all pay big money to their cadre of advisers -- do they feel like puppets? I doubt it.
Your smartphone will record data on your life and, when asked, will tell you what to do, drawing on data from your home or from your spouse and friends if need be. "You've thrown out that bread the last three times you've bought it, give it a pass" will be a text message of the future. How about "Now is not the time to start another argument with your wife"? The GPS is just the beginning of computer-guided instruction.Take your smartphone on a date, and it might vibrate in your pocket to indicate "Kiss her now." If you hesitate for fear of being seen as pushy, it may write: "Who cares if you look bad? You are sampling optimally in the quest for a lifetime companion."Those who won't listen, or who rebel out of spite, will be missing out on glittering prizes. Those of us who listen, while often envied, may feel more like puppets with deflated pride.
