The rise of the robots brings threats and opportunities

The robots are coming. They’re going to take your job and destroy your life – and there’s nothing you can do about it. That’s the hype: we are facing a dystopian future in which human labour is about to be rendered obsolete. The announcement last week that a robot had been granted Saudi Arabian citizenship – a gimmick, admittedly – was nevertheless reported as yet another step in the direction of our much-anticipated demise.

I am a tech evangelist. I like to say I went into politics for exactly the same reason I went into engineering, two decades earlier: to make the world work better, for everyone.

It’s true that we are going through a period of intense technological change, with data, algorithms and automation uniting to revolutionise much of what we currently take for granted. That is not hype – it’s for real. As we live and breathe, we excrete data trails that giant web crawlers digest into business opportunities that neither we nor our government can grasp. Brains far bigger than ours are working to replicate everything we do, whether it’s kicking a football or empathising with a sick friend.

Yes, there is a chance that all these changes will end up making our lives worse. That future generations will inhabit a surveillance society in which humans are controlled by jailers they have bought – smartphones – while an army of slave robots maintains a narrow elite in extravagant luxury.

But it does not have to be that way. There are choices to be made, and we can make them well – if, instead of running scared, we face up to the responsibilities of this new era.

In other words, we need to establish a social compact that defines our relationship with technology. It should start with the question: who is in charge?

For instance, is it ever appropriate for an algorithm to take an important decision about a human without a right of appeal by that human? US teachers who are performance-managed by algorithm are not allowed see the “commercially sensitive” basis for its decisions. That, to me, offends both employment and civil rights.

Full story and image source credit: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/oct/29/robots-humans-technological-revolution-politics