Jason Dorrier

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“You Couldn’t Have Two More Extreme Positions”

May 30, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

If and when 3D printers become excellent and cheap and ubiquitous–3D printers printing out more 3D printers-it will be fascinating to see the effect that tool has on manufacturing. Will small start-up car companies become a possibility? Will brands be besieged? Will large corporations be usurped?

It’s worth remembering the rise of the personal computer did not lead to everyone writing their own software. Individuals still deferred to experts. It just made room for new companies to elbow aside yesterday’s giants. 3D printers could operate along the same lines, but my guess is they’ll have a more destabilizing effect. Maybe not for companies that traffic primarily in information but for those that deal in physical products.

In a Singularity Hub article by Jason Dorrier, Deloitte’s John Hagel looks at a couple of possible business scenarios of tomorrow. He believes companies will have to pivot quickly when threatened and individual workers will soon have “freedom and flexibility,” which sound (unintentionally) like Gig Economy euphemisms. An excerpt:

Speaking at Singularity University’s Exponential Manufacturing conference in Boston, Hagel outlined a powerful, decades-long economic trend his group calls the “big shift.”

Hagel believes understanding the big shift is key to navigating an increasingly uncertain economy driven by digital technology, liberalization, and globalization. The question is less about whether the big shift is on and more about where it’s taking us. And according to Hagel, two competing visions vie for our economic future.

“There’s one side of the debate which argues that the impact of all this digital technology is to fragment everything,” Hagel says. “We’re all going to become free agents—independent contractors will loosely affiliate when we need to around specific projects. But basically, companies are dinosaurs. We’re going to fragment down to the individual. The gig economy to the max. That’s one side.”

Another view, Hagel says, suggests we’re moving toward a winner-take-all economy in which network effects enable a few organizations—the Googles or Facebooks of the world—to capture most of the wealth while everyone else is marginalized.

“You couldn’t have two more extreme positions,” Hagel said. “Which one is right?”•

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“Once We Create It, It May Be Out Of Our Hands Entirely”

February 15, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Marc Goodman, law-enforcement veteran and author of the forthcoming book Future Crimes, sat for an interview with Jason Dorrier of Singularity Hub about the next wave nefariousness, Internet-enabled and large-scale. A question about the potential for peril writ relatively small with Narrow AI and on a grand scale if we create Artificial General Intelligence. An excerpt::

Question:

Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and Bill Gates have expressed concern about artificial general intelligence. It’s a hotly debated topic. Might AI be our “final invention?” It seems even narrow AI in the wrong hands might be problematic.

Marc Goodman:

I would add Marc Goodman to that list. To be clear, I think AI, narrow AI, and the agents around us have tremendous opportunity to be incredibly useful. We’re using AI every day, whether it’s in our GPS devices, in our Netflix recommendations, what we see on our Facebook status updates and streams—all of that is controlled via AI.

With regard to AGI, however, I put myself firmly in the camp of concern.

Historically, whatever the tool has been, people have tried to use it for their own power. Of course, typically, that doesn’t mean that the tool itself is bad. Fire wasn’t bad. It could cook your meals and keep you warm at night. It comes down to how we use it. But AGI is different. The challenge with AGI is that once we create it, it may be out of our hands entirely, and that could certainly make it our “final invention.”

I’ll also point out that there are concerns about narrow AI too.

We’ve seen examples of criminals using narrow AI in some fascinating ways. In one case, a University of Florida student was accused of killing his college roommate for dating his girlfriend. Now, this 18-year-old freshman had a conundrum. What does he do with the dead body before him? Well, he had never murdered anybody before, and he had no idea how to dispose of the body. So, he asked Siri. The answers Siri returned? Mine, swamp, and open field, among others.

So, Siri answered his question. This 18-year-old kid unknowingly used narrow AI as an accomplice after the fact in his homicide. We’ll see many more examples of this moving forward. In the book, I say we’re leaving the world of Bonnie and Clyde and joining the world of Siri and Clyde.•

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“Computers Might Write Pulitzer-Worthy Stories By 2017”

November 10, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech | Permalink

The idea that machines can write narratives is nothing new, and I suspect that broad screenplays could be produced by algorithms right now or in the near future. Popular books and reportage written with a human level of nuance by bots is a harder trick to pull off, though it probably will be possible given enough time. Not that I’m looking forward to that. From Jason Dorrier at Singularity Hub:

The idea that computers are increasingly taking figurative pen to paper has recently attracted quite a bit of attention. Over the last few years, algorithmic news writing has begun quietly infiltrating big name journalism.

