About The Episode

This week we look at the ideas of technological and social determinism in an attempt to give a more hopeful perspective of job automation. Essentially asking the questions, ‘Is job automation a foregone conclusion? Or is is possible to change the future?

Transcript

Tech News Update

Wanted to start off today with an older idea from a few months ago but one that I only came across recently and I haven’t mentioned on the podcast yet. 

British start-up Exscientia and Japanese pharmaceutical firm Sumitomo Dainippon Pharma have managed to use an AI to have the first ever non-human developed drug – and already in phase 1 clinical human trials. The drug is apparently used to treat patients who have obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). This was followed this week by an AI supporting scientists to discover an extremely potent antibiotic that can combat E.Coli. Although each of these ideas merit substantial time to look into, they only lead into a point that I think is even more interesting. And this is there is now an attempt to get another AI (by the name of Dabus AI) as the inventor on a patent for a food container and a warning light. This is an absolute first and has opened quite a debate within patent offices worldwide. It also might signal one of the first steps in a shift towards accepting AI with human-like benefits. 

In a heartwarming story from Japan, a cafe is giving the opportunity to physically disabled individuals to work and help customers by controlling and communicating through sophisticated robot waiters. In an interview one of these remote robot controllers explained that he feels a sense of increased self value knowing that he can help others and contribute to the functioning of the new cafe. Cochlear as well as eye implants enabling hearing and sight are the more known technologies but  I can easily see this as part of the trend of enabling those with physical issues to become augmented through technology and enable a greater quality of life.

On a lighter note, the world’s first VR e-sports area opened in the Netherlands just a few days ago. This enables you to play a VR game with your entire body rather than with just a few hand controllers, increasing the immersive aspect. If one of the top e-sports tournaments was able to bring in more viewers than those tuning into the superbowl, I think it’s likely that full body VR games are set to grow quite quickly over the next few years. 

And finally, thanks to Giel for sharing an article that discusses a group of students and their teacher in the Netherlands who have implanted chips in their hand enabling them to pay for groceries, opening their lockers, and maybe log into social media in the future. These students believe than in 15 years everyone will be using an implanted hand chip but this actually brings up an interesting point. I’ve discussed before that China and some parts of America are already using facial recognition technology which enables many of these actions, and I would think that people would be more willing to look into a camera rather than having a microchip surgically implanted in their hand, even if the technology is state of the art. However, this fits perfectly with an idea in this month’s blog post which will come out next week, where I look at the idea of exponential technological growth, and briefly discuss technological leapfrogging. You can read the posts on automatedpodcast.org/blog/. 

Today’s episode is actually one of the first topics that was focused on during my masters programme, so it is nice to go back and explore some of the ideas I looked at years ago. The two ideas we’ll look at are those of technological determinism and social determinism, usually seen at odds with each other. The first perspective is simply that technology is a driving force of society and that its development is pre-wired and determines the way we live. Social determinism on the other hand sees technology as a neutral tool in the hands of human beings, and it is human desire that molds and directs technological change. Do you think one is more correct than the other?

Don’t worry I won’t go into the research and readings of my masters but rather focus on the more interesting idea through two main examples, one which I’m sure many people have heard of, and the other is less well known. My goal with doing this is to emphasize one of the more hopeful ideas of the podcast that I don’t think I’ve given enough attention to in the episodes so far, but I can explain that at the end. 

 

Technological determinism. 

Electric vs gas vehicles

So let’s look at the first case. With the continuous rise and publicity of Elon Musk and Tesla’s electric autonomous vehicles it’s only fitting to talk about the electric car. Electric cars seem to be something new and exciting, a technology that overrides the dominant transportation technology now seen as a generator of needless pollution and noise. However, electric vehicles actually have been around for over 100 years. In fact, around the turn of the 20th century they were the preferred mode of ‘modern’ transportation. Steam powered vehicles could take up to 45minutes to start, and gasoline vehicles required a hand crank and came with an unpleasant odour. With the growing number of electric grids, recharging also became less of a problem. Even breaking the 100km/h records was first set by an electric vehicle. However, even with their apparent lead, improvements in refueling and production saw the gasoline powered car decrease in cost and grow in desirability. The final nail in the coffin though was an electric starter developed in 1912 that replaced the physically demanding hand crank starting method for the gas powered vehicles. This is what we can call a deterministic outlook. Technological innovations led to the ‘fixed’ outcome of gas powered vehicles dominating our transportation mode for over 100 years. However, the re-emergence of EV’s tells a different story. Social and cultural pressures, mostly fueled by the environmental movement’s push to reduce C02 emissions, is strongly forcing the technological development of electric vehicles like the well known models from Tesla Motors. 

