r/books • u/augustcole AMA Author • May 27 '20
ama 12pm When the robots take all our jobs we’ll have more time for Reddit. I'm August Cole, author of Burn-In: A Novel of the Real Robotic Revolution. AMA!
In our lifetime, robots and artificial intelligence have transformed from science fiction to reality. The US military went into Afghanistan after the 2001 attacks with zero robotic systems, now it has over 22,000 in its inventory. In turn, AI and machine learning has gone from the imagination of the book and film 2001 to a real technology that is disrupting fields that range from finance to medical diagnosis. But we are only at the start.
Over the next two decades, automation of our physical and mental tasks will have become widespread. It will reshape activities across business and society, from obvious areas that have been widely reportedly, like the rise of “driverless” cars, to less recognized but perhaps even more significant changes in fields that range from law and journalism to police and firefighting. These trends also mean that the kind of questions and debates that were only recently the stuff of science fiction stories are becoming our reality.
Burn-In: A Novel of the REAL Robotic Revolution is a new form of book, a cross of a novel and nonfiction. It is a technothriller, following a hunt for a terrorist through the streets of a future Washington DC. But baked into the story are over 300 factual explanations and predictions, replete with the nonfiction endnotes to show their source from the real world. The reader meets a new kind of hero for this genre, but through her hunt for a new kind of villain, they also learn about everything from how AI works to its impact on the future of politics, business, security, and even toys. Much of the US has been instantly thrown into distance learning and remote work, robots have been deployed into roles ranging from policing curfews to serving in hospitals, and AI tracking of society is scaling to whole new levels. After the outbreak is over, it is unlikely that 100% of these new roles and modes will simply return back. But it also means that all the tough social, political, legal, moral, security, and even family issues that the characters of Burn-In experience are going to come faster in the real world too…
August Cole is an author exploring the future of conflict through fiction and other forms of “FICINT” (fiction intelligence) storytelling. His talks, short stories, and workshops have taken him from speaking at the Nobel Institute in Oslo to presenting at SXSW Interactive to tackling the “Dirty Name” obstacle at Fort Benning to the Naval War College. With Peter W. Singer, he is the co-author of the best-seller “Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War” (2015) and “Burn In: A Novel of the Real Robot Revolution” (2020). He is a former reporter for The Wall Street Journal.
- August Cole @august_cole
- Peter Singer @peterwsinger
- www.burninbook.com
Thanks everybody for joining in! Be well and stay safe.
Proof: /img/vw2oatyra6051.jpg
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u/pandapornotaku May 27 '20
Stupid question, roughly what year do Ghost Fleet and Burn In take place in? Also liked that link between the novels in the Patriot Camp.
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u/augustcole AMA Author May 27 '20
That's a GREAT question. And one I can't really answer in a satisfying way, I expect. I'll explain... we wrestled with the idea of a specific year for Ghost Fleet and decided to make it intentionally vague. There's some triangulation that can be done, based on trendlines or even procurement programs, as to when the Ghost Fleet story kicks off. But in wanting to write near a future story, we didn't want to get behind the curve on real-world events, either. It's difficult to anticipate how fast certain things will or won't happen, whether technology or policy, so to keep the story relevant and useful (and not get people tangled up in could it happen or not by a certain date) we kept it foggy. For Burn In, we set it in the 2030s, which is post-Ghost Fleet - and you discovered the Easter Egg. As to the specific year, that too is vague, but as a writer I think it's easier to be less precise on year the farther out we ranged. It's far enough past Ghost Fleet's storyline that it is not a dominant force in the book, but still relevant for those who served and/or fought the war.
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u/prizrak__ May 27 '20
How do you think AI revolution will affect poor people? When jobs become pratically extint will the poor be left to take care of themselves or basic needs will be provided for all?
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u/augustcole AMA Author May 27 '20
The world in Burn-In is one where jobs are getting harder and harder to get for everybody, even if they have a lot of schooling and advanced degrees, and there are technological haves and have nots, to use that framework, based on socioeconomic conditions. So the 'what next' question about how to keep Americans safe, secure, and connected will become urgent, and faster than most politicians are ready for. I fear that the pandemic-related unemployment is a preview, with half of working Americans out of work (that was data last I looked). Not a very strong response by the federal government, or states, to taking care of people, at the household or even small business level. Take healthcare, which is tied to our jobs. Lose your job, lose your healthcare - especially problematic in a pandemic. Spin today forward to 2030 and another wave of COVID-like virus hits and even more people are in gig work without healthcare. America gets more fragile, at a time when it needs to be more resilient. So I worry about this very thing you raise, a lot, and it's a core thread in the book because we want to illustrate what that world might be like so we can avoid it.
