These Canadians are helping the world become replicant ready: Don Pittis
Blade Runner-style androids are many decades away, but it's time to prepare to welcome them
Sorry, science fiction fans. The replicants that do the dirty work in the new Blade Runner movie are not likely to be ready by 2049.
But two Canadian women are world leaders in laying the groundwork.
"One thing that a lot of people don't realize is that Canada is at the forefront of AI ethics and roboethics," says AJung Moon, CEO of Generation R, a startup company that helps organizations prepare for the robot invasion.
Comfort level
Representing the Open Roboethics Institute (ORI), Moon addressed the United Nations in 2015, helping to develop the global discussion on ethical issues that include the proper limits of robot autonomy.
Aptly located in Vancouver, a world capital of science fiction entertainment production, ORI is an outgrowth of the University of British Columbia's specialization in human robot interaction. In such a new field, the institute is considered venerable.
"ORI has been around for five years and not a lot of institutes that study this topic can say the same thing," says Moon.
In a world where robotics and artificial intelligence are sweeping into every part of the production chain, Generation R may have found a niche.
The company recently completed a study for Technical Safety BC, a self-funding organization charged with licensing and inspecting the safety of technical installations in the province.
Artificial intelligence safety
The technical authority recently began incorporating machine learning — the basis for modern artificial intelligence — into its system for deciding where to get the best bang for its buck in the use of its limited inspection staff.
The job of Generation R was to spot where the new AI system was likely to encounter problems with the human-centred task.
Workers at Technical Safety BC were worried that the new automated prediction algorithm would create ethical problems, missing or misjudging risks or stealing jobs rather than helping workers to do their jobs better.
In fact, experts, say automation is best when it is stealing jobs in what they call the three Ds, those that are dull, dirty or dangerous. But whatever they do, automated systems, just like replicants, have to get along with people.
Friendly robots
"We're about friendly robots," says UBC's Elizabeth Croft, a mechanical engineering prof and director of the world-leading Collaborative Advanced Robotics and Intelligent Systems Lab (CARIS).
According to Croft, the idea that a higher minimum wage will take away dull and repetitive jobs is almost beside the point. The replacement of low-wage jobs is inevitable. The trick is to make people happy about it.
The way to do that is to be sure there are still plenty of good quality, complex and interesting jobs for human labour that, so far at least, only humans can do. That seems to be working out.
"Where robots are good is reliability, repeatability, the heavy lifting, able to untiringly do dumb tasks — pick-and-place pick-and-place, they can do that over and over again," says Croft.
"You want to focus your labour to those high-value activities where there needs to be logic under uncertainty."
Moving people into those higher-value, higher-wage jobs is the only way to increase Canadian productivity, leaving the bad jobs for the computers and robots.
"To be able to do that effectively there is a point where people and robots have to come together to really obtain that full value of that transition," says Croft.
Essentially, the robots have to be constructed and used in a way that makes people happy and comfortable.
And unlike in the world of Blade Runner 2049, we don't have to worry about how the robots feel about it — so far.
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