Rule of the Robots - Martin Ford

I finished the book Rule of The Robots , by Martin Ford , which is a great addition to the series of books I've been reading about the impact of Artificial Intelligence on our society.

An interesting allegory that the author brings is that AI will become the new Electricity in this super cycle of innovation, being a useful mental model to understand how technology will evolve and ultimately affect all spheres of the economy, society and culture.

I believe that the book is a great complement to what I have been studying about artificial intelligence, considering the benefits that technology can bring us, and its risks, in a positivist tone regarding the use of these platforms. As a futurist, he tends his analyses towards what good the platforms will bring to the world, limiting himself to describing how the platforms got here. I missed a deeper look at the current state of implementation of the solutions described, but perhaps that is my own expectation about how to analyze the future through a technology that already presents problems today. The book is right in not being utopian in the use of AI, while at the same time presenting a critical view of its impact on employment, governments and people's lives.

However, I would like to make a suggestion: this book does not intend to describe in depth our current problems with the use of artificial intelligence, which in my opinion is a mistake. It is important to use authors who are more critical of the current moment, such as The Chaos Machine and Weapons of Mathematical Destruction . This way, you can use it as complementary content, making reading this book even more worthwhile. With the exception of the discussion about the impact on employment, the book limits itself to exploring risks in a superficial manner, relegating only small references to the end of the book.

Since the book is from 2021, one interesting thing is that the companies mentioned in the book are sometimes no longer in existence, but the book does a good job of remaining quite useful and relevant. I liked the way the book deals with issues of futurism, current perspectives, and a critical view of the future. It has an important commitment to deepening the concepts and establishing a guideline for understanding. And with much less hype than other self-help books on AI.

I liked the definition that the book brings about what we can expect from the scenario for the AI Revolution :

• Processing power and cloud computing as the driving force behind most of the industry’s evolution. For years relegated to university labs, we are at the point where scaling algorithms using cloud computing has yielded impressive results, but we may be nearing the “end” – the computing power needed to achieve the next levels of autonomy and intelligence could consume all the energy in the world , making it commercially unviable.

• Democratization of AI through increasingly easy-to-use tools. An ecosystem only exists when the available tools work to lower the barrier to use

• Community of Experts through open ecosystems. No company is good at opening up the code or creating open source code for the use of AI. The interest is to build such a large community with knowledge of these tools that the company eventually becomes the main reference in the market, making it difficult for new players to arrive.

• Connectivity and IoT . With devices increasingly connected and ubiquitous in our daily lives, they will be a lever for data collection and transformation.

• Venture Capital Money . Mainly for the amount needed to train neural networks for some of the products. In this regard, the big cloud companies are much better positioned than any other player.

The book provides a more in-depth assessment of unemployment and the impact that automation has had on the available population. What we may be about to experience in our society is worrying. It even proposes universal basic income as a solution - could this be the most left-wing and AI-friendly book ever written? The author describes and raises this issue since his first books, with the understanding that we are facing such a huge impact on the supply and possibility of employment that there is no way to expect that the generation of jobs and new industries will meet the demand.

At this point, I highly recommend reading the World Economic Forum Report , which describes a very bleak scenario for the coming years, in which approximately 85 million jobs will be lost, and provides an analysis of the main demands and professionals most impacted.

This book should be read in conjunction with The Chaos Machine to better understand the current impact of artificial intelligence in the broader context of technology companies. The book makes brief references to the influence of large technology companies that are now using AI to maximize their profits at the expense of the social impact they can cause, while dedicating an entire chapter to describing the impact of China's technological advances as a real competitor to US hegemony.

It makes small references to the current challenges of polarization, addiction, and the political impact of AI platforms on social media. It’s almost as if the Chinese specter of a surveillance state is incomparable to what we are seeing every day being carried out by big tech companies, which have real influence on governments around the world, and which have caused a wave of polarization never seen before. This is a false dichotomy that the book tries to preach.

The author is quite forceful in defending the case for regulating the use of AI in various scenarios, under the pretext of protecting the democratic world from reaching a dystopian version of a surveillance state, placing China as a great example to be avoided. He fails, however, to describe how large companies use these tools to, in a vision as dystopian as Orwell's, social networks continue to impact governments around the world, with the use of AI to sell more ads, as described in the book The Chaos Machine .

In recent days, following the trend and prediction of the book, the Artificial Intelligence Act was approved by a large majority by the European Parliament. A big step for the use of AI platforms in Europe, and one that could become an example for other countries in the search for more transparent and regulated tools.

The measure, approved by a large majority, is expected to guarantee a set of fundamental rights while trying not to impede innovation.

Among the guidelines:

• Delimit the use of general-purpose Artificial Intelligence tools

• Limit the use of Biometric Identification Systems in all aspects of law enforcement

• Completely eliminate the use of Social Score systems and their manipulative use by AI systems

• Consumers' right to demand transparency and explanations regarding decisions made by AI-driven systems

I welcome this movement, and it is in line with what leading researchers and authors in the field are saying: some kind of regulation is needed to curb the indiscriminate use of technology, despite its proven negative impact in many instances. It is extremely important that the democratic world be able to have more transparency in the use of these platforms when they affect people's social lives.

The creation of GenAI tools has been widely discussed in the technical community, mainly due to criticism of the use of intellectual property without authorization to create tools such as Midjourney, Dall.E and others. The IA Act also provides legal procedures to ensure that intellectual property is adequately protected.

Ultimately, I look forward to seeing how Bigtechs and Vendors will respond to the decision, as they are the biggest investors in these solutions.

The book also tries to present AGI as one of the major risks for the future, but in a positive way it gives little emphasis to the challenge. I will not delve into this topic in this post, as I intend to write a specific one. For reference, the author describes 4 major challenges for Artificial General Intelligence:

• Common Sense Reasoning

• Unsupervised learning

• Understanding Causality

• Knowledge Transfer

I would strongly recommend reading this book - given the author's context and his expectation of outlining a Technopositivist vision for the use of artificial intelligence.