Author Archives: Stephen Oram

About Stephen Oram

Stephen Oram writes near-future and speculative fiction. His work has been praised by publications as diverse as The Morning Star and The Financial Times.

Automation: a life of luxury and the death of democracy?

Thoughts and speculation 1 Comment

There’s been a fair amount of press coverage lately on the potential for artificial intelligence and robots to take our jobs and how a Universal Basic Income could be part of the solution. Something the Silicon Valley tech-giants are putting their shoulders behind.

Some say that’s a good thing, while others disagree.

The European Parliament’s legal affairs committee report on Civil Law Rules for Robotics “takes the view that in the light of the possible effects on the labour market of robotics and AI a general basic income should be seriously considered, and invites all Member States to do so.”

As I’ve said before, I’m a big fan of Universal Basic Income for all sorts of reasons. Not least because it frees us up to live the life we want to and, as far as I can tell, it’s the most credible way to have a capitalist society that allows people to opt-out if they want to.

However, it was the link between major corporations, automation and democracy that struck me most at a gathering of London Futurists where Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams talked about their book, Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work.

The argument from the audience that captured my attention went something like this…

With full automation we don’t have to work, but stuff can still be produced for people to buy and economies can still grow.

There’s only a handful of companies that can realise full automation e.g. Google, Amazon, Facebook.

Universal Basic Income is possible in an automated and thriving economy.

And now for the scary bit… the few mega-companies that are generating the profits and controlling the economy will have the ultimate say in how the country runs. It’ll be their shareholders that hold the power. Democracy dies, sold off for a life of doing as you please.

It certainly made me stop and think.

I haven’t changed my mind, but I have developed a little more caution.

photo credit: WanderingtheWorld (www.ChrisFord.com) ‘Bonfire’, United States, New York, The Hamptons via photopin (license)

Will the machine learning community protest?

Thoughts and speculation 2 Comments

Following on from my recent blogs about machine learning, here’s a bit of good news.

Well, probably good news.

Scientists and researchers at Google and Toyota are trying to do something about bias in machine learning by devising a test to detect it.

The problem of course is that algorithms are deliberately designed to develop themselves and they become complex and opaque to anyone trying to understand them. This test will spot bias by looking at the data going in and the decisions coming out, rather than trying to figure out how the black box of the algorithm is actually working.

This has to be applauded so long as the people analysing and testing the decisions aren’t biased themselves; there’s an obvious danger that the very people unconsciously introducing bias into the algorithm also introduce the same bias into the test – a futuristic version of Groupthink.

In a recent article in the Guardian newspaper, Alan Winfield, professor of robot ethics at the University of the West of England, said: “Imagine there’s a court case for one of these decisions. A court would have to hear from an expert witness explaining why the program made the decision it did.”

Alan, who was one of the scientists I collaborated with on Science and Science Fiction: Versions of the Future, acknowledges in the article that “an absolute requirement for transparency is likely to prompt ‘howls of protest’ from the deep learning community. ‘It’s too bad,’ he said.”

I’m not a machine learning expert so a lot of the paper that sets out this test is beyond my understanding, but I couldn’t see how the bias that already exists in our society wouldn’t be incorporated into the test.

Take a look for yourself at the Equality of Opportunity in Supervised Learning.

photo credit: ING Group The Next Rembrandt via photopin (license)

Robots: fact or fiction?

Events News Projects 2 Comments

What do you get when you mix science fiction writers, social scientists and roboticists with an inquisitive audience?

A great event!

I really enjoyed being a part of the whole thing from the initial planning with the Human Brain Project through to visiting the scientists at the Bristol Robotics Lab.

Suitably inspired by all the wonderful robot things at the lab, we writers went away to our respective ‘desks’ and wrote a five-minute story each.

Mine was Eating Robots, which is also the title of my forthcoming collection.

Then, as part of the Bristol Lit Fest, SilverWood Books and Sarah LeFanu hosted Science and Science Fiction: Versions of the Future where we, the writers, read our stories, formed a panel with the roboticists and were quizzed by the audience.

If that’s the sort of thing that interests you take a look at this 5 minute trailer or the full video.