AI is set to take over all cognitive tasks in the next few years. Your hard-won career as a paralegal, data analyst, radiologist,\u00a0coder\u00a0or novelist is about to be hacked out from under you. So far, so apocalyptic. But what about the jobs that are primarily embodied? Sous-chef, rehabilitation nurse, plumber, dog-trainer? These are expected to\u00a0lag behind, awaiting the next generation of robots. But there is an important further question. Who will train these robots? Answer: you will.\u00a0<\/p>\n
This is the concept of the arm farm. On an arm farm, practitioners of the\u00a0aforementioned jobs\u00a0\u2013 chefs, nurses, plumbers etc. \u2013 wear Go-pro helmets, pressure-sensitive gloves, even full motion-capture rigs, and do the jobs that the robots will\u00a0ultimately usurp. Somatic data flows from the sensors: information on force and precision, timing variables,\u00a0optimal\u00a0trajectories. Over many thousands of iterations a profile accumulates, amounting to the ideal way to, say, make an\u00a0omelet. Here we are not just\u00a0talking\u00a0spatula\u00a0proficiency.\u00a0We\u2019re\u00a0talking pan-time\u00a0relative\u00a0to heat, browning metric, wrist action (tossing, beating)\u00a0and toaster multitasking. This is the final frontier: handling irregular, deformable materials (otherwise known as food).\u00a0<\/p>\n
The human traitors paid for this work are called (by the colleagues who would\u00a0probably do\u00a0it too if they were offered it) \u201ccoffin\u00a0makers.\u201d Because the occupational\u00a0know-how\u00a0the traitors divulge ensure that those jobs are dead and buried, never to be performed by a human again.\u00a0<\/p>\n
And of course\u00a0it\u2019s\u00a0already here.\u00a0Objectways\u00a0is a company based in the USA and India that captures data from human workers to train robots. Its aim is \u201cto blend advanced technology with human-in-the-loop expertise to deliver secure, high-quality AI data solutions.\u201d What\u00a0this amounts\u00a0to is that a young woman in Chennai stands before a\u00a0work station. She has a camera strapped to her forehead. Her job is to fold the same towel a thousand times. The towel must be retrieved from a pile to her left, placed on the work surface, smoothed down, folded once along the x axis, once along the y, and then placed on a pile to her right. The video data is then post-processed and sent to the AI, which learns how humans fold towels.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
The human traitors paid for this work are called \u2018coffin\u00a0makers\u2019<\/p>\n
Tech giants Boston Dynamics, Nvidia and Tesla are watching, of course.\u00a0At the moment their robots are rubbish at almost everything except dancing to Motown hits.\u00a0But when there is a market worth trillions of dollars in the offing, you can bet they are investing heavily. After all, if they\u00a0don\u2019t, others will.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Ali Ansari, founder of San Francisco-based Micro1, says robotics data collection increasingly focuses on remote operations. Humans in haptic\u00a0suits\u00a0make the robot do something like making tea. The AI is fed data from failed attempts at doing this and learns, eventually, to achieve it. It may also, in future, need to partner with the junior doctor who is increasingly unable to understand burns. \u201cI believe that we will have systems that are smarter than all humans combined, eventually,\u201d says Ansari. \u201cThat, however, does not mean humans will become less important.\u201d\u00a0Sometimes, of course,\u00a0the robots\u00a0lie on the floor and convulse.\u00a0It\u2019s\u00a0a good idea\u00a0to get as far away as possible from them when they do this.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Brett Adcock is the founder of Figure AI. \u201cFigure was founded with the ambition to change the world,\u201d he says. \u201cWe envision a future where humanoid robots are the universal interface in the physical world\u2026 Longer term, humanoids will play an important role in many areas such as assisting individuals in the home, caring for the elderly, and building new worlds on other planets.\u201d Figure is\u00a0in the process of capturing\u00a0real-world data from inside thousands of American homes,\u00a0observing\u00a0human movement to teach robots to negotiate the domestic arena.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
In earlier industrial upsets, workers moved on to other jobs. For example, Silas Marner, once a weaver, could\u00a0retrain\u00a0as a leech-gatherer. Now, with arm farms in the mix, all possible\u00a0physically-encoded\u00a0knowledge is extracted,\u00a0digitized\u00a0and centralized. In practical\u00a0terms\u00a0it means you might never have to gather a leech again. Workers, having given away the last thing they could\u00a0possibly have\u00a0bargained with, are\u00a0rendered\u00a0cognitively and somatically pointless. They have been paid to\u00a0eliminate\u00a0their own livelihoods. There are no hobbies they can\u00a0undertake, since\u00a0the robots can write an opera or drink themselves to death far better than a human being ever could.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Not everyone thinks this way, naturally. Many hypothesize that people will be freed from tedious\u00a0labor, find more time to spend with their\u00a0families,\u00a0and eventually have more opportunities to wake up at 4am to see an advanced robotic valet standing next to their bed holding a cordless drill.\u00a0But who owns the data generated by the arm farms? This big-picture question has a\u00a0bigger picture\u00a0answer: Sam, Elon, Dario,\u00a0Sundar\u00a0and Demis.\u00a0In the near term, arm farms expand and then disappear. The better the models\u00a0get,\u00a0the less new human data is needed.\u00a0<\/p>\n
What about the remote future (three to six years)? Many human beings complain that their sexual partners are unable to touch them in a satisfying manner.\u00a0Here\u2019s\u00a0where the arm farm becomes uniquely personalized. Strap on your Go-pro and your pressure-sensitive glove. Generate data. It turns out that some of the skills for making an\u00a0omelet\u00a0are quite transferable. Handling irregular, deformable materials. Grip nuance. Finger tracking. Tool haptics. Tension or resistance intensification. Rhythm, crescendo, pan-toss. Now pass this data on to your humanoid operative,\u00a0perhaps working\u00a0remotely from Guangdong.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Finally, having trained AIs on the best way to fold towels, make tea, saut\u00e9 onions and indeed\u00a0ourselves, we will be left with the one question that cannot be outsourced: deciding whether any of this was\u00a0a good idea\u00a0in the first place.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"AI is set to take over all cognitive tasks in the next few years. Your hard-won career as…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":531992,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,86,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-531991","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-technology","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom","14":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/531991","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=531991"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/531991\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/531992"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=531991"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=531991"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=531991"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}