Tag Archives: children
#439023 In ‘Klara and the Sun,’ We Glimpse ...
In a store in the center of an unnamed city, humanoid robots are displayed alongside housewares and magazines. They watch the fast-moving world outside the window, anxiously awaiting the arrival of customers who might buy them and take them home. Among them is Klara, a particularly astute robot who loves the sun and wants to learn as much as possible about humans and the world they live in.
So begins Kazuo Ishiguro’s new novel Klara and the Sun, published earlier this month. The book, told from Klara’s perspective, portrays an eerie future society in which intelligent machines and other advanced technologies have been integrated into daily life, but not everyone is happy about it.
Technological unemployment, the progress of artificial intelligence, inequality, the safety and ethics of gene editing, increasing loneliness and isolation—all of which we’re grappling with today—show up in Ishiguro’s world. It’s like he hit a fast-forward button, mirroring back to us how things might play out if we don’t approach these technologies with caution and foresight.
The wealthy genetically edit or “lift” their children to set them up for success, while the poor have to make do with the regular old brains and bodies bequeathed them by evolution. Lifted and unlifted kids generally don’t mix, and this is just one of many sinister delineations between a new breed of haves and have-nots.
There’s anger about robots’ steady infiltration into everyday life, and questions about how similar their rights should be to those of humans. “First they take the jobs. Then they take the seats at the theater?” one woman fumes.
References to “changes” and “substitutions” allude to an economy where automation has eliminated millions of jobs. While “post-employed” people squat in abandoned buildings and fringe communities arm themselves in preparation for conflict, those whose livelihoods haven’t been destroyed can afford to have live-in housekeepers and buy Artificial Friends (or AFs) for their lonely children.
“The old traditional model that we still live with now—where most of us can get some kind of paid work in exchange for our services or the goods we make—has broken down,” Ishiguro said in a podcast discussion of the novel. “We’re not talking just about the difference between rich and poor getting bigger. We’re talking about a gap appearing between people who participate in society in an obvious way and people who do not.”
He has a point; as much as techno-optimists claim that the economic changes brought by automation and AI will give us all more free time, let us work less, and devote time to our passion projects, how would that actually play out? What would millions of “post-employed” people receiving basic income actually do with their time and energy?
In the novel, we don’t get much of a glimpse of this side of the equation, but we do see how the wealthy live. After a long wait, just as the store manager seems ready to give up on selling her, Klara is chosen by a 14-year-old girl named Josie, the daughter of a woman who wears “high-rank clothes” and lives in a large, sunny home outside the city. Cheerful and kind, Josie suffers from an unspecified illness that periodically flares up and leaves her confined to her bed for days at a time.
Her life seems somewhat bleak, the need for an AF clear. In this future world, the children of the wealthy no longer go to school together, instead studying alone at home on their digital devices. “Interaction meetings” are set up for them to learn to socialize, their parents carefully eavesdropping from the next room and trying not to intervene when there’s conflict or hurt feelings.
Klara does her best to be a friend, aide, and confidante to Josie while continuing to learn about the world around her and decode the mysteries of human behavior. We surmise that she was programmed with a basic ability to understand emotions, which evolves along with her other types of intelligence. “I believe I have many feelings. The more I observe, the more feelings become available to me,” she explains to one character.
Ishiguro does an excellent job of representing Klara’s mind: a blend of pre-determined programming, observation, and continuous learning. Her narration has qualities both robotic and human; we can tell when something has been programmed in—she “Gives Privacy” to the humans around her when that’s appropriate, for example—and when she’s figured something out for herself.
But the author maintains some mystery around Klara’s inner emotional life. “Does she actually understand human emotions, or is she just observing human emotions and simulating them within herself?” he said. “I suppose the question comes back to, what are our emotions as human beings? What do they amount to?”
Klara is particularly attuned to human loneliness, since she essentially was made to help prevent it. It is, in her view, peoples’ biggest fear, and something they’ll go to great lengths to avoid, yet can never fully escape. “Perhaps all humans are lonely,” she says.