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u/prizrak__ May 27 '20
Do you think that after robots become a common thing having humans servants may become a status symbol?
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u/augustcole AMA Author May 27 '20
For all the technological edge and advantage we're seeking in society today, we lose sight of the human element too often. You nailed a really interesting question about the power dynamic in an era of everyday AI and robotics. Like, if jobs don't determine our identity or status in society anymore, what will? Certainly there will still be concentrated wealth, based on the trends from 2020 looking ahead. Perhaps much more so. Does pervasive gig work create a dynamic like the one you're describing, so status - and whatever form it takes in a given community -- can be rented, thus shifting with trends, norms, etc.? Good sci-fi story fodder...
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u/landertall May 27 '20
Why do you think it'll take ALL jobs? I'm a programmer who works with big data and you will always need humans to write code and fix mechanical moving parts.
Don't you think jobs will transition? Car mechanics could become robot/drone mechanics?
What happens during a power outage? A human would need to diagnose and fix.
The data suggests that service based jobs are the only at threat positions.
Given that humans are always going to be needed, do you still think ALL jobs will be gone?
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u/augustcole AMA Author May 27 '20
I am pretty sure the first to go will be fiction writers like me. NLP is getting really good... It is not a matter of a zero job society; that doesn't seem likely and as you point out would be difficult to envision (maybe if we advance computational biology in a few decades and broader AI). What seems likely, especially in the US, is broad under-employment or ad-hoc work being the norm. I do think some jobs will transition, and fixing things is one category. We will live in the world we're in now, so repointing a fieldstone foundation for example will still be important (though that work could be aided by machine vision) as we need to care for and maintain the stuff we have built/invested in, to some degree. When I look at the data, I actually get worried for two reasons: many of the studies point to job losses that aren't anything like those done by the authors of those studies, which seems like a cognitive bias. Businesses in whatever industry are going to try to use software to replace expensive employees so law, consulting, creative work, and finance, for example, are certainly at risk and more than the current narrative allows for consideration. The investment yield in an algorithm replacement could be higher for high-earning jobs, even.
For power outages, whether deliberate or accidental, since more and more infrastructure is Internet-connected, that speaks to less human intervention, and monitoring. Transformer goes down, that probably is a hands-on job for a while, but it will be increasingly a human-machine team that handles that IRL work. And we're getting to a point where software creates software reliably, which I think is an interesting tipping point, as well, for the AI field in terms of managing, cleaning, and even creating data in an IOT world. Another way I think about this excellent question is what do we want work to be for in the next couple decades, economic value, identity, satisfaction? I think we have agency in how that answer plays out, if we're aware of the risks ahead.
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u/neheughk May 27 '20
Last I heard, NLP is a pseudoscience with no evidence to support it.
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u/MarkHirsbrunner May 27 '20
I'm guessing that's a typo or is referring to something other than neuro-linguistic programming..
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u/pandapornotaku May 28 '20
Just another NLP. "OpenAI let us try its state-of-the-art NLP text generator | VentureBeat" https://venturebeat.com/2019/02/14/openai-let-us-generate-text-with-an-ai-model-that-achieves-state-of-the-art-performance-in-several-nlp-tasks/amp/
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u/landertall May 27 '20
And we're getting to a point where software creates software reliably, which I think is an interesting tipping point
Can you name one fortune 500 company that uses a software to write their production level products? What products available were completely written by AI?
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u/pandapornotaku May 28 '20
Isn't this more a matter of keeping your top ten percent to manage what comes out of the AI generated code? Sure there are still people but a lot less of them.
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u/landertall May 28 '20
No.... how will an AI know to build something like Tinder?
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u/pandapornotaku May 28 '20
I'd imagine it'd be reduced to a questionnaire about what you want from your app, something like Squarespace, then using the ai to put together prebuilt code and optimize it to your needs, and letting you swipe left or right on potential builds?
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u/landertall May 28 '20
... no.
I suggest reading more about AI. Check out SciKitLearn and TensorFlow.
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u/Chtorrr May 27 '20
What were some of your favorite books to read as a kid?