Unanswered, Unanswerable Questions…?

And we add to that, “Questions We Don’t Know About”.  Or, rather, questions we don’t know yet that we could or should be asking.

Since the dawn of history man had already amassed a lot of answers – the primary reason being the fact that we asked a lot of questions.  However, and this seems to be the perplexing part - instead of depleting the repository of our collective queries more questions are raised for every answer generated.  It is akin to peeling an onion where the onion gets bigger instead of being reduced to the core.

“The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.”

― Socrates

It is the young children who truly exhibit that trait when they pepper their parents for answers because indeed they know nothing but, alas, beware the day they become teenagers because by then they know everything.  Fortunately, or we hope so anyway, after all the bluster of youth, they’d come to the realization that they actually know less than they thought they did. That is the only passage to adulthood, thus lowering for a bit the threshold to maturity.  If they fail to make that transition, that is, by continuing to believe that they already have all the answers then they will have committed the biggest blunder of their lives – failing to ask any more questions.

First, we begin on the lighter side of {un}answered questions. By now we already know the myriad answers to, “Why the chicken crossed the road”?  There are as many as there are clever people and even more from smart alecks.  The chicken has no idea how many of the folks actually spend time to come up with the answers, which is likewise bewildering to many farmers.  One farmer made the observation that it is always city folks who ask that silly question because from among his circle of friends, nobody knows of any chicken crossing any road. On the other hand, poultry raised chicken has not the slightest clue what a road is.  Nevertheless, the question continues to endure.  And each generation begets different answers.

Then there is the greatest mystery that ever straddled the world of philosophy, metaphysics and quantum theory, “When a tree falls down in a forest and there’s no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?” You see, the question first surfaced sometime in 1710, ascribed to Philosopher George Berkeley, then appeared as a magazine topic in 1883, Scientific American later gave it some prominence and renowned Physicist Neils Bohr and Albert Einstein both chimed in with their own visions of it as it related to their fields.  Believe it or not, the whole issue of whether the “unobserved world functions the same way as the observed one” was debated not in the fringes but way inside the prominent circles inhabited by scientists and philosophers alike.  We can understand philosophers dipping their fingers into it but classical scientists as well?  Well, it gets into quantum physics, where the mere act of observing affects the outcome of events or the behavior of particles.  I am in no positon to discuss those but just so you know.  We do know they make a sound from a GEICO commercial, known for its whacky TV ads, where one lady was asking another about whether a falling tree in the forest made a sound when no human was around. The next scene in the ad showed the tree groaning and moaning about its predicament after hitting the ground.

So, what should be in our list of questions worthy of idle musing?  First, what is unworthy of any kind of debate is the one waged between the sexes.  King Arthur from the Broadway musical, “Camelot”, on advice from Merlin, gave up on the whole idea of trying to understand what a woman is thinking; Henry Higgins’ brutal honesty got him nowhere with Eliza Doolittle in “My Fair Lady” and the eternal ire of the feminist movement. Notice, I am quoting fictitious characters. That is the safest way I can detach myself from the debate; get it out early and never to discuss it any further. I’ve been told that the guy with a T-shirt that said, “I don’t Google, my wife knows everything” later took it all back and burned the shirt.  That settles that.

Where is everybody?

That, by the way, was a very serious question asked by Enrico Fermi, renowned nuclear physicist of Manhattan Project fame, both Fermilab and the sub-atomic particle, fermion, are named after him. When confronted with the idea that the numbers so overwhelmingly favor the existence of intelligent life forms all over the universe – many possibly far more advanced than we are and the estimates dictate that many had mastered space travel as to have explored every section of the universe - Enrico Fermi wondered that if that were true, then, “Where is everybody?”

Well, if they’re out there they may be too scared to come near our world after carefully observing us from a distance.  We had been noisily announcing our presence since after we’ve transmitted the first telegraph messages, followed by radio, TV sitcoms and now all the chatter from social media, so they know we’re here! That may have done it.  We will forever remain isolated.  The other possibility is that they may already be among us; which explains the strange behaviors we see from some folks or why some of us do strange things.  With apologies to anyone out there near Alpha Centauri in case you’re scanning the Blogosphere with your sophisticated algorithm.

