A dangerously misleading title about robots
Robots? Why Robots?
An article at the Guardian tries to answer the question “Can we stop robots outsmarting humanity”
The article is good, but the title is highly, and potentially dangerously misleading. As I already explained in detail here and here:
“robots are nothing but software inside a box that more or less looks like a human body, or some part of it."
it is software that “increases the odds that there will not be adequate humans around in one of those few times that software cannot handle a situation”
It is NOT robots!
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The point is that it is very limiting, and highly unproductive, to frame this kind of questions in terms of “robots”. What drives deep change and is already turning society upside down is not robots, but software. Or, if we want to use the current buzzwords, artificial intelligence, machine learning, big data…
And if we want to be even more accurate: the problem is when those tools are totally controlled by very few people, for their own interests, in totally unaccountable ways. Regardless if what hosts them looks like a mannequin or a toaster. That article should be titled “are the too few people who, without any oversight, control today’s deployments of artificial intelligence, machine learning big data etc.. unfairly exploiting the rest of humanity for their own exclusive benefit”?
Who writes this, why, and how to help
I am Marco Fioretti, tech writer and aspiring polymath doing human-digital research and popularization.
I do it because YOUR civil rights and the quality of YOUR life depend every year more on how software is used AROUND you.
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