Last year a Los Angeles Times algorithm was first to break the news of a mild quake that hit LA in the early morning hours. And one of the best known algorithms, by Narrative Science, is used by a number of news outlets, including Forbes.

These robot writers are fairly limited and highly formulaic (to date). For the most part, they excel at what might be called data-centric journalism—sports, finance, weather. Basically anything that generates statistics and spreadsheets.

The bots peruse the data, looking for outliers, maximums, minimums, and averages. They take the most newsworthy of these statistics, come up with an angle and story structure—choosing from an internal database—and spit out the final text.

The result is simple but effective, and on a quick read, perfectly human.

It’s tempting to look ahead a few years and forecast a news media dominated by algorithmic writing. Narrative Science’s Kristian Hammond says computers might write Pulitzer-worthy stories by 2017 and generate 90% of the news by 2030.

He might be right. But the software will need to be more capable than it is now. In fact, computers have been similarly constructing algorithmic sentences since 1952. A machine from that era, the Ferranti Mark 1, constructed love letters from a static list of words, a very simple version of the way modern newsbots build articles from preprogrammed phrases.”•

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“A Robot Was Cooking Up Burgers”

August 11, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

McDonald’s recently reported poor global sales, hurt mostly by dips in the United States and Asia, so perhaps health information and the reality of factory farming are starting to make a dent. But there’s a way on the horizon for fast-food franchises–and even slower-meal places–to save money: robotics. Employee-less service in a consumer environment is nothing new, but perhaps this time it’s real. From Jason Dorrier at Singularity Hub:

“I saw the future of work in a San Francisco garage two years ago. Or rather, I was in proximity to the future of work, but happened to be looking the other direction.

At the time, I was visiting a space startup building satellites behind a carport. But just behind them—a robot was cooking up burgers. The inventors of the burger device? Momentum Machines, and they’re serious about fast food productivity.

‘Our device isn’t meant to make employees more efficient,’ cofounder Alexandros Vardakostas has said. ‘It’s meant to completely obviate them.’

The Momentum burger-bot isn’t remotely humanoid. You can forget visions ofFuturama’s Bender. It’s more of a burger assembly line. Ingredients are stored in automated containers along the line. Instead of pre-prepared veggies, cheese, and ground beef—the bot chars, slices, dices, and assembles it all fresh.

Why would talented engineers schooled at Berkeley, Stanford, UCSB, and USC with experience at Tesla and NASA bother with burger-bots? Robots are increasingly capable of jobs once thought the sole domain of humans—and that’s a huge opportunity.

Burger robots may improve consistency and sanitation, and they can knock out a rush like nobody’s business. Momentum’s robot can make a burger in 10 seconds (360/hr). Fast yes, but also superior quality. Because the restaurant is free to spend its savings on better ingredients, it can make gourmet burgers at fast food prices.

Or at least, that’s the idea.”

 

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“We Are Gifted With The Vision Of Our Times And Cursed With The Temptation To Extrapolate That Vision Into The Future”

April 29, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From Jason Dorrier at Singularity Hub, a hopeful take on the seemingly scary side of the rise of the machines:

“Before the 20th century, most folks in the West farmed. Now, thanks to massive productivity gains in agriculture, virtually none do. To a 19th century farmer that would imply nothing less than the collapse of the economy. Why? Because the thing most people did back then was farm. Our farmer might understandably wonder, ‘What will we do when machines perform our jobs for us? How will we make money? How will we survive?’

We are gifted with the vision of our times and cursed with the temptation to extrapolate that vision into the future. How could our farmer know that in 2013 humans would be paid to make movies, pick up garbage, write online, build robots, clean bathrooms, engineer rockets, lead guided tours, drive trucks, play in garage bands, brew artisanal beer, or write code?

The revolution in agricultural technology liberated vast resources and made us all richer and the economy more diverse as a result. And while one might think that those riches should have accrued to only those making agricultural tech, thus permanently widening the income gap, no such thing happened in practice. While those making agricultural machinery undoubtedly made some bucks, the next economic waves provided different work and income for many levels of skill and motivation.

This is understandably a firebrand topic right now. If current unemployment marked the beginning of mass technological unemployment, you can be sure mass social unrest would be quick to follow. But we can’t prove it’s structural yet. Unemployment is a typically lagging indicator.”

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