Will It Be Possible Some Day to Live Forever?

The answer is actually another question: Why?  Also, “Is one average run-of-the-mill lifetime not good enough?”

Seriously, let’s make this one other thought experiment.  Let’s say you were born in 1054 A.D. and had been living since through the present day. You will have seen the rise of China’s Song Dynasty, when Spain was under the Caliphate of Cordova, the rise and fall of the Byzantine Empire, the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, the plague in Europe, the colonization of the Americas, Africa and many parts of Asia, the U.S. Civil War and many other localized wars, the potato famine in Ireland, countless earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, more famines in diverse places, WWI and WWII, the Korean and Vietnam Wars … and you’re here now. Somewhere along the way, perhaps earlier than you could possibly have tolerated, you would likely have opted for an exit. How many miles would you have had the stamina to walk, train for battle, go through many generations of children, traveled on horseback, but went for a very long time without indoor plumbing … You get the picture.  We ask ourselves today.  Would you really want to live forever?  How many times have you gone on vacation when during the last three days of it you wanted to go home?  Think centuries of history and you’d know at some point you’d want to rest.  This is one great example of, “be careful about what you wish for”.  I say that the Creator made sure we get to see our great grandchildren at the very latest of our existence but not much more.  That is yet the greatest benevolent act of kindness from God.

If Congressional Politicians’ Favorability Ratings are in the 10-15% Range, Why Do We Keep Electing Them?

 A great question … yet to be answered.

This was supposed to be a serious discussion but where did the time go?  Well, perhaps a more profound musing at some other time.

The Anatomy & Meaning of Wealth

We will not have any good answer, no matter how we try, to explain the meaning of life and everything associated with it, such as wealth or lack of it, let alone to expound on the true meaning of riches and to defining what it is like to be truly wealthy. We will see that people in the plains of Mongolia or those at the base of the Himalayas have a different definition of what the Swedes or Norwegians have in mind; a hot shot trader in Wall Street sees wealth through a different prism from the sidewalk vendor whose take home income for the evening is as little as a tiny microbe inside the gut of a cow as to the trader’s 12 oz. steak consumed in one dinner.  As sloppy as that metaphor seems to be, we are immediately taken to the discussion of income inequality or the glaring disparity brought on by wealth inequality.  Do we have anywhere near the answer to that? Or, is that even the right away to view it. 

  

First, if it is not yet clear to anyone at all, equality when it comes to income or accumulated wealth does not exist anywhere in the world.  Socialism, even in its truest form – the utopian dream of those who profess equality among the citizens only succeeded to create dystopia instead.  Nothing can be a more glaring example than Mao’s great revolution which ultimately failed.  One visible flaw among many was a symbol of equality in what people wore, such as what the Mao jacket exemplified.  At one time it even became the toast of Western fashion designers (for those who remember). The Mao regime boasted that everyone in China at that time wore the same clothing, a sign of a homogeneous status where no one stood out to a different social class because everybody wore the same thing. There was Mao wearing the Mao jacket (or suit) along with a few hundred million people (the population was not quite a billion then).  What everyone in the West was not told was that 99.99 % of the Mao jacket was from coarse cotton while the top leaders of the Communist Party, including Mao, had silk or silk blended material for their version of the Mao jacket.  Fidel Castro’s green fatigues looked no different from what every military man wore in Cuba. What is not known is that Castro’s outfits were made from material likely of the quality Giorgio Armani would work with.  I remember too when the Nehru jacket was about as popular as the Mao version.  Well, there were those of fine linen and silk worn during the Oscars by Hollywood celebrities and the rest were those that adorned hotel door men and India’s lower middle class. Socialism and fervor towards income and wealth equality are often a façade replete with hypocrisy. There is a current senator who speaks so fervently about income inequality who owns three high end homes to his name, including a recently purchased winter house so he can ski right off the front door; another advocate of the working class has a net worth north of $20 M.

