Overpromising is cruel.

In technology and science, you see it especially in the area of life extension. The fountain of youth has been with us ever since people had time to stop and ponder, but the irrational rhetoric has grown louder since gerontologist Aubrey de Grey said in 2004 that “the first person to live to 1,000 might be 60 already.” What nonsense. I’m all in favor of working toward longer and healthier lives, but there’s no need to overheat the subject.

When it comes to a Singularitarian paradise of conscious machines, Ray Kurzweil’s pronouncements have ranged further and further into science fiction, promising superintelligence in a couple of decades. That’s not happening. Again, working toward such goals is worthwhile, but thinking that tomorrow is today is a sure way to disappoint.

Weak AI (non-conscious machines capable of programmed tasks) is the immediate challenge, with robots primed to devour jobs long handled by humans. That doesn’t mean we endure mass technological unemployment, but it could mean that. In a Nature review of three recent books on the topic (titles by John Markoff + Martin Ford + David A. Mindell), Ken Goldberg takes a skeptical look at our machine overlords. An excerpt:

Rise of the Robots by software entrepreneur Martin Ford proclaims that AI and robots are about to eliminate most jobs, blue- and white-collar. A close reading reveals the evidence as extremely sketchy. Ford has swallowed the rhetoric of futurist Ray Kurzweil, and repeatedly asserts that we are on the brink of vastly accelerating advances based on Moore’s law, which posits that computing power increases exponentially with time. Yet some computer scientists rue this exponential fallacy, arguing that the success of integrated circuits has raised expectations of progress far beyond what historians of technology recognize as an inevitable flattening of the growth curve.

Nor do historical trends support the Luddite fallacy, which assumes that there is a fixed lump of work and that technology inexorably creates unemployment. Such reasoning fails to consider compensation effects that create new jobs, or myriad relevant factors such as globalization and the democratization of the workforce. Ford describes software systems that attempt to do the work of attorneys, project managers, journalists, computer programmers, inventors and musicians. But his evidence that these will soon be perfected and force massive lay-offs consists mostly of popular magazine articles and, in one case, a conversation with the marketing director of a start-up.•