The Challenge of Automation

Living close to Lake Champlain we know about the tension between cormorants who feed on the fish that are eaten by the fish that sports fisherfolks like to catch. Are the cormorants an invasive species? Loosestrife, the beautiful purple plant with the electric purple hue, is classed as an invasive species because it will crowd out some of the other plant species considered to be native. This could mean that birds who depended on the native seeds for food will have to migrate elsewhere and animals which depended on those birds become the dominoes in a cascading sequence of cause and effect. But let’s not forget the ultimate invasive species: mankind. We move around a lot and do have a habit of trying to modify our environment so that it’s more to our liking and ofttimes these changes are not for the better. When we use technology to make these changes and these changes create and destroy jobs, we call it Automation.

I have recently been reading some books that deal with the problem of Automation. One of them is “The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future” by Martin Ford. In this and the next column I will  be discussing Ford’s views on the problem and some proposed solutions.

I received “The Lights in the Tunnel” as a Kindle e-book so it’s ironic that while it attempts to explain and suggest remedies for humans losing jobs to automation, in fact it contributes somewhat to the problem. How many jobs are replaced when Amazon wirelessly sends me this book? Depending on how far back in the chain we go, we had to get in our car, drive to a bookstore to purchase the book and then drive back home. From the supply side there were trucks driven by people delivering these books to store, not to mention the owner and the employees of that store. So lots of folks are impacted when technology enters the process.  Technology acts like an invasive species which comes into a dynamically balanced environment and crowds out one or more species from their niche. There's no question that it changes the environment. Does this make things better or worse? That's the question.

The challenge of automation is that while it’s fairly easy to identify the problem; it’s extremely difficult is to propose useful solutions. However, a good diagnosis improves the odds for a useful prescription. The problem is that new technology destroys some jobs and creates others; in the long term we don’t know whether more more jobs get created or destroyed and so we cannot judge a net gain or loss for society as a whole.


One of the claims made by Ford is that as technology grows exponentially so will automation and although most economists seem to think that the net effect of automation will create more jobs than it destroys, the author strongly disagrees. But what exactly is “exponential growth”?  Ray Kurzweil gives an excellent example of exponential growth in his talk at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zihTWh5i2C4  where he points out that if a process is only 2% complete at the end of the year but it’s progress is exponential there’s no reason to fret as it will be completed within 7 years. It works like this: at the end of year 1 due to an exponential growth that doubles each year, the project is 2% complete, at the end of year 2, the project is 4% complete --- doesn’t sound too good does it?  But at the end of year 3 it’s 8% complete; by year 4 it’s 16% complete; year 5 it’s 32%; year 6, 64% and by year 7 it’s been completed!
According to Sigmund Freud as well many other philosophers and social scientists, one's ability to love and work is linked to one's degree of happiness and satisfaction with life. As Freud said, "Love and work..work and love..what else is there really?" --- so if we really need work to supply meaning to our lives and be happy, and automation will destroy more jobs than it creates as Martin claims, then we’d better start planning for some radical economic disruption.

Next time: Ford’s diagnosis and prescription to the challenge of automation.

Teaching is not so Easy Part 3

Well, it’s the middle of January once again and very soon you will notice an influx of students eager to begin the spring semester at Plattsburgh State. You may recall in my Sept 9 column “Teaching is not so Easy as it Looks “ I recounted my progress and lack thereof in preparing for and offering CSC372  “Ethics and the Information Age”  ---  the required Ethics and Writing course for Computer Science majors at SUNY Plattsburgh. I had great (albeit misplaced) confidence I could easily do this as I had developed this course for the department a couple of decades ago.

I described college teaching using the metaphor of the Acting Company where the professor plays all of the roles: Starring actor, producer, director and the most difficult and frustrating --- stage manager. The part I totally underestimated was that of stage manager who must attend to gazillions of unanticipated details (ranging from making sure the software actually works to getting the right keys for the right doors). You can go to: http://tec-soc.blogspot.com and then click on the CSC 372 link for the full syllabus to the course.

Now the most interesting part of the course (after the ethical theory of course) was the slick way the writing part was handled. Professor Del Hart, a colleague, had developed an Online Peer Review System (OPRS) based on the SWORD System developed at the University of Pittsburgh (sword@pittedu) that could be used locally and tailored especially for our students. On a Monday, Wednesday, Saturday (the computer never sleeps and apparently similarly for our students) schedule they would submit a first draft, critique the essays of 3 other students and using them to improve their papers, write the final draft (usually very close to 11:59 PM Saturday). Although the SWORD project’s research has shown that students come remarkably close to issuing the same grades that an instructor would assign, I still read the papers and assigned the final grades. I can attest that the student criticisms were very similar to my own and so the system could have automatically assigned the students’ final grades on the papers based entirely on the other students’ evaluations.

