Anyone who follows this column knows that in the recent past I've taken a little bit of a turn towards being a Luddite: a confused Luddite. I'm confused because: a) if it weren't for technology I wouldn't have the jobs I do, b) I truly enjoy many of the gadgets that I own and use, and c) technology allows me to stay connected with friends and family in a way that I could not do otherwise.
A recent Reuters posting, however, gets me thinking that a future proposed in the Terminator movie and television franchises is actually very plausible.
One particular line from the Reuters posting states that “A recent study prepared for the Office of Naval Research by a team from the California Polytechnic State University” illustrates "Now programs with millions of lines of code are written by teams of programmers, none of whom knows the entire program; hence, no individual can predict the effect of a given command with absolute certainty since portions of programs may interact in unexpected, untested ways."
The article continues, “That's what might have happened during an exercise in South Africa in 2007, when a robot anti-aircraft gun sprayed hundreds of rounds of cannon shell around its position, killing nine soldiers and injuring 14.”
Sounds oddly like the first chapter of the back-story to the Terminator story, doesn't it?
The human quest to create a sentient being is not a new one limited to cloning or artificial intelligence of the latter 20th century and the beginning of this century. Mary Shelly's Frankenstein was a first look into man's desire to create life. Shelly's book became a critique of this quest to create life, which really was a critique of both man's hubris, as well as a damnation of mob-mentality and the common human instinct to fear the unknown.
Within the critique and discourse Shelly ultimately spawned, was the idea that just because we can do something does it mean that we should? Currently the military is pushing ahead hard to develop and refine robot technology. The Reuters article states, “Reducing risk, and casualties, is at the heart of the drive for more and better robots. Ultimately, that means 'fully autonomous engagement without human intervention,' according to an Army communication to robot designers. In other words, computer programs, not a remote human operator, would decide when to open fire. What worries some experts is that technology is running ahead of deliberations of ethical and legal questions.”
But as the article questions, how do we teach these robots to discern friend from foe? How do we teach these robots to be more efficient killers, continue to control the millions of lines of computer code that drive them – code that is written by the teams of disparate programmers, none of whom know everything that is really being coded into the systems – and make sure that the robots are thinking for themselves, but not so much that they turn on their creators?
A computer scientists is going to have a logical answer to this. But can a single computer scientist, or programming analyst ever discern every cascading effect of every possible hiccup that could occur within the programming? We're talking about something far more complex than Windows Vista not talking to a printer on your home network, or suddenly dropping your wireless connection.
So let's back off of this hyperbole of the machines suddenly becoming sentient beings that decide to turn on their creators. Let's, however, stop and ask the shorter-term question about something that is easily forgotten when it comes to the development of electronic technology: ethics.
Of course many people examine the ethics of the use of technologies once they come to market: Facebook, texting, Craigslist are a few of the examples. But what about the ethics that are avoided or outright disregarded much farther upstream: the ethics of whether or not these technologies should be developed in the first place?
The California Polytechnic State University study referenced at the beginning of this piece “said that robot ethics had not received the attention it deserved because of a 'rush to market' mentality and the 'common misconception' that robots will do only what they have been programmed to do.” That rush to market mentality exists in technological arenas far beyond that of robotics.
The mentality seems to be a hallmark of the entire high-tech field, something that consumers readily absorbed, fueling the pace at which manufacturers inserted into the marketplace products – software and hardware – that are close enough to complete, not necessarily perfect. To this day technology companies continue to rush products to market in order to catch that first rush of consumers. We've all become accustomed to our high-tech gadgets having one small flaw or another: some “bug” that the manufacturers either overlooked, or never found because the gadgets are becoming ever more complex with every advancing generation of gadget.
It's nothing like the days when I was young, when my grandfather was a television repairman, bemoaning the growth of the integrated-circuit boards in television sets. Before those days, he could open the back of a television and readily diagnose what was wrong, fix the set, and send it back to its owner. The television was not a disposable good, it was a durable good. Now, practically everything that runs off of electricity is a disposable good, with life-spans getting shorter and shorter from either components that wear out, or because the manufacturers no longer support the older models. After all, three years on the calendar can mean three of four subsequent generations of product development for some gadgets.
If all of these gadgets are essentially banal, with few ethical quandaries to consider in their development, is it ethical for us to be flooding our landfills with more and more disposable items, all laced with mercury and other heavy metals? Where are the ethics of use?
I propose that the same attention to ethics provided to biologically-oriented inventions needs to extend to any technology. Observers and researchers of technology need to follow the path forged by Tom Malone at MIT, where part of his quest is to ask the question “just because we can, does it mean we should?” Professor Malone, however, is not a Luddite, but someone whose “research focuses on how new organizations can be designed to take advantage of the possibilities provided by information technology.”
I'm not advocating turning off all transistors, and returning to the iron age, or the steam age. I do believe, more and more strongly, that we must take technology off of its magical pedestal and examine every new innovation with a jaundiced eye.
RJ Lavallee is the author of IMHO (In My Humble Opinion): a guide to the benefits and dangers of today’s communication tools on sale at Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, and lulu.com.
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