‘HEY, SIRI!’ I shout on my way to the airport, pausing to summon one robot as I obey the instructions of another. While other countries call them traffic lights, it is only in South Africa that our traffic signals take their name from a Czech word for the autonomous machines we deploy to perform the work we deem too dull or dangerous for humans – robota, or robot.
The robot blinks from red to green, and I ask Siri: ‘Directions to Lanseria, please.’ I know full well that I am talking to a voice-activated virtual assistant, a software programme that will convert my speech to data and transmit it to a server in the Cloud. Still, there is no harm in being polite.
As Siri parses my query and reports back, her voice soothing and melodious, I picture a tall, stately humanoid, unflappable and gracious, her algorithmic intelligence coded with an edge of sass and dry wit. But as I keep learning, Siri is not quite as smart as she thinks she is.
‘Getting directions to Gran Canaria,’ she says, showing me a map of the Canary Islands approximately half a planet away from my destination on the outskirts of Johannesburg. I sigh and try again, louder. This time, Siri mishears Lanseria as a mathematical conundrum and presents me with a series of easy steps on how to calculate the area of a rectangle.
By the time I have finished yelling at my phone, choosing instead to chart my own path by the road signs along the highway, I can take some comfort in knowing that our species is in no immediate danger of being replaced or subjugated by self-thinking robots or apps embedded with artificial intelligence.
The advantages of artificial intelligence
I turn for insights to a man who cheerfully admits that some of his best friends are robots. Dr Benjamin Rosman is a principal researcher in the Mobile Intelligent Autonomous Systems group at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in Pretoria. His mechanised buddies include CHAMP (CSIR Hybrid Autonomous Manipulation Platform), a wheel-mounted robotic arm with a three-clawed hand for grasping and manipulating objects.
It is an early-stage automaton, a long crawl, lope and stride away from the sophisticated icons of sci-fi cinema, which typically portrays robots either as cute (the blooping, whirring R2-D2 of Star Wars) or murderous (the blood-eyed, liquid-metal cyborgs of Terminator).
‘We should stop making movies where robots are evil,’ laughs Rosman. ‘It might give them ideas.’ At the same time, he concedes that it might make sense to fear the rise of robots in the real world. ‘Whenever you automate anything, at the very least, jobs will change, and that makes it necessary to upskill people. The argument in the robotics space is that you then have to put people’s skills to better use.’
He uses the field of human resources as an example: why, if you enjoy working with people, would you want to spend your workday shuffling paper and fretting over admin? Rather assign such menial tasks to a robotic resource, and everyone will be happy.
Rosman foresees practical applications for robotic technologies, whether in physical hardware form or as part of artificial intelligence systems, in a growing variety of fields. In healthcare, for one, robo-technicians could perform quick and accurate lab tests; in agriculture, another department in the CSIR is already deploying a prototype – essentially a system of sensors mounted on a metallic frame with all terrain wheels – to monitor crop growth and estimate the grape harvest in the vineyards of Stellenbosch.
The trouble with these idealised visions of our automated future, however, is that it isn’t just the robots that will have to be taught new tricks. Back in 2018, an insightful Accenture report already identified six new skills we will need to ‘embrace new challenges and stay relevant’ in a fluid and flexible digital economy.
They are ‘create and solve’, ‘learn to earn’, ‘build tech know-how’, ‘cultivate a growth mindset’, ‘specialise for work’ and ‘apply “We’Q”.’ The last is a fresh coinage for a version of IQ that defines intelligence as the ability to collaborate across personal and virtual boundaries.
The great irony is that the smarter we get in our quest to ‘run with the machines’, as Accenture puts it, the smarter will be the machines we build to make our lives easier. This doesn’t mean that we have to worry about an apocalyptic uprising by terminators, says Rosman.
‘The fear we really have is what we call a value alignment problem. If you build something that is super competent, and you don’t give it detailed enough instructions, it’s going to do something you didn’t intend, because you did not specify properly what you want it to do.’
The tale of the ‘Paper-Clip Maximiser’
He illustrates this with the tale of the Paper-Clip Maximiser, a thought experiment with a theoretical machine programmed to single-mindedly manufacture paper clips. Taken to its ultimate conclusion, it eventually, and with brutal efficiency, destroys every resource and every human being on the planet in order to rearrange their atoms into paper clips. Thankfully, robots in the real world are a lot less obsessive and a lot more subtle in the way they integrate themselves into our lives.
The bright side is that robots, if we build and programme them correctly, have the power to make us not only smarter but also happier humans. ‘Everybody has things about their jobs they hate,’ Rosman says, ‘that in many cases are also bad for them. Taking away some of the worst parts of people’s jobs and giving them to robots to do sounds like something we should be aspiring to as a society.’
Blame Hollywood (but don’t believe all of it)
We have Hollywood to blame for the notion that a robot must mirror our image, a sentient, locomotive creature trained to do our bidding. The truth is, we already interact daily with powerful and fast-learning artificial intelligence in the form of online chatbots that lead us through financial-service applications, neural network optimisers that unlock our phones by looking at our faces and uncannily accurate algorithms that recommend movies for us to stream on Netflix.
For Prof. Brian Armstrong, who heads up the Wits Business School, the epiphany came while he was checking in at Gatwick Airport in the UK for a family trip a few years ago.
From baggage handling to boarding pass, the system is entirely automated. ‘There isn’t a human being in the loop whatsoever,’ he says. ‘What’s interesting is that it works really well, until something goes wrong.’
In this case, it was a group of travellers who either misunderstood or misused the process, leading to a breakdown and a frantic search for a human supervisor. ‘Human beings are emotional and subjective,’ says Armstrong. ‘Machines, whether hardware machines or software machines, are not. The problem is that automation often struggles with exceptions.’
In our developing economy, Armstrong believes there is great scope for robots in automobile assembly lines, customer service call centres and deep-level mining in areas that are unsafe for humans.
Humans still have a role to play
At the same time, given South Africa’s high level of unemployment and our social priorities, it makes sense for human attendants to fill our cars with petrol, and human assistants to smile us through the check-in desk at the airport. ‘At the same time, it can be argued that should we fail to adopt global practices with regard to automation,’ says Armstrong, ‘we will be compromising the competitiveness of our industries. If we compromise the competitiveness of our industries, they will decline and eventually vanish, which will have an even greater impact.’
Armstrong speaks of a global economic effect called ‘hollowing out’, by which more and more mid-skilled and medium paid jobs have migrated to lower-skilled and lower paid jobs over the last two decades. It is the shadow side of the automation revolution, because it can deepen inequality and accelerate joblessness.
There is a bright side, too. ‘Humans, inherently, are the most amazingly resilient and adaptable creatures,’ says Armstrong. ‘With a few exceptions, the impact of technology in the world has been overwhelmingly positive. If we continue on the trajectory that technology has made the world a better place and has improved quality of life, then we needn’t have a dystopian view of the future, provided we don’t fly too close to the sun.’
This article originally appeared in MiNDSPACE issue 2 2018 magazine. Read the full issue here.