The OPRS supplies a rubric the student uses to assign quantitative evaluations to their reviews of the writing. For example, the rubric uses the criteria of Evidence, Sufficiency, Presentation, Insight, and Overall Quality on each paper and for each of these categories a dropdown menu allows the reviewer to assign a specific value; for example, Evidence could be measured as: none, weak, adequate,very good, and exceptional which could be assigned grades of E, D, C, B, and A. respectively. The instructors can manage these settings as they see fit.  Another advantage to the computerized system is that it can enforce deadlines and deduct points for lateness also determined by the instructor. I can be the good cop and the computer the bad cop.

But, I hear you asking, “What about easy graders? Or overly harsh ones?” --- won’t they skew the results?  Not really --- the full-blown system can correct for that situation.  As the semester progresses, each student’s reviews are compared to the class average and the easy and harsh graders are thus identified. It is then just a small step to weight these students’ reviews so that they don’t count as much as the other reviewers. Certainly not a perfect solution but a good one and as our politicians are reminding us these days: “Don’t sacrifice the good for the perfect.” A good followup is to have the instructor review the student reviewers occasionally to make sure he or she agrees with them and with the system’s weightings.

In the past I had to use a full class meeting period for the reviewing process --- now I could spend the class time supplementing and clarifying the ideas in the textbook. I liked the OPRS and think other writing instructors will also. We are currently in the process of reading the student evaluations of the system for their comments and criticisms so that improvements can be made and the system can be offered to other writing courses on campus.

I had a great time.

The Media and Politics

I enjoyed Colin Read’s Nov 4 Press Republican  column where he points out that technology has contributed to a vanishing centrist view in politics. In the past, when newspapers were the main delivery medium for news, editors had to be careful not to skew the facts too far to the right or the left as the readers were sure to contain citizens of both persuasions. As a result the news was nudged  towards the middle of the political road if ,for no other reason, it would outrage fewer readers and was certainly the best choice in terms of the bottom line.

Now most everyone has the Internet and cable TV which can provide the type and slant of news most any individual desires. In addition to cooking, pet and golf channels there is Fox which caters to the right and MSNBC on the left of center. This tends to polarize the politics of our nation and could certainly be a significant cause of our gridlocked government that , like the weather, everyone complains about but no one seems to be able to change.

However, that said, I must respectfully (there’s a word you don’t hear very often anymore) disagree with my colleague. Newspapers, even in their heyday, were divided into right, left and center politically in their editorials and worse, their choice of headlines demonstrated their political leanings. I recall back in the Sixties a headline from the Manchester Union Leader stating, “UN Mercenaries Invade Congo”. Of course, this was the opinion of  the owner (Loeb) of the publication but the people who regularly purchased this paper were also the choir he was preaching to. This seems very little different than what Fox and MSNBC News are doing when they broadcast the opinions of Hannity and Maddow. Actually Fox and MSNBC are being more intellectually honest and transparent with us as they do not claim that Mr. Hannity and Ms Maddow are newscasters but are merely commentators. And as commentators, they can vent their biases to their bases rather freely. The issue is, however, when you sit down for a meal, do you want your soup with  one flavor overpowering all of the others or would you rather they all work to complement each other?

Whether the “good old days” when the Fourth Estate (i.e. newspapers) chose which news was worth reporting were better than the cornucopia of TV channels and Internet (includes newspapers) sites that are currently available is debateable.  If I have to chose between the elite few publishers who decide what news is and the delicious diversity of offerings on the Internet, on the whole, I have to go with the choice that maximizes my choice. I think it’s better to have too much choice than not enough even though there are times when too much choice seems overwhelming --- like shopping in a super-duper market for cereals for example. In fact, some think that this overabundance of choice contributes to the sense of ennui and irony of our age.



Unfortunately, having an abundance of choices does not necessarily mean we will use them  wisely. Sites that analyze Twitter feeds clearly show that visitors to conservative and liberal websites do not overlap very much at all; if you are a conservative you visit mostly conservative websites and liberals visit liberal websites. One would hope that  a plethora of information would inform the populace and promote toleration of other’s viewpoints but, sadly, this does not seem to be the case. Instead of tolerance we get arrogance and righteousness which leads to insularity and polarization. And although it was Abraham Lincoln who said, “A friend is one who has the same enemies as you have.” we must ask ourselves: Are we all in this together or are we not? Sulking in our enclaves is not only counterproductive, it is just plain childish.