Warding off loneliness through technology isn’t a futuristic idea, it’s something we’ve been doing for a long time, with the technologies at hand growing more and more sophisticated. Products like AFs already exist. There’s XiaoIce, a chatbot that uses “sentiment analysis” to keep its 660 million users engaged, and Azuma Hikari, a character-based AI designed to “bring comfort” to users whose lives lack emotional connection with other humans.
The mere existence of these tools would be sinister if it wasn’t for their widespread adoption; when millions of people use AIs to fill a void in their lives, it raises deeper questions about our ability to connect with each other and whether technology is building it up or tearing it down.
This isn’t the only big question the novel tackles. An overarching theme is one we’ve been increasingly contemplating as computers start to acquire more complex capabilities, like the beginnings of creativity or emotional awareness: What is it that truly makes us human?
“Do you believe in the human heart?” one character asks. “I don’t mean simply the organ, obviously. I’m speaking in the poetic sense. The human heart. Do you think there is such a thing? Something that makes each of us special and individual?”
The alternative, at least in the story, is that people don’t have a unique essence, but rather we’re all a blend of traits and personalities that can be reduced to strings of code. Our understanding of the brain is still elementary, but at some level, doesn’t all human experience boil down to the firing of billions of neurons between our ears? Will we one day—in a future beyond that painted by Ishiguro, but certainly foreshadowed by it—be able to “decode” our humanity to the point that there’s nothing mysterious left about it? “A human heart is bound to be complex,” Klara says. “But it must be limited.”
Whether or not you agree, Klara and the Sun is worth the read. It’s both a marvelous, engaging story about what it means to love and be human, and a prescient warning to approach technological change with caution and nuance. We’re already living in a world where AI keeps us company, influences our behavior, and is wreaking various forms of havoc. Ishiguro’s novel is a snapshot of one of our possible futures, told through the eyes of a robot who keeps you rooting for her to the end.
Image Credit: Marion Wellmann from Pixabay Continue reading
Posted in Human Robots
#437809 Q&A: The Masterminds Behind ...
Illustration: iStockphoto
Getting a car to drive itself is undoubtedly the most ambitious commercial application of artificial intelligence (AI). The research project was kicked into life by the 2004 DARPA Urban Challenge and then taken up as a business proposition, first by Alphabet, and later by the big automakers.
The industry-wide effort vacuumed up many of the world’s best roboticists and set rival companies on a multibillion-dollar acquisitions spree. It also launched a cycle of hype that paraded ever more ambitious deadlines—the most famous of which, made by Alphabet’s Sergei Brin in 2012, was that full self-driving technology would be ready by 2017. Those deadlines have all been missed.
Much of the exhilaration was inspired by the seeming miracles that a new kind of AI—deep learning—was achieving in playing games, recognizing faces, and transliterating voices. Deep learning excels at tasks involving pattern recognition—a particular challenge for older, rule-based AI techniques. However, it now seems that deep learning will not soon master the other intellectual challenges of driving, such as anticipating what human beings might do.
Among the roboticists who have been involved from the start are Gill Pratt, the chief executive officer of Toyota Research Institute (TRI) , formerly a program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA); and Wolfram Burgard, vice president of automated driving technology for TRI and president of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society. The duo spoke with IEEE Spectrum’s Philip Ross at TRI’s offices in Palo Alto, Calif.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
IEEE Spectrum: How does AI handle the various parts of the self-driving problem?
Photo: Toyota
Gill Pratt
Gill Pratt: There are three different systems that you need in a self-driving car: It starts with perception, then goes to prediction, and then goes to planning.
The one that by far is the most problematic is prediction. It’s not prediction of other automated cars, because if all cars were automated, this problem would be much more simple. How do you predict what a human being is going to do? That’s difficult for deep learning to learn right now.
