Four Views on General Artificial Intelligence Progress, and What It Should Get

Taking one step up from specific AI accomplishments, or lack of same, we have what it needs to advance – and what tactics might be too problem-ridden to pursue.  Here, we have a month’s worth of both.

In “The Tech Fantasy That Powers A.I. Is Running on Fumes” (The New York Times, March 29^th), Tressie McMillan Cottom said we are now in “the decade of mid tech,” as “most of us aren’t using A.I. to save lives faster and better,” but “using A.I. to make mediocre improvements, such as emailing more,” as “even the most enthusiastic papers about A.I.’s power to augment white-collar work have struggled to come up with something more exciting than “A brief that once took two days to write will now take two hours!””  Although there have been sharp improvements in other areas, such as medicine, those most people see constitute “a mid revolution of mid tasks,” as “cashiers are still better at managing points of sale,” airport facial recognition “hasn’t particularly revolutionized the airport experience or made security screening lines shorter,” and as “A.I spits out meal plans with the right amount of macros, tells us when our calendars are overscheduled and helps write emails that no one wants,” its contributions seem only incremental.  The “tech fantasy” in the title that is running dry, per Cottom, is that “we won’t need institutions or expertise.”  Indeed, that doesn’t seem even close.

Next, an April 1^st editorial of sorts by Jason Kwan in Fox News, “AI’s development is critically important for America – and it all hinges on these freedoms,” namely interpreting and allowing “fair use” of “fundamental science and publicly available content used to train AI tools for the rising AI industry,” even if it is copyrighted, if “the application is transformative, meaning it uses existing works to create something new and different and without eroding the commercial value of such works.”  Kwan also suggested that there should be more “government data and government-funded data available.”  He has a reasonable viewpoint worthy of debate, especially in Congress.

“Use it or lose it,” in The Economist on April 5^th, revealed its subject in its subtitle, “Never mind who is better at developing AI.  What matters is who is first to harness it.”  Instead of technical accomplishments determining that, “it is more likely to be the country where governments, businesses and ordinary people use AI at scale every day.”  If the first piece above is correct, that isn’t happening in the US, yet China, which ranked in a World Intellectual Property Organization survey as being AI’s “47^th-best adopter” of technology and 32^nd in “technological diffusion,” is not excelling there either.  But according to another study, Chinese citizens had much better “attitudes toward AI and technology,” meaning it could still prevail.  Ultimately, per the article, “The AI race… will be won in places like Dayton and Zhengzhou, where ordinary companies and consumers harness the technology to do extraordinary things.”

Last, the “First autonomous AI agent is here, but is it worth the risks?” (Kurt Knutsson, Fox News, April 23^rd).  The issues the author saw with Manus, which can “do its own research, make decisions and even carry out plans, all with barely any human oversight” are about “data privacy,” as its “combination of weak oversight, powerful automation and questionable data practices makes it far riskier than your average AI assistant.”  To avoid such acquisition, which could end up with hackers even if Manus turns out to be harmless, Knutsson recommended securing and removing personal information, maintaining software updates, and using multifactor authorization.

What do we have now?  It’s too early to say that artificial intelligence has grown up, but it has moved along a lot, with many modest and some high-value applications.  It is not too soon to call it a 4 or 5-year-old instead of a toddler, as it still doesn’t have common sense but is taking shape.  Its authority figures, as with parents of humans, will need to agree on how it should and should not be limited.  Likewise, its next few years will be critical, but hardly definitive. 

My next post will be published on May 30^th, on a subject to be determined.

Five New Robots, All AI in Another Guise

Robotics is now an artificial intelligence subfield.  Perhaps it always was, but now it’s being driven more by the state of AI than by any mechanical improvements.  Here are some developments to underscore that.

The first I saw this year was “Chick-fil-A’s lemon-squeezing robots cut over 10,000 labor hours per day: report” (Greg Wehner, Fox Business, January 8^th).  It’s a way for the chain to make lemonade, in “a plant just north of Los Angeles with machines occupying space larger than a typical Costco Wholesale,” which employs 120 who are among other tasks “bagging the juice and sending it off to Chick-fil-A locations all over the country.”  It seems simple, but lemons vary in size, could not as effectively be juiced with ordinary machines, and using robots spares the company “injured fingers.”  The process also allows the company to remove “the oils from the peels,” which are “sent to cosmetic and fragrance industry companies, which brings in a new stream of revenue.” 

Next, “Is this robot after our hospitality, retail and healthcare jobs?” (Kurt Knutsson, Fox News, April 12^th).  The automation in the question is a Pudu Robotics product known as “FlashBot Arm.”  It is “semi-humanoid,” “is designed to interact with its environment in a more human-like way,” and with its arms and “dexterous” hands can “perform tasks such as pressing elevator buttons, swiping card keys and carrying objects.”  It is almost five feet tall, and “automatically returns to the charging station when the battery is low.”  It uses lidar “for real-time mapping and obstacle avoidance,” costs about $28,000, and has a “10.1-inch touchscreen capable of displaying facial expressions.”  Could this become standard at offices around the world?