Maybe we can find some ironic solace in the message from Kahlil Gibran, “I have learned silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet, strange, I am ungrateful to those teachers." If we could just follow his example but learn instead to be grateful to those teachers I’m sure the world would be better for it.

Political Rhetoric

November 11, 2012

By the time you are reading this article  the Election will be over and it will be time to step back and view the events from a longer and more objective perspective. During the runup to it, Ron Jackson (Essex County Republican Committee Chairperson) wrote a letter to the editor (10/16/2012) which listed a litany of reasons to vote against the democratic incumbent , Bill Owens. Included in the list was the claim that Owens “co-sponsored the SOPA bill to allow the government to take away your Internet freedoms without any due process of law”. Jackson ends his letter with the admonition: “He (Owens) can’t be trusted.”  

I was puzzled on two accounts: first, I remember reading about SOPA but couldn’t remember exactly what it was about let alone what the acronym stood for; second, I knew Owens personally, as he helped my wife and I draw up some legal documents in the past  and I recall that he was a compassionate and competent lawyer. So I did what everyone else does when confronted with a problem: I googled it (I know, I know,  the Google Corporation doesn’t like it when a citizen uses their name as a common noun or verb because it degrades the patent on their good name but that is their problem and not mine --- I should be so successful that my name becomes a verb).

Anyway, I found out that SOPA unpacks to “Stop Online Piracy Act” and that like any complicated piece of legislation it contains many complex interacting parts due to the compromises that must be made during any effective political process. It was introduced in the House of Representatives on Oct 26, 2011 by Lamar Smith (R-TX) with bipartisan support  and its intent is to strengthen the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) by making it easier to prosecute online lawbreakers who violate intellectual property copyrights (e.g. music, video) as well as counterfeit products. Naturally there are pros and cons to the passage of any new law and this is no exception.

On the negative side, it would force Internet Service Providers to block the sites of copyright violators and even stop search engines like Bing and Google from displaying them in their search results. Most internet users are opposed to SOPA ( as well as the ACLU, Google and Facebook) as it will limit their free access to information, They claim that the law is overly broad and will be nearly impossible to enforce as pirates, when closed down, usually pop up again somewhere else on the web --- usually offshore the US (as pirates are wont to do)

Those arguing for SOPA including the AFL-CIO and the US Chamber of Commerce (politics does indeed make for strange bedfellows) point out that jobs depend on commerce and that commerce depends on copyrights, patents and trademarks. Also, as expected, the large internet music, movie and video vendors support the legislation.

As of now, the legislation has been tabled but expect it back in a new form  as it seems to be a very effective fund raiser for both sides.

For quick incomplete description of SOPA visit: http://www.emedialaw.com/sopa-the-debate-in-plain-english/

For a longer more complete treatment of what everyone seems to agree is a very complicated issue see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act#cite_note-washingtonpost-4


What I cannot understand is why Jackson is so vociferously against Owens --- according to govtrack.us Owens is a centrist whose voting record places him smack dab in the middle of the ideology scale (in fact Obama and Owens disagree on SOPA). So Jackson’s claim was either oversimplified or simply not the whole truth. Is not telling the whole truth equivalent to a lie? I’m not sure but I do know that when someone dissembles in this manner, I am much less likely to swallow any other claims he has made. It’s really too bad that so many politicians on both sides of the aisle use this tactic to discredit their opponents --- at best it destroys our trust in the person and at it’s worst it undermines our democracy. It’s easy to understand why little kids tell lies and half-truths to get their way,  it’s much harder to explain in adults.

Teaching Not so Easy: Part 2

Guess what the French word for “paper clip” is. Give up?  It’s “trombone” or to be more grammatically correct,  “un trombone” --- what a much more imaginative word to capture the shape of what we anglo speakers mundanely call the paperclip.

Perhaps you read in the 9/25 PR,  “Speech Jammer among 2012 IgNobel Winners”. It’s a device that repeats an individual’s speech a few hundred milliseconds after they’ve said it and it purportedly completely discombobulates the speaker. It’s proposed use is to warn conference speakers that they have exceeded their time limits. I know this works because when I was a typical bratty teenager, I had the ability to do the same thing --- repeat almost immediately one’s speech which really annoyed the speaker. I quit this practice after my seventh grade English teacher stopped lecturing, glared at me and slowly said, “Stop That!”. I may have been a wisenheimer  but I was also wise enough to know when enough was enough.