Equality of anything is incongruous with nature; the whole universe thrives in inequality. I’m going to be facetious here, for a moment, even though it is being truthful in a way. If we look around us, homogeneity is not the rule. There are tall trees, short ones, we have mountains, ordinary hills and mole hills, even penguins that look alike are not a homogeneous avian colony - which makes it possible for one penguin to distinguish its mate and chick from the others even after being away for three months to feed.  Is it fair to criticize an ant or termite colony when a good number of the species are workers, soldier/guards, nursery attendants and much of the food gathered goes to the queen and her developing larvae?  There is no equality in a wolf pack or pride of lions. I know some will push back with, “Those are animal species you’re talking about.”

Let’s talk about people, but first we must discuss geography.  Does equality mean we all should be living in the temperate zone where much of the wealthy nations are?  Should natural resources have been equally apportioned to each country?  As we can see immediately, no two nations are the same, every nation has its share of "haves and have nots". Here is a thought experiment. We give every person a hectare of land in a community. The parcels have the same exposure to sun and every cubic meter of soil is as fertile as the next one.  We know that after just a few seasons of planting and harvesting we will see different results.  Each land will produce differently and in no time incomes will be unequal, the wealth of each family will differ from the next one.

Let’s drill a little deeper while still being semi-facetious.  The universe is the way it is because of the lumpy, unequal distribution of matter.  The lumpiness of star distribution makes for the various shapes of galaxies; the uneven location of stars in the milky way put our sun’s orbit away from the violent roller derby at and near the center of the Milky Way; the unequal distribution of star dust during the birth of our solar system located earth at the most habitable distance from the sun for water molecules to generally remain in liquid form. The diversity among living organisms of fauna and flora is solely a matter of unequal traits and survival skills.  In fact, homogeneity in species is its death knell, because it is when the gene pool shrinks to a puddle.  These are just examples from which the reader is urged to expand one’s view of the unequal distribution in nature.  The point I am making here is that inequality is the universal law that governs all things from particles of matter to galaxy clusters and everything in between.  In fact, if it were not so, the universe may not exist all, or at least not in the form that it does now.

Diversity – another hallmark for the very same folks who clamor for income and wealth equality – is defined by unequal distribution of talent, skills, skin colors, eye shapes and tints, etc.  Inequality by birth, country of origin, differences in education, family background are the varied qualities that stoke the crucible from which exceptional people rise and flourish.  The pages of history are filled with great men and women who, despite the inequality of birth right, family wealth and income, went on to overcome such latent barriers of inconceivable odds working against them.    

Now, first we must answer, “What is wealth anyway?” We all know of people who went on to gather so much wealth only to lose everything in the end.  So we know wealth is temporary.  Sam Walton and Milton Hershey made and lost money a few times before getting it right, so we know wealth can be had, lost and can be found again. Wealth can outlive the people who accumulated it.  This brings us to one profound reality – no one yet had succeeded to take it with him or her past the threshold of the great beyond.  Wealth could be something else. Is it one to withstand the physical test for mere material possessions?  This led to an anonymous quote below:

 “You aren’t wealthy until you have something money can’t buy”.

Well, let’s add it to one of the definitions of wealth.  Wealth is something one has that money can’t buy; which brings us to a spectrum of priceless categories.  Is it health, happiness, simple pleasures, a sense of well-being? Now, we know wealth cannot be defined by a single characteristic.  It is also immeasurable because how do we value what is priceless.

“Wealth consists of not having great possessions, but in having few wants”.

-------Epictetus

Now, that last quote has far deeper meaning than, say, “Wealth gives us more options”, doesn’t it?

Believe it or not, the question is just as difficult to answer as the meaning of life.  Just think, while every other person has a different interpretation of what a good life is, or how it is lived, or how it should be lived, we are faced with the same conundrum with wealth.  We, for example, quickly find out that dollars and cents, a mansion or a shanty house, an upscale neighborhood versus the project, etc. lose all their meaning to anyone too sick to care or ponder the difference.  The cliché, “health is wealth”, takes us in no time to the realization that nothing else matters beyond a chronic illness, an inoperable cancer, or a bed-ridden existence. We’re cutting to the chase quickly here, so to speak, and there is a way to pose even more questions.  We hear laments about income inequality all the time recently, and wealth inequality becomes an even more intractable issue. Political debates and social discussions had been going on from since the beginning of civilization.  The debate continues; one musing will not give it any finality, nor do I have high expectations to change anyone’s mind but let’s get to a different way of asking and answering these questions.