The next day, we saw as an “AI humanoid robot learns to mimic human emotions and behavior” (Kurt Knutsson, Fox News, April 13^th).  It is a Walt Disney Company product, “uses advanced artificial intelligence to replicate natural gestures and deliberate actions with striking accuracy,” and “learns by observing and mimicking human operators who guide its emotional responses during interactions.”  Disney will apply it, Newton, “to enhance its robotic character platform.”  This one could be controversial, but with more and more people expecting such powerful technology, especially at that company’s theme parks, Newton will catch few by surprise.

From the same writer and source, we wonder, “Can this $70,000 robot transform AI research?” (April 18^th).  This product, Reachy 2, is from open-source AI company Hugging Face.  It is another “state-of-the-art humanoid robot” designed to be “a lab partner for the AI era,” and is “already making waves in labs like Cornell and Carnegie Mellon.”  The piece told us that Reachy 2 is “perfect for research, education and experimenting with embodied AI,” and would “help with the chores,” but got no more specific than that.  Is it worth $70,000?  That will probably depend on how much value it can actually add.

The last one was a classic automaton application, updated for modern technological, and political, times.  “China Has an Army of Robots on Its Side in the Tariff War” (Keith Bradsher, The New York Times, April 23^rd).  As “factories are being automated across China at a breakneck pace,” reaching higher levels “than in the United States, Germany, or Japan,” the country will be well placed to “continue to dominate mass production even as its labor force ages and becomes less willing to take industrial jobs.”  Automobile production is a huge area, but so are “many thousands of back-alley workshops” such as a place with “11 workers who cut and weld metal to make inexpensive ovens and barbecue equipment,” scheduled to replace some with “a robotic arm with a camera,” running $40,000 instead of 2021’s almost $140,000, which “uses artificial intelligence to observe how a worker welds the sides of an oven, and then duplicates the action with minimal human intervention” – just as automated barbers did in Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Player Piano.  And there are and will be vastly more.

Overall, robots are, and will continue to be, highly beneficial AI products.  If they are relatively unconnected to other resources, the fear they generate will be simply physical instead of existential.  Eventually they will unnerve no one.  They will be less prone to other problems with the technology such as hallucinations.  If office AI use turns out to be little more than advanced editing, robots could save artificial intelligence’s value, much as applications in human-driven cars are now showing the worth of autonomous vehicle research.  That might be good enough – or it may not.  Hang on.

Per Latest Jobs Report, Employment Keeps on Trucking; AJSN Says Latent Demand Way Down To 16.0 Million

This morning’s Bureau of Labor Statistics Employment Situation Summary was forecasted to show a real decrease in the number of net new nonfarm payroll positions, from last month’s surprising 228,000 to 125,000 or 135,000.  It did better than that, with 177,000, way beyond what we have reason to expect given our slowing population growth and our recent series of strong employment months.  That is a fine result, and hints at no jobs-related effect from current or canceled tariffs, at least through mid-April.

Otherwise, results in the report were mixed.  Seasonally adjusted unemployment held at 4.2%.  On the good side, the two measures of how common it is for people to be working or close, the employment-population ratio and the labor force participation rate, each gained 0.1% to 60.0% and 62.6%.  Unadjusted joblessness dropped 0.3%, mostly but not completely from seasonality, to 3.9%.  The count of people working part-time for economic reasons, or keeping that sort of work while thus far unsuccessfully seeking full-time opportunities, lost 100,000 to 4.7 million.  Unadjusted employment rose an excellent 631,000 to just over 164 million.  Worsening numbers included a 200,000 jump in those jobless for 27 weeks or longer, to 1.7 million, and average hourly nonfarm payroll earnings, edged out by inflation at $36.06, or 6 cents more. 

The American Job Shortage Number or AJSN, the metric showing how many new positions could be quickly filled if seekers knew that getting one would be little more than another errand, lost almost 700,000 as follows:

 

Six hundred thousand of the decrease was from lower official employment, with the rest from fewer people wanting work but not looking for it during the previous year.  Other changes were small.  The share of the AJSN from those unemployed fell 2.1% to reach 36.9%.  Compared with 12 months before, the AJSN was virtually unchanged, with higher joblessness covered by a lower estimate of the number of American expatriates.

What happened this time?  It was a positive month for employment.  While 270,000 more said they were not interested in work, driving a 205,000 increase in those not in the labor force, they seemed to be those who did not have jobs, as the count of those working reached a strong local high.  The categories of marginal attachment changed little, which was fine since that meant they held last month’s improvements.  So far, then, the antics of our Executive Branch have not, overall, affected American employment, and though I am expecting something from the high China tariffs, we are still in good shape.  Yet we cannot take anything like 177,000 new jobs for granted, and that sort of result may cease.  It’s all largely up to our president’s whim.  This month, though, the turtle took a substantial step forward.