Spectrum: Can you offset the weakness in prediction with stupendous perception?
Photo: Toyota Research Institute for Burgard
Wolfram Burgard
Wolfram Burgard: Yes, that is what car companies basically do. A camera provides semantics, lidar provides distance, radar provides velocities. But all this comes with problems, because sometimes you look at the world from different positions—that’s called parallax. Sometimes you don’t know which range estimate that pixel belongs to. That might make the decision complicated as to whether that is a person painted onto the side of a truck or whether this is an actual person.
With deep learning there is this promise that if you throw enough data at these networks, it’s going to work—finally. But it turns out that the amount of data that you need for self-driving cars is far larger than we expected.
Spectrum: When do deep learning’s limitations become apparent?
Pratt: The way to think about deep learning is that it’s really high-performance pattern matching. You have input and output as training pairs; you say this image should lead to that result; and you just do that again and again, for hundreds of thousands, millions of times.
Here’s the logical fallacy that I think most people have fallen prey to with deep learning. A lot of what we do with our brains can be thought of as pattern matching: “Oh, I see this stop sign, so I should stop.” But it doesn’t mean all of intelligence can be done through pattern matching.
“I asked myself, if all of those cars had automated drive, how good would they have to be to tolerate the number of crashes that would still occur?”
—Gill Pratt, Toyota Research Institute
For instance, when I’m driving and I see a mother holding the hand of a child on a corner and trying to cross the street, I am pretty sure she’s not going to cross at a red light and jaywalk. I know from my experience being a human being that mothers and children don’t act that way. On the other hand, say there are two teenagers—with blue hair, skateboards, and a disaffected look. Are they going to jaywalk? I look at that, you look at that, and instantly the probability in your mind that they’ll jaywalk is much higher than for the mother holding the hand of the child. It’s not that you’ve seen 100,000 cases of young kids—it’s that you understand what it is to be either a teenager or a mother holding a child’s hand.
You can try to fake that kind of intelligence. If you specifically train a neural network on data like that, you could pattern-match that. But you’d have to know to do it.
Spectrum: So you’re saying that when you substitute pattern recognition for reasoning, the marginal return on the investment falls off pretty fast?
Pratt: That’s absolutely right. Unfortunately, we don’t have the ability to make an AI that thinks yet, so we don’t know what to do. We keep trying to use the deep-learning hammer to hammer more nails—we say, well, let’s just pour more data in, and more data.
Spectrum: Couldn’t you train the deep-learning system to recognize teenagers and to assign the category a high propensity for jaywalking?
Burgard: People have been doing that. But it turns out that these heuristics you come up with are extremely hard to tweak. Also, sometimes the heuristics are contradictory, which makes it extremely hard to design these expert systems based on rules. This is where the strength of the deep-learning methods lies, because somehow they encode a way to see a pattern where, for example, here’s a feature and over there is another feature; it’s about the sheer number of parameters you have available.
Our separation of the components of a self-driving AI eases the development and even the learning of the AI systems. Some companies even think about using deep learning to do the job fully, from end to end, not having any structure at all—basically, directly mapping perceptions to actions.
Pratt: There are companies that have tried it; Nvidia certainly tried it. In general, it’s been found not to work very well. So people divide the problem into blocks, where we understand what each block does, and we try to make each block work well. Some of the blocks end up more like the expert system we talked about, where we actually code things, and other blocks end up more like machine learning.
Spectrum: So, what’s next—what new technique is in the offing?
Pratt: If I knew the answer, we’d do it. [Laughter]
Spectrum: You said that if all cars on the road were automated, the problem would be easy. Why not “geofence” the heck out of the self-driving problem, and have areas where only self-driving cars are allowed?
Pratt: That means putting in constraints on the operational design domain. This includes the geography—where the car should be automated; it includes the weather, it includes the level of traffic, it includes speed. If the car is going slow enough to avoid colliding without risking a rear-end collision, that makes the problem much easier. Street trolleys operate with traffic still in some parts of the world, and that seems to work out just fine. People learn that this vehicle may stop at unexpected times. My suspicion is, that is where we’ll see Level 4 autonomy in cities. It’s going to be in the lower speeds.