Why am I writing about trombones and speech jammers? Because they are both educational experiences that I never would have remembered if I had not agreed to teach the computer ethics and writing course at SUNY, Plattsburgh as I mentioned in the previous column. Associative memory is a strange and amazing thing.

I also promised a Part 2 to complete my thoughts regarding this process and so, here they come:

I began preparing for this course several months ago by perusing my last Syllabus which lays out the goals of the course and the scheduled assignments --- what to read when and when the writing assignments on the readings are due. Fortunately, the textbook is the same one I chose 5 years ago although it is now in it's fifth edition but the content is pretty much the same and the ethical theory covered has not yet changed. The supplementary readings were a bit out of date so I thought I could replace that with readings from the web (including perhaps some of the articles from this very column accessible at: tec-soc.blogspot.com )This required reading ethical articles on the web.
In the process I found that in addition to the standard ethical theories of : Relativism (Cultural and Subjective), Divine Command Theory, Egoism, Kantianism, Utilitarianism (Act and Rule), and Social Contract Theory --- I had overlooked investigating the Free Will vs Determinism issue even though it's resolution is critical to the study of ethical theory. Determinism has been described as the view that the past determines the future. However,you must first believe that humans have free will, that one can rationally choose their actions before you can hold them accountable for them. And since Ethics can be briefly characterized as What you Ought to Do, you implicitly accept Free Will over Determinism which, in its extreme form states that we cannot control our actions as every action is predetermined by its many causes.  No wonder this issue has been debated for over two millennia without resolution, however, I found the links below to be useful:


Humans have Free Will
http://www.des.emory.edu/mfp/JamesDilemmaOfDeterminism.html
Humans do not have Free Will
http://danielmiessler.com/arguments/free_will/two_lever_argument/
Humans are Determined but still have Free Will
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compatibilism
Buddhist View of Free Will
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will#In_Buddhist_philosophy

It’s been quite a bit of work but it’s been worth it.
A long-time friend and colleague once told me that that whenever he hears from someone that claims we profs have an easy life on the gravy train, he responds, “Yeah, that’s right, I only work 9 hours a week and 30 weeks a year --- anyone who’s not a teacher is crazy!”. The reply is usually stunned silence and hopefully, eventually the realization that not only is this a gross oversimplification, it’s just not true. I’ve worked for over fifty years in the federal government, private industry and in academia and I can say without a doubt that I’ve never worked harder or been happier than when working as a teacher.  Next to being a brain surgeon performing a successful operation, I cannot think of a more fulfilling profession.

Teaching is not so Easy as it Looks

Modest gentleman and scholar that I am, I don't enjoy writing about myself but a situation has arisen whereby I can possibly benefit others by doing so and therefore I, in this column, shall. A few months ago I was invited to teach “Ethics and the Information Age” for the Computer Science Department this semester due to a temporary shortage of faculty for the fall semester. After carefully analyzing the pros and cons of such an endeavor, I acquiesced to the request thinking that it should be fairly easy to fit into my retirement schedule and might even result in some ideas for future columns here. How wrong and right I was! Since developing this course in ’90s and teaching it until I retired fully in 2007, I figured it should be a piece of cake and a lot of fun doing this again. 

The course has two main goals: The first goal is to enhance the students' awareness of the ethical issues raised by the presence of computers in society and how they relate to their future role as computer professionals; the second goal (just as important as the first) is to develop and improve their writing skills. The latter goal is essentially a lifelong process but as the proverb notes: the journey of 1,000 miles begins with a single step. What I did not take fully into account was that teaching a college course is more than standing in front of class and delivering content. I have kept up with the evolving content of the technology and society field largely through the research for this column but what I temporarily forgot is that in a college course the instructor is, with some excellent support staff, the producer, the director, the stage manager and the main actor in the creation of a course. 

The stage manager function includes setting up the teaching environment. The teaching environment includes the classroom which holds not only the students but the equipment to deliver the media for the course. The media includes computers and their associated software as well as audio/visual equipment like TV and Overhead projector and, if one is especially lucky it has all been integrated into a “smart classroom” which provide not only computers connected to the Internet but overhead projectors and blackboards have replaced by computer-controlled projectors and smart boards much like the ones you see on TV when election results are broadcast. Then there are the lower level details like getting keys to all the rooms on campus you will be using, learning how the local phone system works as well as the photocopier which has most of the attributes of a media lab (Fortunately, I did not have to apply for a parking tag as I have continued to visit campus since retirement). OK, I hope you get the picture. 

