AI finally catches up to… cows?

Have you heard the news? Super-intelligent machines are plotting to take all of our jobs during breakfast before deciding over their lunchtime soup and salad whether or not they want to kill us all!

What’s that you say? You want proof - or at least a tiny shred of evidence? Well look no further than this: A "learning robot” managed to escape from it’s fenced-in training area. Surely, this is nothing less than Skynet in the making!
Well. Maybe not quite… You see, the engineer kinda forgot to close (much less lock) the gate. The robot, like any decent overgrown Roomba vacuum cleaner, eventually found it’s way out of its pen and went cavorting around the town... until its battery died while it was in the middle of a nearby street. And then to prove that it wasn’t a fluke, the robot escaped... AGAIN!  (No word on whether or not the gate was closed the second time.)

I confess that I’m being a bit facetious here. I will say that I do believe that technology/AI/automation is reaching a level of sophistication that will eliminate a lot of jobs. I could even see a very real potential for not-quite-smart-enough AI in charge of cars or anti-aircraft lasers causing a real and very serious danger to people. Even more so, it appears that AI may take over defending our skies in the not-too-distant future. 

On the other hand, before I’ll believe that Skynet is coming for me, I’d like to see evidence that robots are doing more than escaping from their pens similar to how cows, sheep, and dogs have been giving their owners the slip and even stopping traffic for millennia. There’s at least one 2,000 year old parable in The Bible of sheep performing similar feats, and I imagine there’s other similar stories in ancient literature/historical accounts. 

I’m ready to say that there’s plenty of prior art to go around on this one. 

AI Flight Simulator Defeats 'Top Gun’ Pilots

In a triumph of AI, scientists have built a flight simulator that can consistently beat the best human pilots - even when the humans are given superior [virtual] aircraft. What’s more, the AI used only a $500 low-end consumer grade computer. 

This is a significant advance in technology. It’s sure to be replicated by military powers all over the world, and I’ll go out on a limb and say that it greatly increases the odds that one day human fighter pilots will be mostly [if not completely] replaced by drones. 

How is this done? Well, first let’s talk about how modern “dogfights" work. Basically, they don’t - and they really haven’t since Vietnam. Aircraft combat today has a 100-mile range and is called “Beyond Visual Range” combat.  In fact, United States General Normal Schwarzkopf was quoted as saying “During the first three days of the war, when control of the air was greatly contested, what it basically amounted to was the Iraqi aircraft would take off, pull up their landing gear, and blow up.”

That said, air combat is something that can be essentially be reduced to a math problem. There are only so many possible changes in speed and direction that a pilot can make, and BVR combat becomes a math problem. In other words, you want to get within range, fire a missile, and get out in a way that makes the other guy go boom without your plane going boom. Computers are better at such math than people are. 

I would say that this does raise a very legitimate moral/legal/ethical debate about whether/how to let machines make kill decisions - and despite my personal preferences, I could see legitimate arguments on both sides of the issue. I wouldn’t trust this machine to make any sort of decision on who to go to war with, and I don’t think it means that Skynet or the Singularity is imminent. 

Umpires, Farmers, and Ranchers

Question: What do a baseball umpire, a farmer, and a rancher all have in common?

Answer: all three have repetitive jobs that can be automated and done by machines that don’t get tired and don’t care much about work-life balance.

Complaining/protesting, trying to hold back the technology, and/or demanding an increase in the minimum wage don’t seem like solutions that scale very well.

On the other hand, learning enough about technology, programming, and/or AI so that you can solve problems yourself does seem like it would scale... Unless of course you agree with Charles H. Duell, who famously claimed (in 1899) that "Everything that can be invented has been invented."