“We are now in the age of deep learning, and we don’t know what will come after.”
—Wolfram Burgard, Toyota Research Institute
That’s a sweet spot in the operational design domain, without a doubt. There’s another one at high speed on a highway, because access to highways is so limited. But unfortunately there is still the occasional debris that suddenly crosses the road, and the weather gets bad. The classic example is when somebody irresponsibly ties a mattress to the top of a car and it falls off; what are you going to do? And the answer is that terrible things happen—even for humans.
Spectrum: Learning by doing worked for the first cars, the first planes, the first steam boilers, and even the first nuclear reactors. We ran risks then; why not now?
Pratt: It has to do with the times. During the era where cars took off, all kinds of accidents happened, women died in childbirth, all sorts of diseases ran rampant; the expected characteristic of life was that bad things happened. Expectations have changed. Now the chance of dying in some freak accident is quite low because of all the learning that’s gone on, the OSHA [Occupational Safety and Health Administration] rules, UL code for electrical appliances, all the building standards, medicine.
Furthermore—and we think this is very important—we believe that empathy for a human being at the wheel is a significant factor in public acceptance when there is a crash. We don’t know this for sure—it’s a speculation on our part. I’ve driven, I’ve had close calls; that could have been me that made that mistake and had that wreck. I think people are more tolerant when somebody else makes mistakes, and there’s an awful crash. In the case of an automated car, we worry that that empathy won’t be there.
Photo: Toyota
Toyota is using this
Platform 4 automated driving test vehicle, based on the Lexus LS, to develop Level-4 self-driving capabilities for its “Chauffeur” project.
Spectrum: Toyota is building a system called Guardian to back up the driver, and a more futuristic system called Chauffeur, to replace the driver. How can Chauffeur ever succeed? It has to be better than a human plus Guardian!
Pratt: In the discussions we’ve had with others in this field, we’ve talked about that a lot. What is the standard? Is it a person in a basic car? Or is it a person with a car that has active safety systems in it? And what will people think is good enough?
These systems will never be perfect—there will always be some accidents, and no matter how hard we try there will still be occasions where there will be some fatalities. At what threshold are people willing to say that’s okay?
Spectrum: You were among the first top researchers to warn against hyping self-driving technology. What did you see that so many other players did not?
Pratt: First, in my own case, during my time at DARPA I worked on robotics, not cars. So I was somewhat of an outsider. I was looking at it from a fresh perspective, and that helps a lot.
Second, [when I joined Toyota in 2015] I was joining a company that is very careful—even though we have made some giant leaps—with the Prius hybrid drive system as an example. Even so, in general, the philosophy at Toyota is kaizen—making the cars incrementally better every single day. That care meant that I was tasked with thinking very deeply about this thing before making prognostications.
And the final part: It was a new job for me. The first night after I signed the contract I felt this incredible responsibility. I couldn’t sleep that whole night, so I started to multiply out the numbers, all using a factor of 10. How many cars do we have on the road? Cars on average last 10 years, though ours last 20, but let’s call it 10. They travel on an order of 10,000 miles per year. Multiply all that out and you get 10 to the 10th miles per year for our fleet on Planet Earth, a really big number. I asked myself, if all of those cars had automated drive, how good would they have to be to tolerate the number of crashes that would still occur? And the answer was so incredibly good that I knew it would take a long time. That was five years ago.
Burgard: We are now in the age of deep learning, and we don’t know what will come after. We are still making progress with existing techniques, and they look very promising. But the gradient is not as steep as it was a few years ago.
Pratt: There isn’t anything that’s telling us that it can’t be done; I should be very clear on that. Just because we don’t know how to do it doesn’t mean it can’t be done. Continue reading
Posted in Human Robots