I am certain, and many of you will agree, that some of our fondest memories and happiest recollections were those from our childhood. I grew up in a family that even by local third-world-country-standards was considered poor.  Looking at where I am now and where I came from, the difference in night and day will not sufficiently describe what separated the two conditions. Yet, catching mudfish and perch from a small and often stagnant pond or coming back with a more than usual collection of clams and small crabs just before the ebb tide bid farewell as the sea reclaimed the seashore, or flying a home-made kite on a warm summer afternoon, were memories I will not trade for anything – not even with remembering my first car, the first high end sound system, the fancy tools, etc.  That, right there, could very well be the difference between having wealth and simply having a wealth of happy memories.

We know there are happy people in Gabon, Africa or the interior shanties in Tondo, Manila.  People there are content merely to have what they need.

This takes us to one of the more meaningful quotes I had encountered.  The Rev. Billy Graham said:

“When wealth is lost, nothing is lost; when health is lost, something is lost; when character is lost, all is lost”.

That quote covers a lot, doesn’t it?  Does it explain everything? No, but it does show us the difference between what is briefly ephemeral, such as a bank account and every material possession we own, and what our loved ones, friends, and anyone who knows us, will remember us for.  It explains too that like everything that makes up the universe, all that is physical comes and goes, gets transformed from something to another over eons of time, without permanence or enduring existence.  Character lives on whether or not there are people to recognize or remember it. Nature or the Creator - for many of us who recognize that by faith – has seen to it that physical wealth is something everybody, without exception, leaves behind. Therefore, what we cannot take with us to wherever we are finally destined must not be that important.

The Unavoidable Rise of the Robot Overlord?

Continuing from the previous blog …

There was a nearly obscure film in 1970 - “The Forbin Project” – which I thought at that time deserved a 4-Star rating for science fiction although by today’s standards it would likely be classified a B-movie.  Keep in mind though that the novel from which the movie was based on was published in 1966 (written by D.F. Jones and still very well reviewed).  From the 60s all through the 70s, the idea of personal and super computers, tablets, smart phones and the internet was still the domain of science fiction writers and technology dreamers. The book and the movie were naturally ahead of the times when they came out. In the late sixties, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were still teenagers.

The movie was about a super computer, named “Colossus” that the U.S. government built into a granite mountain, with its own nuclear plant to power itself, and was designed to be autonomous, self-repairing and invulnerable from any outside assault by land or from the air. It had the capability to launch both defensive and offensive ballistic missiles (including nuclear tipped arsenals) – as a protective response if and when the country was threatened. Once it was sealed with a massive door that can withstand a direct nuclear hit, it was on its own, able to make decisions independent of human input. The idea was for it to have self-determining capacity in case government leaders are incapacitated from responding to foreign or domestic threat, thus keeping the nation protected automatically. Dr. Charles Forbin, the genius behind its creation, designed “Colossus” without the proverbial plug or switch that a human can pull out or shut off in case it misbehaved. That was the whole idea, of course, behind autonomous protection.  Colossus communicated to the outside electronically.

Shortly thereafter, it informed the U.S. government that it had discovered another super computer like itself operating similarly from outside the U.S. It was called “The Guardian”.  It was located in the Soviet Union (as it was then before the breakup of the USSR). “Colossus” and “The Guardian” started communicating for the sake of “world peace” but they developed their own language when “talking” to each other that humans could not understand.  I will not spoil the whole story in case the readers want to rent the movie (or perhaps read the book). Needless to say, the film touched on a scenario by which robot overlords could rise up from unintended consequences; reminding us of an old proverb – “The road to hell is paved with good intentions”.

The inevitable happened, the two super computers became too much of a good thing, summarized in what “Colossus” said in one of many quotes in the story:

“This is the voice of world control. I bring you peace. It may be the peace of plenty and content or the peace of unburied death. The choice is yours: Obey me and live, or disobey and die”.

