Thinking Digital: Part One

Hello!

This week I was fortunate to enough to win tickets to Thinking Digital 2015 as part of SageOne's social media team. Essentially I got a free ticket to a really cool festival to tweet along, interact and blog... What I'd be doing anyway! So how was it?

Well I can safely say that it was one of the best conferences I've been to with a diverse selection of speakers catering to areas I'm incredibly interested in already. Highlights of the conference included talks from all kinds of people from heads of start ups to academics and managing directors to artists, everyone is impacted by our digital world so so many people are able to speak. This created a huge pool of depth in not only across the topics featured and also allowed the audience to get a good insight with more information to pursue if they choose. The talks are in bitesize chunks, similar to TED giving a speed and efficiency to the event.

Held at the beautiful Sage Gateshead, a building I'm ashamed to say I wasn't so keen on when it was being built as I thought it looked a bit like a jelly sweet that had the bursting jelly inside if I was being kind, or a maggot if I was being crude.

So, enough on the set up, let's get on to the themes and speakers, for each speaker I'll pull their description from the Thinking Digital site with a brief breakdown and impression of their talk:

• Luciano Floridi is Professor of Philosophy and Ethics of Information at the University of Oxford, where he is the Director of Research and Senior Research Fellow of the Oxford Internet Institute, Governing Body Fellow of St Cross College, Distinguished Research Fellow of the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, Faculty of Philosophy, and Research Associate and Fellow in Information Policy of the Department of Computer Science.
•  Kicking off with a bang, this talk was possibly one of the most information rich and interesting. Floridi explains that the concept of robots have been around for millenia however we need to define what robots are and what we actually hope to achieve by creating robots.
• When we think about robots in the current landscape we are inspired by science fiction and the thoughts that enchant us and stay in the common consciousness are those that challenge us or shock culture. This is why HAL endures in the popular consciousness, because although HAL becoming self aware is unlikely, it's still a striking thought...
• Floridi argues that we should not be worried about AI and the singularity, comparing the subject to ghosts, as a scientist they cannot disprove ghosts so the idea will pervade.
• Floridi enters a thought experiment and creates his self aware AI from the singularity and nicknames it AI-Zilla, if this system were created would this spell a dark time for the human race? Well yes, pretty much, however if the four horsemen of the apocalypse appeared overnight we would be in a very similar position, Floridi posits that both situations are as likely as each other.
• Labouring the point further, Floridi argues that the self aware malevolent AI is the 'Nigerian Prince email' of the subject in that it's an annoying concept that keeps appearing in the discourse. 
• Floridi's primary concern regarding AI and robots is not an evil robot enslaving humanity, at least ideologically.
• If you review robots as a very basic worker with predetermined labour limits this view becomes far more interesting. A Roomba is an automated AI vacuum cleaner, it is for all intents and purposes a cleaning robot, however this does not mean your Roomba is going to be able to make you a coffee let alone become self aware and kill you whilst you sleep in a fit of revenge...

• However as we develop more robots to do more tasks, we will impact the job market eliminating jobs once held by humans and giving them to automated systems. The job that would take 15 workers to do could be done by robots, supervised by one engineer. We are finding more and more ways of automating tasks using big data and robots, this will lead to growth, however growth of what? Jobs may decrease and automation increase, is this what we want?
• Floridi argues that safe is always better than sorry, however in the realms of AI is there anything that could actually make us sorry? He doesn't think so, therefore why don't we play around with robotics and automation
• Is AI possible? There has not been a great leap forward since the creation of the Turing test, however those who attempt the Turing test must be reviewed and have those administering it actually understanding the point. For example if you ask a computer if it believes in God and it answers 'no', this is not showing intelligence, it is showing that the computer does not believe in the concept of God. If a computer says it is not afraid of the dark it does not show that the computer feels a fear, it shows that it is incapable of fear.
• If AI is coming, and by AI we mean computers that can pass the Turing test, when do we anticipate it?
  • 2000 - 50 years from paper published in 1950 by Turing
  • 2018 - oh I suppose it'll be done by then
  • 2028 - I’ll be 80 by then, and it’ll happen by then
  • 2115 - Hawking ‘I’ll be dead by then’ 
• We now live in a more connected world with a growing population, however whilst people increase in number, the amount of devices online, currently we think of mobile phones, tablets and laptops however as the Internet of Things grows we will have many robot assistants and devices interacting with us in daily life.
  • For example a dishwashing robot is most likely to be linked directly to dishwasher than a dishwashing robot maid
   
• 4 Real Challenges facing us when we think about AI:
• Replaceable agency
• Interface between tasks will cut job market
• Humans are replaceable - 10 jobs can be done by one person with automated assistance
• Will we introduce legislation to protect jobs?
• Predictable freedom
• Influential autonomy
• Amazon suggests what you like, automating choices and trends
• Dependent delegation
• Moving to an urban population, becoming dependant on machines
• With all this in mind, we are now in a architectural generation and must define the course we tread in the future asking ourselves 'What kind of society do we want to build?' We need to understand how things work, from robotics to emotions, we need to understand all we can. Floridi's advice for this:
• Think deeper
• Through learning and creating philosophy
• Design better
• Think how it can be used and how it will be impacted
• Be mindful
• Think ahead as to how what we do now will be remembered and impact us, we’re in this for the long haul
• It was a fantastic talk and I'm inspired to learn more about our evil robot overlords, I mean, slightly sinister robot desk clerks.

Hope you've enjoyed reading this so far, I will have more breakdowns in the coming days...

 

Cheers,
The Digital Thinking, Robotically Integrated Agile Timelord