Transformers: Mis-management in Disguise
I’ve recently seen Transformers for the second time now, and every time I see a movie about evil (or even well-intentioned) robots trying to enslave the human race, I can’t help but think that my work in AI falls into a morally gray area.
My thoughts fall once again to the dangers of creating an intelligence that rivals (and would inevitably surpass) our own. Imagine the seemingly innocuous process of automobile design and manufacturing. Being a software engineer, I see large, complex processes as units or agents that can be moved or reused easily, so I might say something like, “just slap a steel mill on the front of it” (edit: I’ve ended up saying exactly that). The point is, I’m not used to the limits of the physical world; my tools are abstract and usually homemade.
Automotive construction has become almost entirely automated. Engineers and designers are now also experimenting with computer aided design, the least of which uses computers as platforms for collaboration. Engineers are using complex drafting tools to design cars for minimal drag and fuel usage, while also maximizing interior space. Though I’m not sure if there is any research going on in the field currently, I could certainly imagine analyzing body styles of popular vehicles and using them to create entirely new designs, either by melding the designs or by actively avoiding things that have already been designed.
Now, machines are building designing the cars, and machines are building them, but there’s still one gap: whose building these machines? That task still lies, at least partly, in the hands of human ingenuity. Factories still need to be retooled to build new vehicles, so there will never be a design that accidentally gets built into a fleet of vehicles by marking the wrong check-box on buildthiscar.ford.com .
But now imagine taking current-day rapid prototyping technologies and building a general purpose factory, that can build a car from an adequately detailed power point presentation, but could also build the 8th generation iPhone, and also switch between the two with little to no human interaction (or interference, some might say). Now, slap a steel mill on the front of it, and you’ve got a machine, or more accurately, set of machines, that can design and create anything from scratch.
For the most part this is still just a tool, but that’s how all these stories start. If you were to give the design system a parameter to optimize passenger safety, it may (and this is far fetched) conclude that the best way to ensure the safety of your passengers is to equip vehicles with cannons to blast obstructions off the road. A silent feature at first, the system monitors passenger safety statistics, realizes that the feature isn’t being used, and automates it. All of a sudden, we have an epic battle between Ford and GM over the carpool lane.
The moral of the story? People need management, so anything created in humanity’s image will need management too. We should never intend to create things and allow them free reign over their domain. This becomes more evident with stores like the one above, where reign over the machine domain bled into reign over the world as we know it. Responsibility is key, with todays track-record of owning up to ones mistakes, the outlook is bleak.