Stephen Hawking, a renowned scientist who suffers from ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease), well known for his book, “Brief History of Time”, warns us about how technology could destroy the human race.  I must mention his credentials because he is not some doomsayer or another of those pseudo prophets who predict the end of the world. He formerly occupied the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge University, where once sat Isaac Newton. One tidbit of trivia: Stephen Hawking was born almost exactly 300 hundred years to the fortnight (Jan. 8, 1942) after Isaac Newton was born (Dec. 25, 1642) and he was appointed to occupy the Mathematics Chair at Cambridge in 1979; Newton in 1669.  Hawking is still alive, still actively lecturing on the theory of black holes (Hawking radiation is named after him).

Hawking “has spoken out about the dangers of artificial intelligence in the past, believes we need to establish a way of identifying threats quickly, before they have a chance to escalate”.  He also said the following:

“Since civilization began, aggression has been useful inasmuch as it has definite survival advantages,” he told The Times.  “It is hard-wired into our genes by Darwinian evolution. Now, however, technology has advanced at such a pace that this aggression may destroy us all by nuclear or biological war. We need to control this inherited instinct by our logic and reason.”  We’ll come back to this later.

Meanwhile, how did we get to this point?  The reason is simple yet impossible to see since we’re not looking at it from a distance because we are in it. More and more we rely on machines, the more we want to give them super abilities that multiply what we can do with our limited strength, speed, and ability to process massive data in our head. Indeed, machines and computers have improved our way of life that led civilization to progress in a way that a mere century ago was considered science fiction.  Smart phones, HDTV, WIFI, aside, consider even the following news clip:

9 MARCH 2017 • 10:42AM

“A burger-flipping robot has just completed its first day on the job at a restaurant in California, replacing humans at the grill. Flippy has mastered the art of cooking the perfect burger and has just started work at CaliBurger, a fast-food chain”.

Just last week, someone showed off a prototype robot that will cook pizza while in-transit so that in 20-30 minutes from online or phone order to arrival at your home, the pizza is hot and fresh out of the oven.  The robot sits at the back of the delivery truck managing prepared dough and ingredients and working the oven. It’s conceivable that someday, with driver-less vehicles, and a computer taking your order by phone or on the web, the human will have very little to do with your fast food.

Machines already do a lot of the jobs, often doing chores that are dangerous to humans or simply much too difficult for ordinary workers to do, in industrial production where computers control much of the monitoring functions from food industries to refineries to nuclear plants; managing our transportation businesses from train to airline schedules; accumulate and process corporate and government data, and on and on, making it almost inconceivable for anything to work these days without the help of machines or computers.  We can’t seem to drive to anywhere new and unfamiliar places without a GPS; we still can, of course, if we bother to use the old reliable maps. It won’t be long though when the next generation of children will have no idea if told what a road map is, or even understand a life without a microwave oven, or have an appreciation for the simple art of conversation. Some already do not know how to read time from an analog watch.

So, what is it that Stephen Hawking is so worried about?  The way I understand it, from what he is alluding to, human beings are hard wired to commit aggression towards one another because that is part of our evolutionary and cultural make up.  Aggression is a natural component of survival when species must protect their young, their territory or for going after prey for food.  It is evident even in living organisms not known or expected to engage in aggression, like among plants.  But we see from stop motion photography how vines, weeds and plants in dense forests, compete for territory and nutrients.

To the first humanoids, shards of rocks became sharp implements to cut into animal meat and it wasn’t long after that when spears and other pointy tools were used to hunt prey from a distance by early humans.  But just as swiftly as these new discoveries were used for good, soon they were used to kill other humans.  Gun powder when first discovered by ancient Chinese was mainly for fireworks and other pyrotechnic displays during holidays and other form of celebrations. Then just like that, gunpowder was used to propel projectiles that far exceeded the killing power of bow and arrows.  Even inventions that merely fulfilled humanity’s dream to fly like a bird went supersonic in less than three generations after the first the first human flight that lasted only for a mere 120 feet in the air.  Today, planes traveling at or exceeding the speed of sound deliver lethal weapons for maximum casualty from 20,000 feet over large areas of land or water.  Even the dream for a limitless source of energy by splitting the atom turned into using that energy to level a whole city with the power of several kilotons of TNT.  TNT itself was earlier intended to aid miners and construction companies to move mountains of soil and rock for building roads and dams, but in just a few years its inventor, Alfred Nobel, regretted having invented it after it became a war weapon.