A second case looks at a more fundamental technology, that of energy generation from nuclear reactors. Perhaps no technology has been viewed as more controversial throughout the 20th and early 21st century as nuclear energy. Maybe you’ve seen the Netflix 3 part Netflix documentary “Inside Bills Brain” and the 3rd generation nuclear reactor that was built to use nuclear waste as fuel? If you have you may have come away with a different perspective on nuclear energy production? My hope with what I am about to present is that we can see that nuclear technology did not develop along a linear path but was rather strongly influenced by certain institutions, people, and mentalities.

Nuclear Plants 

Nuclear power plants across the globe use uranium as their main fuel. The technical details are well beyond the scope of this episode, but to give a brief idea, immensely pressurized water is used to cool the solid fuel contained within Uranium rods. Due to the strong radiation and pressures, the fuel rods themselves become physically worn, necessitating replacement after only around 5% of the energy of the uranium has been used. These spent rods contain one of the main elements needed to make nuclear weapons, Plutonium-239 as well as many other radioactive elements which we typically deem ‘nuclear waste.’ This waste is both harmful to carbon based life and persists for thousands of years. However, what I want to focus on in this section is not the traditional nuclear plants, but rather a very different and mostly forgotten alternative. (http://Prachi Patel (2014). India’s thoriumbased nuclear vision. Energy Quarterly. Vol 39.)

Thorium

Unlike Uranium, Thorium is up to four times more abundant and it does not require extensive and environmentally destructive mining practices to extract. As it has different elemental properties from uranium, it does not require highly pressured water for cooling, thus reducing the size and cost of the power plant, making a meltdown scenario practically impossible.However, the greatest benefits are that the nuclear waste is extremely difficult to use in weapon creation, and the half-life of the spent fuel is only a few hundred years, in contrast with tens or hundreds of thousands of years with uranium. These last two issues are typically the main concerns that anti-nuclear supporters hold when advocating against nuclear generated energy. (http://Marvin Baker Schaffer. (2013) Abundant thorium as an alternative nuclear fuel: Important waste disposal and weapon proliferation advantages. Energy Policy, Vol 60.)

Given these tremendous environmental, technical, and political advantages, why aren’t all nuclear reactors today based on thorium? 

The answer is quite simple. Due to nuclear disarmament talks breaking down in 1948, and the Soviet military detonating its first atomic weapon in 1949, governments, militaries, national media, and the US Atomic Energy Commission, began to see nuclear reactors as machines that could churn out the ingredients necessary to produce nuclear weapons with which to protect their nations, rather than as energy production plants. Thus Uranium reactors were funded and built out, while Thorium reactor research was discontinued and shut down because it didn’t fulfill the dominant need at the time. Without this story being told, it would appear that scientific advancements simply led to advanced nuclear reactors that facilitated the hydrogen bomb, nuclear weapon proliferation, and nuclear waste. (http://Goldschmidt, Bertrand (1982) The atomic complex: a worldwide political history of nuclear energy. La Grange Park, Ill.)

Conclusion 

So while electric vehicles and nuclear energy are interesting, what in the world do they have to do with the automation of jobs and the focus of this podcast?

My goal here was to show a more hopeful perspective. Even if I feel that many new and emerging technologies are incredibly powerful and promising, it doesn’t mean that they will be accepted and integrated. For example, AI diagnostician algorithms can already perform better than several diagnosticians combined. But, because medical unions have political power, these may not be accepted. This is the same for several technologies impacting many of the areas of society that have been talked about on this podcast. Put simply, social forces have a large part to play in technological adoption and use in society. 

This is the idea that technological progress and the subsequent social impacts aren’t deterministic and that individual actions can act as a catalyst for change. Even though the two examples focused on led to less than ideal outcomes I want to stress that our world is not fixed in having technological unemployment with it’s catastrophic short term social destabilization that many think will ensue with a high degree of automation.  

To summarize this episode I think the best example I could find actually came from the Pew Research Centre’s study that I discussed last week. 

There was a single Point of agreement between the 2000 technology experts surveyed on the topic of job automation, and it was that, “none of these potential outcomes—from the most Utopian to most dystopian—are etched in stone. Although technological advancement often seems to take on a mind of its own, humans are in control of the political, social, and economic systems that will ultimately determine whether the coming wave of technological change has a positive or negative impact on jobs and employment. “Technology is not destiny … we control the future we will inhabit.”