Tag Archives: dystopian

Lost Connections

Flash fiction Short stories No Comments

The morning air was crisp and cold and the wind whistled through the leafless trees.

She shuddered. Not from the weather, from the stark reality that she was outside and still alone.

The smell was what surprised her most. A rich earthy smell in the middle of a town. Nature had taken over and the sterile and faintly industrial smell she remembered had been replaced with the fragrance of wild flowers and weeds.

It’d happened weeks ago and sitting on her own inside her house Hazel had imagined a bustling street of people outside, becoming as desperate for company as she was. Eventually, she’d taken the plunge and for the first time in a long while had stepped through her front door.

The street was deserted.

Where were all the people? Continue reading →

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)