Robot Sophia inspiring — until lights go out
Every fortnight, before I sit down to write this column, my mind runs, a bit like a rhizome, in different directions, surrendering often to serendipity. This is in part because I always try to find something that lies in between the shadows and lights of discussions on global and national political economic trends or states of affairs.
Like most people who write on current affairs for a living — inasmuch as it is possible — I usually try to find a hook or an angle, something that meets the basic requirements of proximity, time, relevance and impact. The hook may be an event or a statement by a political leader or public intellectual, or any new development in the world of ideas and of “things”.
The problem is that once I find a hook, the mind sets off (like a rhizome) and I rarely know, before I start writing, where I will end up. The act of writing becomes an exploration, a way of trying to make sense of things. It would be rather foolish to look at the world through a single lens. Only distinguished professors have that (dubious) privilege.
Nonetheless, I was firm in the intention to write about the ways in which information technology, robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) could reshape corporate strategies, improve co-ordination and specification in production, the future of work and the fantastic opportunities there are for innovation.
I thought about how fewer tasks per single occupation, fewer occupations per stage of production, the tendency towards efficiency in production and of workers who surf the learning curve while workplaces can be modernised and optimised by technological innovation. I imagined that these processes would be guided and co-ordinated by innovative technologies that ensured there was no replication or superfluous tasks in production facilities. I thought of the ways in which information and communication technology can facilitate the efficiency co-ordination trade-offs … Then the lights went out. I had arrived at a relative’s home in Johannesburg some time in the afternoon. Within a few hours after sunset the family were (back) in darkness.
We were back where we were four decades ago, when the nine of us — my parents and the seven children — lived in a two-bedroom dwelling, reading by candlelight, cooking food on a Primus stove and later on a coal stove that also served as a space heater in our asbestos-roofed matchbox home without a ceiling.
Fumbling with the blues, I adjusted the flame of the paraffin lamp. I reflected on the ways in which populism, so appealing to an increasing number of South Africans, would have us return to darker days by starting over again, and going back, much further back, in the ways Pol Pot sought to reset the clock in Cambodia, force everyone back to the land and remove all traces of foreignness; the ways populist indigenisation and crude ideological reordering eventually destroyed the political economies of Zimbabwe and Venezuela, for no other reason than to erase foreign or nonindigenous influences.
Over the days before writing this essay I watched a video clip of the social humanoid robot Sophia in Ethiopia, and was especially impressed by how open the Ethiopians were to advances in AI and robotics. No one seemed to care that Sophia had pale skin and creepy yellow-brown eyes.
I do not embrace Sophia uncritically, but the technology that went into its creation is what continues to clear a new path for AI. The wave of AI has created inflated expectations and is high on the hype curve. It has also become a type of portmanteau concept for everything that everyone wants. Yet AI, robotics and technological innovation can improve manufacturing and industry, lessening the back-breaking burden that workers carry.
While I was watching the flames of candles dancing in the dark, it dawned on me again for the nth time how futile are the best-laid plans and how the most brilliant ideas about technological innovation and exploiting advances in AI can be laid to waste by a single infrastructural deficit: the absence of reliable and progressive sources of energy.
It matters naught whether people come out on the side of workers or of management, whether they support private profit generation or a Soviet-style permutation of state-directed redirection of capital to government consumption and distribution. The one thing people can agree on is that none of this is possible in the absence of a reliable source of energy.
This is where technological innovation, imagination and exploration meet the cold hard world of physical infrastructure and sources of energy.
IT HAS ALSO BECOME A TYPE OF PORTMANTEAU CONCEPT THAT HOLDS EVERYTHING THAT EVERYONE WANTS OR THINKS THEY NEED