As part of the setting up of the teaching environment, after reviewing the pros and cons of the college's websites, Google Plus, Facebook, and the Computer Science Department's Wiki, I decided to make the tec-soc website that I use for this column do double duty for the course as well. If you go there you will notice you have a choice between “Columns” (what you are reading right now) or “CSC 372” which is the college’s designation for the course. I have also launched a class discussion blog at http://csc372.blogspot.com/ . The purpose of this blog is pretty broad. Students may use it to just chat with each other outside of class (circumspectly, as it's visible to all); for example: "Does anyone have any idea about what DrD wants from us on question 45?" ranging to: "It's too nice a day be indoors, anyone for Frisbee?" I will also pose questions occasionally like: "The results of the last writing assignment were dismal — as it too long, too difficult to read or what?" In any case this apparently simple process was much more difficult and took much longer than I had hoped for and expected. 

Next time: More travails and vexations of the professed professor and a fuller explanation of how and why to teach ethics to college students.

Privacy: The Right to be Left Alone

August 12, 2012

According to a national poll sample [approximately 1,700 people] taken by Monmoth College, " An overwhelming majority of Americans support the idea of using drones [flying "armed robots"] to help with search and rescue missions (80%). Two-thirds of the public also support using drones to track down runaway criminals (67%) and control illegal immigration on the nation’s border (64%). One area where Americans say that drones should not be used, though, is to issue speeding tickets. Only 23% support using drones for this routine police activity while a large majority of 67% oppose the idea. " http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/military-robots/poll-shows-concern-about-drones-and-domestic-surveillance

Peter Singer, in his New York Times piece, "Do Drones Undermine Democracy?" (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/opinion/sunday/do-drones-undermine-democracy.html?pagewanted=print) points out that drone technology ( or in military jargon, "unmanned aerial systems") has raised important questions about the division of powers between the Congress and the President: "In America, our Constitution explicitly divided the president’s role as commander in chief in war from Congress’s role in declaring war. Yet these links and this division of labor are now under siege as a result of a technology that our founding fathers never could have imagined." Singer goes on to comment that,"... now we possess a technology that removes the last political barriers to war. The strongest appeal of unmanned systems is that we don’t have to send someone’s son or daughter into harm’s way. But when politicians can avoid the political consequences of the condolence letter — and the impact that military casualties have on voters and on the news media — they no longer treat the previously weighty matters of war and peace the same way." He comes concludes, "The Constitution did not leave war, no matter how it is waged, to the executive branch alone. In a democracy, it is an issue for all of us."

Rich Lowry, Editor of the National Review points out that, "Drones will no doubt raise novel issues under the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable search and seizure. They will require rules. The same is true of any technology, of course. The Supreme Court held unanimously earlier this year that police can't attach a GPS tracker on someone's vehicle without a warrant. This isn't reason to ban all use of GPS trackers by law enforcement. The fear of drones is, in part, the fear of the new -- it is Luddism masquerading as civil libertarianism. " (Luddism is a perjorative term for folks who act like the Luddites of the nineteeth century destroying the new technology of the industrial revolution which threatend their livelhoods ). Lowry further states, "The influential conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer wants drones banned domestically and thinks the first American to shoot one down will be declared a national hero. Sen. Rand Paul considers them a clear and present danger to American freedom and is offering legislation to require a warrant every time one takes flight, except to patrol the border or in extraordinary circumstances. The drone is to our liberty what the wolf is to sheep, a natural enemy." http://newsok.com/rich-lowry-the-great-drone-panic/article/3691059#ixzz20FqmvhzD

From the Reason Online blog, Calvin Thompson opines, "It is a stretch to think that the same federal government that gave us the PATRIOT Act, the TSA, and the indiscriminate drone attacks on civilians in the Middle East would even think twice about violating domestic privacy rights." (http://reason.com/blog/2012/07/10/drone-code-of-conduct-says-and-accomplis)

Apparently this seems to be an isssue that Progressives and Libertarians can find common ground as both place a premium on individual rights including Privacy --- the right to be left alone.

"Watchbirds", a short story by Robert Sheckley written over fifty years ago, addresses this issue. Watchbirds were like our drones taken to the next level: they were equipped with learning circuitry which allowed them to discern when a crime was about to take place and could deliver a taser-like jolt to the would-be perpetrator thus preventing the intended crime. When one Watchbird learned something new ­-- it was automatically transferred to the whole flock so they became better and better at detecting and stopping crimes like murder until they began zapping fishermen who they had inferred were murdering the fish. I won't spoil where this goes --- I'll only reveal that the outcome is much much worse than anything the pundits or the politicians have mentioned. Read the story at: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/29579/29579-h/29579-h.htm