Raging against the invisible machine

Today we use the word Luddite to describe someone who is nonplussed by technology. Someone who just doesn’t like it, understand it, or engage with it. This is not an accurate description of the real luddites though – as a historian friend once pointed out to me. They had no abstract objection to technology, they just didn’t like it taking their jobs.The Luddites could see and touch the machines that they opposed. They could take hammers and break the frames. Not so for any true modern luddite, raging against the cognitive automation that might strip them of work. Today the greatest threats to human work are remote algorithms, spun up on a distant server, perhaps on the other side of the world, to perform a single task. They may only exist for a fraction of a second before they disappear again, back into the giant pools of data and computing power.I raised this at Barclays recent Charities Day to highlight the challenge that automation presents to all of us, but particularly to the third sector. Charities have the challenge of employing automation to maximise their own performance, when they might consider their role as employers and venues for volunteering as a very important secondary goal to their primary mission. But they also have the threat to their fundraising activities. Payroll giving has been a growing component of their income in recent years. What happens when fewer and fewer of us are on a regular payroll?Ephemeral robots aren’t likely to be so generous.

Robots are companions, not carers

I trust that the TV and radio producers I deal with are adept at gauging public interest in the stories on which they ask me to comment. So I’m sure there must be great interest in the concept of the care robot, a topic on which I was asked to comment three times yesterday, ending with a debate with The Guardian’s Michele Hanson on BBC Ulster.Michele and I were positioned slightly apart in our opinions, though perhaps not as far as it may have seemed to the listener. For while I think robots most definitely have a role to play in the care sector, I’m loathe to accept that they are in any way a suitable replacement for a human being.

Love technology, respect people

Any reader of this blog will know that I love technology. It has been my obsession from near-birth. But I also feel we are too appreciative of our own brilliance when compared to the spectacular complexity of our own bodies. We can’t yet understand nearly half of what we our bodies and minds can do, let alone replicate it. Rarely are those uniquely human characteristics more important than in a caring environment.For this reason we are a long way from having a robot that can ‘care’, however rapid the rate of technological progress. The revolution we require is not one of technology but of economics and social policy, properly valuing care work and creating a system to reward it appropriately. It’s hard to see how this will be achieved without radical political intervention in the economic system, something that might be decades away.What fits today’s system is an answer based on capital investment in technologies that can — if only in part — offset the lack of proper investment in humans in a care setting.This is where Michele and I differ. We agree that robots can’t care. But we disagree about whether robots can be useful companions.

Plug-in pets

I am not a pet person. Animals make me sneeze. Dogs scare me. And frankly it’s hard enough tidying up after myself and my kids, let alone adding an even less self-controlled creature into the mix.But I get it. I understand the appeal. I’ve seen the joy that animal companions bring to others. A joy that has been quantified by research. As the US Center for Disease Control, an organisation not prone to woo, puts it:“Pets can decrease your: Blood pressure, Cholesterol levels, Triglyceride levels, feelings of loneliness…”Now, what proportion of each of these benefits do you think is down to the innate capabilities of the animal? And what proportion is down to what happens in our heads through our interactions? The studies, though small so far, suggest that robot companions can offer the same benefits as living companions.Robots may not yet be even as smart as our pets. But they can be much better adapted to the needs of those they are designed to interact with. For a start, they can speak, tell stories, show films, control lights and heating, and clean floors rather than dirty them.Between these enhanced capabilities and our own propensity to anthropomorphise everything around us, it seems obvious to me that robot companions can be a useful supplement to human interaction.

Companionship is not care

This though, is the limit of their capabilities with today’s technology. Robots cannot replace humans in a care setting and nor should we accept that as a proposition. We have a major under-employment problem amongst the young, an ageing population and historical undervaluation of care work: one solution could hit the trifecta.If and when these problems are solved though, robots will remain useful and valid additional companions.

Four Fears for the Future of Drones

I’m talking to Sky News later today about the future of drones — the domestic variety rather than the military ones. I think there are four areas we really need to consider: safety, security, privacy and pollution.

Safety

Put simply, what goes up, must come down. Let’s do some very rough maths. The highest you can legally fly a drone in the UK is 400ft or about 122 metres. A drone like a DJI Phantom 3 weighs around 1.2kg. I don’t have one to measure but I’m guessing it’s cross sectional area when flat is around 0.2sqm — though it would likely tumble as it fell.I’m going to suggest it’s like to be travelling around 110mph or 50m/s at the point it lands on someone’s head, delivering 14KN of force, assuming their head moves by about 0.1m as the drone comes to rest on it. Or rather in it: that’s plenty to crack your skull. At least I think it is: there’s a reason I never became an engineer.Drones have all sorts of safety measures built in to stop this happening. Like returning to base when their battery is low. But people tinker and tamper all the time. And go way beyond the technical and legal limits. Drones don’t need to fall to cause damage. They could interfere with a driver’s concentration, or get sucked through the engine of an aircraft. And that’s all before...

Security

...people choose to use them to cause harm. The payload of a drone is more than enough to carry explosives. Explosives are fairly easy to make. And even if you can’t, you might only need a naked flame to cause some serious harm. As our military has shown, drones can be used as weapons and consumer grade drones almost certainly will be re-purposed as such at some point in this country.Even if they’re not blowing things up, many drones have high-grade cameras built in as standard. More than high enough resolution to capture secrets, though they are noisy enough that it might be hard to do stealthily (see below).

Privacy

It’s not just state secrets that we will need to be concerned about. We are already the most photographed age in history by many orders of magnitude. Drones allow people to put cameras where maybe we don’t want them: over fences and up to first floor windows. Frankly even in the high street: we all have a right to privacy and drones are a spectacular way to breach that right. I doubt your average user flying a drone over a park is collecting consent forms from everyone.

Pollution

Though drones are yet another disposable collection of heavy metals and oil-based plastics, my concern here is not primarily about thousands of drones filling up landfill. It’s about noise.Drones make one hell of an irritating noise. This is good in some ways: it makes it harder to use them to breach security and privacy. But when drones become a fact of every day life it is going to be seriously problematic.There are moves to address this with clever changes to the rotor design and the number and performance of engines.But for now, drones? They drone.