Matt Yglesias

Our Robo-Port Overlords

I don’t know if you remember the scene from Season 2 of the Wire when Frank Sobotka is talking about a video he saw of next-generation port automation technology the horror it struck in him as he contemplated the future of stevedoring. Well, at HHLA’s Altenwerder terminal at the Port of Hamburg yesterday I saw an awful lot of impressive automation:

Among other things, automated cranes take containers off boats and load them onto automated trucks that move themselves into place and then drive off to their destination on their own. Volkswagon’s Transparent Factory in Dresden also has impressive little robot trucks that carry around the boxes full of parts and instruments that the workers need to use.

The part of my brain that’s familiar with economic history and models tells me that this automation is pushing the production frontier outwards and ultimately making a better world possible. But the common sense portion of my brain can’t help but fear the specter of mass inflation. And the part of my brain that watched Terminator: Salvation on the flight from DC to Frankfurt is still concerned about robot rebellion.

That aside, of course we have industrial robots in the United States as well. But I do think it’s somewhat telling that the most advanced sector of our robotics industry relates to the military. And it’s really quite advanced. But while military robots come with a sharply enhanced risk of rebellion and subsequent enslavement, it’s hard to see them as pushing the production frontier outwards. Military robots have led to fewer American deaths in Iraq than we would have seen in the absence of robots, but following a “don’t invade Iraq” would have saved many more lives at less cost.

Robot Attacks Aren’t Just for Comedy

Balsta, Sweden (wikimedia)

This is mostly being played as a joke around the intertubes but obviously deadly accidents are a real issue in any industrial setting:

A Swedish company has been fined 25,000 kronor ($3,000) after a malfunctioning robot attacked and almost killed one of its workers at a factory north of Stockholm. Public prosecutor Leif Johansson mulled pressing charges against the firm but eventually opted to settle for a fine. “I’ve never heard of a robot attacking somebody like this,” he told news agency TT.

Notwithstanding Johansson’s lack of previous knowledge, but this sort of thing has happened before. Japan, where they have the most robots, is the world’s leader in robot-related accidents and even former Prime Minister Koizumi has been attacked. But this has happened in the United States and U.K. as well. On net, however, the evidence is pretty clear that the advance of robotics is making industrial accidents less common rather than more common if only because it involves fewer human beings doing work in dangerous industrial settings.

Trauma Pod

Alert reader G.K. is on guard about the robot threat and offers this link about DARPA’s Trauma Pod project:

The Trauma Pod Program will enhance battlefield casualty care by developing autonomous and semi-autonomous mobile platforms through the integration of tele-robotic and robotic medical systems. The initial phase has successfully automated functions typically performed by the scrub nurse and circulating nurse; these functions are now performed by semi-autonomous robots working in coordination with the tele-robotic surgeon. The next phase of the program will develop methods for autonomous airway control and intravenous access so that initial therapy can be autonomously administered. Finally, these systems will be miniaturized and incorporated into a tactical platform capable of operating in a battlefield or mass casualty environment.

As I get almost to the end of Peter W. Singer’s Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century I worry less and less about the Terminator scenario and more and more about two other considerations. One is the way in which for some in the American national security establishment, thinking about better military technology seems to serve as a substitute for thinking about better strategy. It’s more lucrative, it ruffles fewer political feathers, and it’s easier. But it doesn’t work as well. War is politics by other means, and improving your means doesn’t get you very far if you’re not thinking sensibly about your policy aims.

The other is that if robots and AI are really the technology of the future, then the United States seems to be aiming a perilously large proportion of our financial and intellectual resources into military applications of these technologies rather than potentially more productive ones. In Asia they have lots of robots making stuff and taking care of people, not patrolling the skies over Afghanistan dropping bombs.

Robots and DARPA

Ezra Klein offers up some neat video of a self-reassembling robotic chair:

On the continuum between today’s friendly iPod and tomorrow’s murderous T-1000 that you blow apart with a well placed grenade only to watch it calmly reassemble itself before your horrified eyes, this self-constructing robot chair is pushing uncomfortably close to the T-1000.

I’ve been reading Peter Singer’s Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century and I’m becoming somewhat less concerned about the looming robot slave revolt and somewhat more concerned about serious misapplication of social resources. Singer makes clear something I hadn’t previously understood, namely that military applications of robots isn’t like military applications of the internal combustion engine—a useful technology being used by the military simply because it’s so useful. Rather, in the United States the military actually represents the leading source of funding for basic robotics research (via DARPA) and the leading client for cutting-edge robots.

I think this is pretty problematic in pure economic terms. DARPA—the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency—is by all accounts an effective government agency and lots of technologies originally developed with DARPA funds have useful civilian applications. But at the end of the day, having research funded by DARPA rather than through some other mechanism tends, at the margin, to channel work to military applications rather than to civilian ones. Now on some level, that can fine. All the productivity-enhancing or quality-of-life-improving technology in the world wouldn’t be worth much if we were groaning under the Stalinist yoke. But realistically, a shortfall in high-tech military gear is far from the most pressing issue facing the United States of America. There are a number of respects in which the USA is lagging behind some group of nations or another, but military technology really really isn’t one of them. And over time our disproportionate focus on military-related research and military-related technology is going to undermine the very economic base on which our military strength—as well as our living standards more broadly—depends.

Reassemblable Modular Robot

And we get one step closer to the T-1000:

We’re going to need some more liquid steel.

Monday Wilson Quarterly Blogging

Peter W. Singer, author of a 2003 book on private military contractors and a 2005 book on child soldiers, is back with a new book Wired for War about military robots. I won’t say much more about the book at this juncture since I’m supposed to review it for a magazine, but I will recommend this adaptation from the book in the new issue of The Wilson Quarterly.

This is a magazine that I think nobody reads, but it’s actually really good. Recent issues have included this from Larry Bartels and this from Holly Yeager and other great stuff. But you can’t just do everything online! If you buy the current issue—the one with Singer’s robots on the cover—on the newsstand you’ll find one witty, engaging, and informative letter to the editor by yours truly and another by the lovely and talented Sara Mead. As best I know, it’s a coincidence that we were both solicited to write letters for this issue—the previous one just happened to include one article that criticizes blogging and another that criticizes preschool—but maybe it’s all part of Skynet’s long-term plan to conquer us.

The Rise of the Machines

Rob Farley teams up with Josh Keating to demonstrate that the robot threat will come from the east:

And don’t let yourself become complacent with the thought that these are “good” robots either. As Chris Fabri observed yesterday:

Don’t you people read Asimov? Robots are bad for humanity, even when they are an apparent positive, and not bent on our destruction. I’m going to call it “Fabri’s Wager:” Either you 1.invent robots and they turn on you, destroying civilization, or you 2. invent robots and they eliminate the need for humans to do anything, thus effectively destroying civilization. So clearly, we should not create robots.

Exactly. Beware robots. Of course Steve Sailer thinks it’s great that Japan’s full of robots — it’s an alternative to immigration.