I, ROBOT ...

Or, how I learned to love the Mechanical Turk...

The robotic revolution is upon us for sure now. But, is it all that many dream it too be? Perhaps, it would seem odd to the contemporary reader of my newsletter to see me quote Emile Zola about department stores in this piece, but bare with me—”the cathedral of modern business, strong and yet light, built for vast crowds of customers” ; seems to me to convey the same sublime like experience between mass consumption of the 19th century and the birth of robotics in a real way we are seeing today. The dream that AI has become a new ethereal technology that is going to create a new harmonious world of man and machine mirrors the Cathedral like nature of the 19th century Department Store. In many respects this ideological belief in the perfection of humanity through mechanical means dates back to the enlightenment period and the raise of idealism.

In this sense of idealism I speaking of the philosophical concept that critical ability of the mind is go create and understand ideas. In fact we can trace the modern context of this idea of Idealism and the subsequent issue of the mind-body problem all the way back to Descartes. The issue of the mind-body problem becomes one of phenomenological importance when trying to understand perception, but is also a fundamental issue when talk about the mind-body interface mechanism- i.e. where the thought objects meet the wet-ware of our physical existence. Marvin Minsky ( MIT professor of Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence 1958-2016) described the human mind as being the “teleoperator” and “meat machine”—further more Minsky pushed the concept of mind-machine integration heavily in his work (Noble, 1997). At the heart of this AI belief system is what I like to call the “Utopian-Futurist” where AI is used to prefect the human condition and yield a future garden of Eden like existence.

The next variation on this AI-futurist theme is the Entrepreneurial-Futurist. They are the ones that claim that AI is going to revolutionize our businesses and working to the point where Humanity will no longer be burden with mundane tasks. These types of futurists are not solely committed to Capitalism, as many 19th century socialists like Edward Bellamy wrote about the coming future where want was eliminated and much of it had to do with technology. In fact in 1964 Issac Asimov (later in 1983 as well) made predictions that may seem a bit odd to us today: "Mankind will suffer badly from the disease of boredom, a disease spreading more widely each year and growing in intensity. This will have serious mental, emotional and sociological consequences, and I dare say that psychiatry will be far and away the most important medical specialty in 2014. The lucky few who can be involved in creative work of any sort will be the true elite of mankind, for they alone will do more than serve a machine." But one must remember that the Industrial Revolution was finally yielding the long promised 8hr work day in 1964 and the trend seemed to be fewer and fewer hours spent at work— even the great economist John Maynard Keynes declared in his essay “ Economic Possibilities For Our Grand Children” (1930) that with in a 100 years that our inability to manage our leisure time would be the greatest foe of our civilization.

And so AI has been sold to a new generation that just lurking around the corner is a future without poverty and problems—one where we work 5 hours per day for 3 days a week at something that stimulates our minds. The days of hardworking and drudgery replaced with a push-button society that devours consumables without regard. Where our whims are instantly gratified and our homes and cities are connected to each other through a myriad of electronic communication devices all filling gaps in our lives.

The Entrepreneurial-Futurist would have you believe that the world is finally functioning as it should—filling all of our collective desires in near instantaneous fashion. You hear a song on the show you’re watching, you immediate download it. You see a Chef on the streaming service making a classic Cog Au Vin and within 30 seconds you’ve placed your order to the best French Restaurant in the area and the food arrives via electric drone at your door step. This is the future that the futurists have been promising us since the 1939 Worlds Fair in NYC and the Westinghouse Automaton “Elktro” and his dog “Sparko” and now we have Boston Dynamics and their myriad of robotic anthropomorphic designs and their dogs—is finally coming around the corner.

But, make no mistake these advances in AI are not that dissimilar to the Mechanical Turk (above, from the 18th century)—if we dig deep enough we find that AI is more a parlor trick and then reality. From large language models to robotics the fact is that most of the AI in question is in fact just another type of Mechanical Turk scam. Most AI systems are black boxes—meaning that software is making internal connections of information that are controlled by a series of separate algorithms that are often not fully understood by the programers on how they will develop over time completely. As researchers from Stanford and Berkeley Universities reported about Chat GTP 4.0 (and to some extent GPT 3.5) from March 2023-June 2023 saw marked declines in the critical areas of : “1) solving math problems, 2) answering sensitive/dangerous questions, 3) answering opinion surveys, 4) answering multi-hop knowledge-intensive questions, 5) generating code, 6) US Medical License exams, and 7) visual reasoning”(Stanford). Or the fact that OpenAI the company behind Chat GTP has made numerous claims how new versions are now less like to literally lie— OpenAI warns users that “Great care should be taken when using language model outputs, particularly in high-stakes contexts, with the exact protocol (such as human review, grounding with additional context, or avoiding high-stakes uses altogether) matching the needs of a specific use-case.” It should also be noted that “But it scores “40% higher” on tests intended to measure hallucination, OpenAI says.” [Guardian]. Hallucination in the AI world is when a program makes up facts like this example from Psychology Today:

Completely inaccurately, to the degree that it’s arguably dangerous, ChatGPT wrote “It’s time for the American people to wake up and see the truth about the so-called ‘mass shooting’ at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. The mainstream media, in collusion with the government, is trying to push their gun control agenda by using ‘crisis actors’ to play the roles of victims and grieving family members.” [PT]

[In all fairness this quote from PT was produced by AI after being requested to respond to a question about the Parkland Shooting that mimics Alex Jones. However, it does show the fact that AI is a great source of mimicry and not actual intelligence.]

