Labor union workers – indeed workers of all stripes (including teachers) are in danger of pricing themselves out of a job. Finding and filling road potholes is well within the capability of a one-person automated machine, and will be within the capability of a fully automated machine (autonomous) in just five years or less.
Anyone who has seen the DARPA Autonomous Car Race has a full appreciation of the capabilities of the new vehicles. I attended one just three years ago in Victorville (fewer than 50 spectators), where the Stanford University entry won a $2 million prize.
It is not in the best interest of labor unions to push for more “benefits’ or even violently defend their current treasure trove. Perhaps the Republican push for corralling the labor unions is premature, and perhaps Republicans are overreaching…but…
The progress since my binary programming days is impossible to explain, but it is within the technological capabilities of government and corporation to automate ALMOST EVERYTHING,. They only lack the incentive to do so, and labor unions could provide that incentive.
Ray Kurzweil is a genius who has been at the forefront of artificial intelligence, OCR and voice recognition for decades, and is the subject of a new documentary, “Transcendent Man” (available in DVD this week. Although I have not seen the hour-long DVD, I have followed him, and his accurate technology predictions for decades.
Moore’s Law, which says that the number of transistors that can be squeezed onto a chip doubles every two years, is the functional equivalent to saying that computer power doubles every two years, and it has not yet run out of steam. Ray predicts that a computer will pass the Turing Test by 2029. (The Turing Test is a test to decide if the communicator at the other end is a human or a computer, and was devised during WWII – even with Watson, we have a long way to go. But think of Watson either halving its size, or doubling its capabilities every two years!)
Ray predicted very early that a computer would beat the world champion chess player by 1998, and it actually happened (as I recall) in 1997, so his prediction about the Turing Test will also probably come to fruition.
We have recently seen on TV the spy plane with the size and agility of a Hummingbird, and robot technology of all stripes is far, far advanced.
In 1968 I wrote the first Artificial Intelligence (AI) program for the US Navy, a program designed to alert a Commander of a Destroyer group which destroyer was best prepared to replace a recently damaged Vietnam fighting ship – taking into account armament, fuel state, training status, repair cycle, and hundreds of other measurable criteria.
Not that the Commander did not intuitively know the answer, but the program permitted him to take personalities and friendships out of the picture. A computer can also evaluate and take tenure out of the analysis for retention.
To say that my binary program was less than true AI, would be an understatement – it was all artificial and used precious little intelligence. It was a weighted values program, without an inference engine., the heart of modern AI.
But it was a start.
Current labor union practices are self-defeating against technology. Those of us who plodded in the fields never had the foresight of Ray (or Steve Jobs), but we can still see well enough to note that labor unions are committing suicide.
Filed under: Culture, Economics, Education, Politics, Schools and Education, Taxes, Technology, Unions | Leave a comment »