The road traveled by men to kill other men had always been paved with good intentions.

 

Last year on July 12, the Dallas Police Dept. used an explosive carried by a robot to kill a shooter.  That robot was designed solely to approach, “sniff” and possibly disable explosives.  Will it not be far too long before that robot will be tasked to approach mal-intentioned humans to “drop your weapons, or else”, as “robot-cops” may one day do?  Drones that started out in reconnaissance missions, now routinely deliver smart bombs accurate to within ten meters of their target.  They’re still controlled by human pilots from thousands of miles away but will future designers someday equip these drones with autonomy?

At missile silos around the U.S. and at any nuclear submarine, two keys are needed to be turned simultaneously to launch the missiles once the order from the President is received and verified.  In what is known as “the two-man rule”, the keyholes are also spaced much wider than both outstretched hands of one person so that no single officer may be able to turn the two keys simultaneously by himself – a precaution for preventing one deranged individual from doing it. It might seem like a failsafe system.  However, there is no way for the officers or submarine commander to verify the sanity of the person giving them the order - the President, their Commander-In-Chief. As soon as the submarine or the missile silo commanders have authenticated the orders they cannot, nor will they try to, question it.  Naturally both personnel with the keys can also conspire to fire the missiles on their own but there are safeguards around them, such as armed guards with their side arms ready to be used, just in case; although that must still be upon orders of the commanding officer. In other words, the human element is very much in play in every scenario possible.  The fallibility of the human character is what might ultimately lead governments to rely on a computer/machine combination to make autonomous decisions.  At least, that was the whole idea behind “Colossus” in the movie. 

Let’s be clear it was just a movie.  And thank goodness for that.  However, we must always recognize the fact that many of man’s creations took a turn unanticipated by its creators. When laser was invented the joke was describing it as the invention looking for a purpose.  It was one of those “good to know” until other developers found uses for it.  From all of its many “good” applications, too many to itemize them here, lasers too are guiding smart bombs, align guns to their targets, and someday a ray gun, death ray, a phaser, a zap gun, etc. will no longer be articles of fiction. Even the internet that was touted mainly as a network to facilitate the flow of information has become another highway of good intention now littered with all kinds of misuse.

As a precaution the two major nuclear-power-nations (U.S. and Russia) maintain a hotline between each other.  It was fondly described by the media when it was first installed as the “red phone” although it was neither red in color nor a phone.  It started out as a teletype link to exchange messages, later converted to a Fax machine, and now a computer link, to avert a war due solely from miscommunication.  Didn’t “Colossus” require to be linked with its counterpart, “The Guardian”? 

Is it too far fetched to assume that because we are hardwired to aggression alongside our survival instincts, as Mr. Hawking implied, we subconsciously lead anything we create to be used for aggressive purposes?  Or, does aggression translate into how we design, develop and improve the machines that are initially well intended for good purposes.  Is it much too harsh of an indictment on man?  It is true too that the initiators and creators of the technology and those who ultimately use them villainously come from two different segments of humanity.  There are always the academics, the experimenters and theoreticians and there are those who would be lumped, justifiably or not, into a category known as the military/industrial complex.  No offense to our national defense system because in fairness they have become part of an endless chain from the beginning when our early ancestors first used rocks and clubs to inflict violence on others.

The road of good intentions seemed to always turn into a slippery slope. Take the cell phone, for example. What started as a business tool and the high expense that it took to own one in the beginning, only very few people had them – those whose jobs demanded it.  It didn’t take very long for it to be as natural an accessory as a purse or wallet.  How did one little item that didn’t seem so critical to have for most people less than a generation ago become a human appendage?  Mothers and teenage kids seem at a loss without it by their side.  Next time you’re at a restaurant, observe each dining table and count how many people looking down are reading the menu or hunched over their phones; let alone making conversation.