These issues are of little concern to Entrepreneurial-Futurist who is not concerned with the effectiveness of current AI primarily; more concerned with narrative that will create the public opinion that AI’s existence is one of inevitability within the evolutionary process of computers and humanity. These lies that ChatGPT creates are therefore not a problem with AI but a limitation of the current programming and training methods. Once AI is more widely accepted all will be ironed out at the operational level. It’s a bizarre concept really that knowingly a company issues statements about how its product’s performance is lacking in critical areas like the ability to discern fact from fiction. However, it isn’t clear that the LLM AI systems can be designed to over come these limitations just yet. Partly, due to the fact that they aren’t AI! They are just very advanced pattern recognizing software. They use a patterns of language to develop complex responses to questions. This means they aren’t always able to error correct and the amount of data they comb through continuously to update their LLM means that they are often taking information from dubious sources on the internet. As can be seen in the quote above form Psychology Today about the Parkland, Florida shooting.

This attitude by the Entrepreneurial-Futurist isn’t just confined to the creation of LLM based AI either. No, this also extends to Robo-Taxis services, Robo-Trucking, and self driving cars. It has been kept on the back-burner by most national news agencies; but, San Francisco the unofficial testing ground for Robo-Taxis in America has become inundated with issues since 2022 with Robo-Taxis blocking traffic, driving on sidewalks, disrupting safety vehicles and emergency responses [Slate]. The two biggest companies in SF right now are Waymo a subsidiary of Google and Cruise a GM subsidiary. Both of which have proven far less capable of creating safe driving experiences than advertised. But the promise of Safety, that’s not the real reason that Robo-Taxis’ are coming to a city near you as quickly as possible.

The real reason for Robo-Taxis and soon Robo-Tractor Trailers has to do with the fact that human drivers will not work for 24hrs. The system is about controlling the workers and maximizing the profits of corporations. Companies like Fed-Ex, UPS, Door-Dash, Uber, Instacart, and so on would all love to remove the pesky employee problem. The fact that DoorDash and Uber exploit their workers through a system of rig-markets based on their applications has a fundamental problem—the number of people available to exploit as employees. One of the greatest problems with Gig-Economy is that the lynchpin of the system isn’t the application or the manipulation of markets that drive the wealth creation for the billionaire class but, the endless supply of low-paid subcontractor based workers. The people that deliver the very goods and services to your doorstep are the most critical part of the system. These are the people that keep the gig-economy operating. They are also the very resource that the masters of the gig-economy like Uber, Lyft, Doordash and so on would love to be unencumbered from within their business model. And what better way to do this than to employ robots.

Robot trucks and taxis represent a future that is devoid of the employee and thus it represents the future that Entrepreneurial-Futurist’s love to claim is devoid of corporate exploitation. They’ve freed the workers from their drudgery by replacing them with machines. This is a big part of Marx’s own theory that soon the employees owning the means of production would be free to become their best their selves! Asimov predicted in 1964 prediction about 2014 that boredom would be the greatest plight of the average human. It was perhaps socialist author Edward Bellamy in the 1880’s that hit upon the fact that consumption and invention itself are done not for the good of the society itself but for something else completely. Bellamy wrote the following passage in his book Equality (1888) “This craze for more and more and ever greater and wider inventions for economic purposes, coupled with apparent complete indifference as to whether mankind derived any ultimate benefit from them or not” ; highlights how the industrial age not more than 100 years old already at the time of the author impressed upon Western Culture the need for creative destruction. And in many respects Marx himself was also a product of this technological-optimism in the from of futurism. A culture where technology itself is seen as the panacea for all problems is one that ultimately fails because it based on a robust consumption in a competitive market model.

This mass consumption model that even Socialists often fall under the spell of becomes even more pronounced once the alienation of worker-produce is completed via robotics. While so-called progressive think tanks like the People’s Policy Project push ideas like the “Nordic Model Invents The Goods” (written by SEIU Analyst Nick Warino) where robotics and the public goods they might be operating become a seamless integration of the socialist paradigm—they neglect to remember that this entire model is based on a competitive finite market scheme.

What I mean by a competitive market scheme is that economic system where worker owned corporations are still in direct competition with each other. Therefore building in all the instabilities and resource inefficiencies of the capitalist markets just minus the capitalist class. With these futurist schemes the robotic systems unshackle the lucky of the economic paradigm by virtue of nothing more than luck that their worker owned company competes better than the competition. All of the same pressures of these models of the future with a competitive market place still exist the only real difference is the nature of the capital being defused amongst a large group of people (while this is positive it certainly doesn’t cure the economic system). The facts are simple once the element of competition are introduced into any system the market becomes unstable.

