Tuck in, it's what the WEF wants...
Talking to those involved in professions that are about to be “affected” by the
advent of artificial intelligence reminds me of a previous time when I was
talking to friends involved with the video production industry about the
arrival of cheap video cameras that were going to destroy the market for £5,000
tape driven video recording systems.
There was a mood of absolute denial that a £300 solid state digital camera
could possibly threaten to undermine their world of £20k per hour
production services. Huge effort went into trying to dismiss the new technology
as a passing fad, and point out its deficiencies when compared to their
familiar industry that had developed over 60 years and invested many billions
of pounds. Very few wanted to accept that Moore's law would guarantee the rapid
development of the technology to first match and then exceed expectations for
quality and convenience.
However, the video production revolution was not the first time I had
experienced this type of denial as an old established industry came up against
new technology. The first time was when the "letterpress" metal typesetting industry that
was the foundation of all printed publications, ran into the photo setting
revolution. The arrangement of lead type that was selected and positioned one
character at a time in frames had prevailed since the age of Gutenberg, and
many of the terms introduced with metal type persist – “upper case” and “lower
case” refers to cases containing the type. Very little about the basic principles changed over hundreds of years - the process has just got progressively bigger as single pages became complete sections that were printed on larger sheets that were folded, gathered, trimmed and bound into books
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| By Deutsche Fotothek, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6543777 |
Typesetting was a “foundation” industry, based on years of hands-on
apprenticeship and experience that was so far beyond the ability of a neophyte
- ie anyone not deeply embroiled in the industry, that the profession was
thoroughly protected from casual competition, leading to some very famous
industrial relations battles (who remembers Rupert Murdoch and Wapping?) as
newspaper proprietors attempted to change terms of employment with some intransigent
skill unions, who still remembered and resented the Industrial Revolution and
the arrival of fancy automated looms.
This was a two-stage process, since photo setting originally used high
definition character sets reproduced as film strips, and fixed to drums that
were rotated as a precision timed light flashed to expose the required
character onto film. It was a fantastically high precision mechanical process,
limited to the skills of very few organizations throughout the world (Linotype
was the bellwether for many years). This process was far more complex, precise
and skilful than the lead type industry it replaced.
The famous IBM “golf ball” office typewriter had a high precision variant aimed
at the type setting industry, and this was a considerable breakthrough that was
still massively mechanically complex, but relatively portable compared to the
photo setting industry. The quality was not as crisp as photosetting, but sheer
convenience was inescapable as there was no need to develop the exposed film,
before you could see the results of your layout.
A further intermediate solution evolved around a high definition cathode ray
tube output device, that replaced the film strip by projecting the characters onto
the layout film gallies - that were sliced up and laid out using drawing
boards, scissors and scalpels - manipulated by artists with cans of spray-mount
adhesive. Companies such as Compugrahic and Linotype ruled the industry for a
period of about 20 years with extremely expensive precision electro mechanical solutions
requiring extensive service organizations, and powered by the early days of
solid state computer technology - Xenoton's PDP4 breakthrough graphics layout terminal showed the way forward...
And then along came the microprocessor - which the Apple Macintosh coupled to
an integral high definition display that gave rise to the world of "what
you see is what you get" (WYSIWYG) and Adobe Page Maker (and Quark
Express) software that elevated the office word processor into a complete type
and graphics compositing system. For 10%
or less of the price of the established professional type setting solutions.
Along each step of the process of evolution, the incumbent industry attempted
to stave off progress while they assimilated how to compete. But the
intervention of low-cost, high speed computing polished off the traditional
typesetting and graphics industry in the space of a few years.
Much the same happened to the video production industry, although somewhat more dramatically,
since the step from production to delivery to an audience was so much shorter
when a mass distribution platform like YouTube disintermediated most forms of
traditional (regulated) broadcasting and publishing.
And all the time, the underlying computer technology has been expanding
exponentially according to Moore's law. The limiting factor was that the
hardware required human created and tested software in order to function. Can
you guess where this is going?
The latest "industry" to be challenged by the arrival of a superior
solution provided by technology is now humanity itself. There is evidence that
the current generation of interactive artificial intelligence "chatbots" can provide legal advice that is superior to a $200 an hour attorney,
medical advice that is superior to a $200 an hour specialist, and a creative
writing ability that simply wipes the floor with its ability to master news
journalism.
All this is nothing new to followers of science fiction. Just about every
possible angle of the threat to humanity from self-aware artificial
intelligence has been covered and explored extensively in movies for the past
30 years at least. Yet that moment has arrived, and the world of politics is
scuttling around like so many headless chickens, trying to work out what to do. The best politicians can manage is try to call a halt, but that ain't going to happen, is it? Each country has to be in an AI arms race. The UK needs to believe that it has the crucial combination of brains, original thinking and sheer perversity to get to the top of this challenge and stay there. And not sell it off to foreigners in the traditional way that has all our pioneering inventions exploited overseas, thanks to an infinite supply of dumb politicians and science industries run by accountants.
Major breakthroughs enabling progress in this area include speech recognition,
which has come on in leaps and bounds after a rocky start, and is now pretty
much perfect. And the ability of computers to interpret visual images that has
been driven hard by the headlong pursuit of driverless transport.
It's time to be very afraid once more as we wait for our fridges to become sentient, and shop our eating habits to the nanny state NHS - who will instruct our banks not to honour credit card purchases of the wrong type of food. You have been warned!
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