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Podemos postular como uma generalidade que “a máquina abstrai”. Ela coloca um intermediário – uma coisa intermédia – entre a experiência e a percepção, e produz apenas uma experiência derivada e artificial. (...) Chamar a esta e outras transformações efectuadas pela máquina abstração é corroborado pelo facto de que as máquinas são concebidas para capturar ou modificar uma parte da realidade a fim de ganhar alguma vantagem. A perda das outras partes parece uma troca aceitável.
Isto não equivale a dizer que a prática de abstrair do real não existia antes da máquina, ou que a vida humana possa acontecer sem o uso da abstração. (...) Uma civilização avançada multiplica esses mecanismos e desenvolve super-abstrações que são o produto da ANÁLISE. A análise decompõe o todo em partes para uma melhor compreensão das qualidades e comportamento do objecto. Esse aumento da compreensão também reduz, uma vez que a análise omite o traço que torna o todo interessante ou valioso.
Barzun
Tempo para um novo apontamento a complementar registos feitos aqui aqui e aqui sobre AI e automatismos, seja sua versão soft ou hard. Ware, ie. Arranque do ano, começam a surgir nos sítios do costume e a entrar no nosso "consciente mediático" algumas ideias que parecem fazer a transição entre um doomsday scenario futurístico e a imposição pragmática de resolver o presente - porque eles também já chegaram.
Da Wired, uma referência incontornável para acompanhar o "in-depth coverage of current and future trends in technology, and how they are shaping business, entertainment, communications, science, politics, and" stuff para contexto, do NYT para conclusão: Ai-bot *circa início de 2017.
* Lê-se "I, bot"
Doomsday scenario:
In February 1975, a group of geneticists gathered in a tiny town on the central coast of California to decide if their work would bring about the end of the world. (...) In January, the world’s top artificial intelligence researchers walked down the same beachside paths as they discussed their rapidly accelerating field and the role it will play in the fate of humanity.
in "The AI Threat Isn’t Skynet. It’s the End of the Middle Class" 10 fev 2017
Back from the present: classe média, tecnologia, revoluções.
Preventing the rise of AI is not the answer. It’s also not really possible - a bit like bringing those old manufacturing jobs back.
At a time when the Trump administration is promising to make America great again by restoring old-school manufacturing jobs, AI researchers aren’t taking him too seriously. They know that these jobs are never coming back (...) they looked at the real US economy, the real reasons for the "hollowing out" of the middle class. The problem isn’t immigration—far from it. The problem isn’t offshoring or taxes or regulation. It’s technology.
Machines aren’t just taking the place of humans on the assembly line. They’re doing a better job. And all this before the coming wave of AI upends so many other sectors of the economy. "I am less concerned with Terminator scenarios," MIT economist Andrew McAfee said on the first day at Asilomar. "If current trends continue, people are going to rise up well before the machines do."
in "The AI Threat Isn’t Skynet. It’s the End of the Middle Class" 10 fev 2017
Conflicto e resolução - e cruza a ideia entretida por alguns pensadores com posts anteriores do tema:
[data shows] a sharp decline in middle class job creation since the 1980s. Now, most new jobs are either at the very low end of the pay scale or the very high end [and] many of the researchers warned him that the coming revolution in AI would eliminate far more jobs far more quickly than he expected. (...) That threat has many thinkers entertaining the idea of a universal basic income, a guaranteed living wage paid by the government to anyone left out of the workforce.
in "The AI Threat Isn’t Skynet. It’s the End of the Middle Class" 10 fev 2017
Pequeno parêntesis para um especial media: automatismos, bots e inteligência artificial não acontece apenas na fábrica, indústrias "criativas" estão igualmente em linha de desmontagem.