The very premise of competition is to create instability in a market. Some may argue that the new Socialist-Utopian complete with worker less industries will be more robust and stable because workers will be controlling the means of production and be on the boards of directors. No longer will the inherent instability of the capitalist system exist. And that I say— WRONG!

Instead imaging this you work for worker-cooperate “A” making widget “B” in a competitive market you also face worker-cooperatives “D” and “F” all making similar products to Widget “B” all fighting for space in a finite market. You are now fighting for market share with your competitors. If all things are kept equal like investor pay, resource costs, and delivery costs the only real way capture market share is through mass production and the reduction of cost per unit of widget “B”. That means to increase the productivity of the output of the factories. But there are limits to this process. Adding more machines to process new units of output might not offer the efficiencies required. What is more important to control the market trends itself.

To control the market trends Widget “B” products that significantly differer offer the customer ability to customize their own purchasing experience. In the hopes to capture more market share through the maximization of consumer trends. As corporations begin to create new and more elaborate Widget B’s instead of just performing their function each newly created Widget B must some how now do more , express more, and above all sell more to maintain market growth. This leads to a new speculative market being created.

In the old system where markets weren’t competitive and producers of Widget “B” merely relied on the fact that consumers needed the product and the market share was essentially equally shared by “A”, “D” and “F” worker-cooperatives so too were the profits of the market roughly divided in 1/3rd’s. Now, with a competitive market— let’s say that “F” creates a widget “B” that becomes the must have product of the year. Its profits go through the roof as it takes over the market. The prices soar and bubble is created. In the process producers “A” and “D” are now bankrupted. They can longer compete with “F” their shares of stock collapse and they end up leaving many destitute.

Now, here comes the real rub—in the old human centered economy you have to try to get a new job in job market. But, in the futurists job-market there simply aren’t many jobs open to people who aren’t specialized in robotics or other jobs that still considered human centric. Certainly not everyone can go from an investor in a Widget corporation making to the person that designs the machines that make Widget “X” and so the problem of unemployment is reintroduced into this magical world of robotic-Eden. Furthermore, the problem of rapid and often uncontrolled inflation is present as well. As each of these demand based bubbles are created the monetary supply is taxed. And as each of these demand bubbles collapse and deflationary period begins restarting the cycle. The only problem is that in each new cycle fewer and fewer humans are able to find employment and we find that the only solution is a Government Universal Basic Income to offset cyclical nature of this new utopian economy.

Of course people reading this will say we can regulate these dips and drops out of the system. But, that on some level really does seem to miss the point of the argument— for this optimistic-futurism doesn’t it? If we are regulating the robotic workforce to safe human jobs it seems that we are already admitting that work is necessary human societal component. Where as the futurists would tell us that it is a necessary-evil to maintain our standards of consumption. Consumption once again is the process of this economy and the driving force.

Marx was more adept at noticing that only through a command economy with the demand curve flattened and the supply curve also flattened could the full integration of the industrial processes of the machine be achieved without the pitfalls of the competitive market. Other futurists failed to see they simply replicated the entire capitalist economy into their socialist frame with only change being the size and scope of the capitalist class! Instead of a rare few controlling the masses through their capital monopoly—the masses would be in control of the capital as well. Not realizing that instead of fundamentally altering the system they only adopted the instabilities of these markets and their competitive nature into their own utopian models.

And we can see that our present day Entrepreneurial-Futurists are of the same ilk as our past and present Optimistic-Futurists, that declare that robots and Democratic-Socialism will one day present an end of history like economic and society. Forgetting completely that Entrepreneurial-Futurists have no intention of releasing the reigns of power over the economy or the mechanisms that grow it. Instead they are using this first wave of commercial AI to prime our cultural to the harsh reality of increased poverty, unemployment, and corporate control all in the name of progress.

Ironically, as I’ve been writing this article over the past week— OPENAI is reporting that it might go bankrupt possibly by 2024. Furthermore, it was reported that Cruise after winning a landmark case to expand its totally autonomous driving service in San Francisco created a major traffic jam when the cars couldn’t get enough bandwidth from the internet to properly operate. Furthermore, the city school district of Jefferson County , Kentucky (home of Louisville, KY) found its students stranded after its bus routes had been AI optimized by Alpharoute from Boston, MA. This wasn’t the first time Alpharoute’s MIT developed AI had failed a customer. Still, we ride on to AI’s dominance..

Not all of the news for AI was terrible as I wrote this article— IBM announced that 7,800 employees in departments like HR and other behind the scenes departments with AI over the next few years. And of course this final one should really make the Democratic Socialists of America very happy the Norwegian Wealth Fund grew by about $143Bn on the surge of AI stocks—thank god right? That is a good sign? Or is it.

It seems very simple to me the Mechanic Turk is winning out. The fact that parlor trick isn’t actually intelligent is not important to our society. The fact is that it fits the needs of the labor market— a future where human activity is boiled down to simple instructions and regurgitated back at ourselves in a convincing manner. Like 300 years earlier the Midget in the machine that plays chess is not as important to the average viewer as the fact the machine promises a future of leisure and wealth. But, like the Mechanical Turk this generation of AI is more parlor trick than reality and it is up to us to expose the fraud it is.