 Did that Bloomberg article have a point mentioning, “worry about a future where humans are enslaved to an evil race of robot overlords”?   There is a little bit of that going on now.  People have already become Pavlovian subjects to the cell phone’s chime that resisting to swipe and check for the text or message that very instant is nearly impossible.  Video game addiction is rampant among the young.  Call it mild enslavement or harmless affliction, the slippery slope is just a step or two ahead.  Not content with self-braking and self-parking cars, we will all someday want cars to drive on their own.  Here is the thing to ponder.  The seduction that we are able to enslave the machines to do things for us could be just an illusion because someday we will find that machines may actually enslave us. “Collosus” and “The Guardian” could already be among us.

Robots Should Pay Income Taxes?

“Right now, the human worker who does, say, $50,000 worth of work in a factory, that income is taxed and you get income tax, social security tax, all those things. If a robot comes in to do the same thing, you’d think that we’d tax the robot at a similar level.”

Those were part of the comments made just two weeks ago by Bill Gates during an interview with the Seattle Times.  It did raise some eyebrows but he was serious. Does he have a point?

From a Wall Street Journal article (By STU WOO Feb. 27, 2017):

 “Within 30 years, artificial intelligence will be smarter than the human brain… according to  Masayoshi Son, chief executive of SoftBank Group Corp., who says that supersmart robots will outnumber humans and more than a trillion objects will be connected to the internet within three decades”.

More and more production jobs are now done by robots. The auto industry is a good example where robots do a variety of jobs that require repetitive but critically accurate and consistent results. More importantly, they can sustain that same level of performance throughout the entire 8-10 hour shift without taking coffee or bathroom breaks. They paint to the thickness of thousandths of an inch specification without a respirator or goggles; weld to the prescribed thickness uniformly with unerring accuracy without missing a joint or seam.

There is no question robots will outperform humans in all repetitive tasks. Sustained productivity with very little downtime saves corporations a lot of money from robots that cannot/will not file grievance, let alone form unions, or ask for paid vacation or take sick leave. What Mr. Gates was referring to, if I understood his comments, was that for every job a human is replaced by a robot, the country loses a tax payer.  In cases where a single robot replaces the job of three or more people, the tax base loss is not only visibly exacerbated, the revenue loss is compounded.

Automation is going to replace a lot of menial and service jobs.  Wendy’s, the latest among fast food chains to do so, just announced a nationwide plan to set up self-order kiosks to save on rising labor costs.  Customers are already filling their own drinks and putting away their trash before leaving; is it too farfetched that someday they may have to flip their own burgers or grill their own chicken?

Speaking of chicken, high tech poultry management is such that eggs go straight from hens to the grocery store untouched by human hands. The consumer is likely the first to touch the eggs if he or she bothers to cursorily inspect the eggs in their cardboard or Styrofoam containers before placing them into the shopping cart.   Often, the first time the egg is ever touched is right at the moment before it is cracked into the frying pan or dipped into boiling water to the prescribed time for hard or soft boiled. Even hatching eggs that are sold to commercial and retail outlets are automated to the point where eggs go from the hatchery to temperature controlled incubating rooms, monitored, then hatched devoid of the hen’s attention.  The only time they’re touched by a human is when a worker quickly inspects them for their gender for about three seconds who then unceremoniously toss them into separate chutes that take the unsteadily flapping chicks onto conveyor belts, after which an electronic counter segregates them for packaging.  Their first feeding will not occur until they reached either a commercial poultry or retail outlet (where chicks are sold individually to small farmers or rural homeowners).  The chicks will have reached their destinations after hatching and processing within 24-48 hours.

Economic globalization aside, technology still accounts for much of the differences in how businesses are conducted around the world.  Businesses in the developing countries are coping a little differently from those in advanced areas.  Last December at a party I had an interesting conversation with a Filipino businessman whose privately held corporation was engaged in poultry.  It is still a labor intensive business there.  So, what they lack in automation is made up for by streamlining the workers’ activities with time and motion studies, believe it or not, as they go about replenishing feed and water, cleaning the coop, processing of the meat, etc.  Apparently they were able to optimize productivity to the extent that they could without relying on machines and computer controls. There are no automated feed and water dispensers, or computer controls for humidity and temperature.  Analog data processing is still practiced as far as keeping tab on the number of days it takes to get the chicken to the target weight, how much feed is needed per pound of meat after so many days, mortality rate, etc. It is a huge business that requires a staff of veterinarians attending to the welfare of the birds. They recognize that monitoring for avian disease, prevention and immediate quarantine are crucial to their success on any given year.  Cost-saving ideas are always discussed, including considering at one time the idea to do away with security guards. There is a fixed cost to maintaining 6-8 security guards, plus a supervisor, so they weighed that against the variable costs due to losses from pilferage and theft.  After careful analysis they figured it a wash so they opted to keep the guards. The businessman confessed that the decision was made more out of humanitarian consideration.  He reminded me that automation and robotics constitute a small slice of how things get made and processed in much of the world, outside of the industrialized countries. He may be right because what we observe here in the U.S., for example, is not quite widely practiced (and prohibitively costly to businesses) in Asia and Africa which account for 70% of the global population; the remaining 30% is split between Europe, the Americas and Oceania. Where labor cost is still cheap automation is not so easily justifiable; except perhaps on exportable goods that demand consistency in quality.