Strategists at the [Washington] Post saw the potential for an AI system that could generate explanatory, insightful articles. After a few months of development, Heliograf debuted last year. It works like this: Editors create narrative templates for the stories, including key phrases that account for a variety of potential outcomes and then they hook Heliograf up to any source of structured data. The Heliograf software identifies the relevant data, matches it with the corresponding phrases in the template, merges them, and then publishes different versions across different platforms.
in "What News-Writing Bots Mean for the Future of Journalism" 16 fev 2016
The Post’s main goal with the project at this point is twofold. First: Grow its audience. Instead of targeting a big audience with a small number of labor-intensive human-written stories, Heliograf can target many small audiences with a huge number of automated stories about niche or local topics.
in "What News-Writing Bots Mean for the Future of Journalism" 16 fev 2016
But this technology seems to have taken over only some of the grunt work. With the rapid advances in AI technology driven by cheap computing power, Prakash sees Heliograf moving beyond mere grunt work.
in "What News-Writing Bots Mean for the Future of Journalism" 16 fev 2016
Continuando da classe média, poucos dias antes do primeiro artigo, ainda na Wired, publicavam uma peça que não sendo necessariamente original, cremos que começaremos a ler com uma maior frequência entre outlets sensíveis à temática.
What if the next big blue-collar job category is already here—and it’s programming? What if we regarded code not as a high-stakes, sexy affair, but the equivalent of skilled work at a Chrysler plant? It would change training for programming jobs - and who gets encouraged to pursue them. Teachers and businesses would spend less time urging kids to do expensive four-year computer-science degrees and instead introduce more code at the vocational level in high school. There’d be less focus on the wunderkinds and more on the proletariat.
These sorts of coders won’t have the deep knowledge to craft wild new algorithms for flash trading or neural networks. Why would they need to? That level of expertise is rarely necessary at a job. (...) "We need to get more employers saying, ‘Yeah, we just need someone to manage the login page,’" he says. "You don’t have to be a superstar."
in "The Next Big Blue-Collar Job Is Coding" 8 fev 2017
E pegando no proletariado, chegamos ao NYT de hoje: o problema não é tecnologia, bots ou AI, mas o que fazemos com eles. Impossível discordar:
President Barack Obama warned that "the next wave of economic dislocations won’t come from overseas. It will come from the relentless pace of automation that makes a lot of good middle-class jobs obsolete."
Blaming robots, though, while not as dangerous as protectionism and xenophobia, is also a distraction from real problems and real solutions.
The rise of modern robots is the latest chapter in a centuries-old story of technology replacing people. Automation is the hero of the story in good times and the villain in bad. Since today’s middle class is in the midst of a prolonged period of wage stagnation, it is especially vulnerable to blame-the-robot rhetoric.
While breakthroughs could come at any time, the problem with automation isn’t robots; it’s politicians, who have failed for decades to support policies that let workers share the wealth from technology-led growth.
in "No, Robots Aren’t Killing the American Dream" 20 fev 2017
The response in previous eras was quite different. When automation on the farm resulted in the mass migration of Americans from rural to urban areas in the early decades of the 20th century, agricultural states led the way in instituting universal public high school education to prepare for the future. At the dawn of the modern technological age at the end of World War II, the G.I. Bill turned a generation of veterans into college graduates. When productivity led to vast profits in America’s auto industry, unions ensured that pay rose accordingly. Corporate efforts to keep profits high by keeping pay low were countered by a robust federal minimum wage and time-and-a-half for overtime. Fair taxation of corporations and the wealthy ensured the public a fair share of profits from companies enriched by government investments in science and technology.
Productivity and pay rose in tandem for decades after World War II, until labor and wage protections began to be eroded. Public education has been given short shrift, unions have been weakened, tax overhauls have benefited the rich and basic labor standards have not been updated. As a result, gains from improving technology have been concentrated at the top, damaging the middle class, while politicians blame immigrants and robots for the misery that is due to their own failures.
Eroded policies need to be revived, and new ones enacted.
in "No, Robots Aren’t Killing the American Dream" 20 fev 2017
So true. Parece-nos que todos estão a responder à chamada - falta alguém?
Para resumir, a análise e a abstração não são demónios a exercitar, mas, tal como a máquina, são para ser dominadas, não para ser obedecidas. Viver entre palavras frouxas e pensamentos vagos mais ou menos traduzíveis em termos concretos enfraquece a energia e amortece a alegria de viver.