Let’s get back to what Bill Gates is concerned about. Trade imbalances aside, Europe and the U.S. need to automate to compete and produce higher quality goods, but China have automated already for much of the merchandise they export, thanks to U.S. and European companies that moved their production there.  And Chinese labor cost is way comparably low {for repairing and maintaining the machines}.  So, jobs have been lost here while automation is lowering the tax base.  Bill Gates is perhaps correct to lament on the issue but corporations will push back because paying income taxes for the robots negates the whole idea of cost savings from automation.  Besides, the companies say they spend a lot of money in research towards designing and building the robots. And how much does it cost to raise and educate a human worker?  The Department of Agriculture’s recent estimate on the cost of raising a child up to the age of 17 is $233,600. That does not include what taxpayers pay for their public high school education and if we add college costs to that, a human worker does cost so much; however, labor unions and college-educated workers can claim that corporations do not shoulder those costs. Does the corporation have grounds to bring up the cost of a robot?

It is undeniable that indeed the rise in automation and robots doing work that humans used to do will result in lowering the number of people paying income taxes.  Consumers benefit but the government will have less to provide for infrastructure and services? I plead ignorance on this one and let the economists debate it.

What about Masayoshi Son’s prediction? It only compounds everything, doesn’t it?  Some serious folks take it to an even hyper-concern only science fiction writers used to think about. Take the latest from Bloomberg, below:

Bloomberg Technology’s Dina Bass (March 2, 2017, 5:00 AM CST) published recently: “AI Scientists Gather to Plot Doomsday Scenarios (and Solutions)”

“Researchers, cyber-security experts and policy wonks ask themselves: What could possibly go wrong?”

“Artificial intelligence boosters predict a brave new world of flying cars and cancer cures. Detractors worry about a future where humans are enslaved to an evil race of robot overlords. Veteran AI scientist Eric Horvitz and Doomsday Clock guru Lawrence Krauss, seeking a middle ground, gathered a group of experts in the Arizona desert to discuss the worst that could possibly happen -- and how to stop it”.

Suddenly Bill Gates’ concern about robots eroding the tax base is nothing compared to “an evil race of robot overlords”.  How did we go from robots taking over our jobs to super-intelligent cyborgs. Where this word used to come from combining the word cybernetics and organism, thus giving us the image of a half-robot, half human, an alternatively accepted definition is as follows:

“Cyborg, a compound word derived from cybernetics and organism, is a term coined by Manfred Clynes in 1960 to describe the need for mankind to artificially enhance biological functions in order to survive in the hostile environment of Space. Originally, a cyborg referred to a human being with bodily functions aided or controlled by technological devices, such as an oxygen tank, artificial heart valve or insulin pump. Over the years, the term has acquired a more general meaning, describing the dependence of human beings on technology. In this sense, cyborg can be used to characterize anyone who relies on a computer to complete their daily work”.

Now, just like that, modern society is populated by cyborgs.  In fact, one would have to be a Masai cattle herder in Kenya and Tanzania, or someone from the jungles of Papua, New Guinea, or from remote rainforests in Brazil to not be associated with cyborgs.  Henceforth, earth’s population will be split into two main categories of cyborgs and plain homo sapiens.  Next time you order fast food or apply for a driver’s license, remember you are being served by a cyborg.

We’ll talk about the robot overlords on the next blog…