Machines of Loving Grace Quotes

“However, one intriguing shift that suggests there are limits to automation was the recent decision by Toyota to systematically put working humans back into the manufacturing process. In quality and manufacturing on a mass scale, Toyota has been a global leader in automation technologies based on the corporate philosophy of kaizen (Japanese for “good change”) or continuous improvement. After pushing its automation processes toward lights-out manufacturing, the company realized that automated factories do not improve themselves. Once Toyota had extraordinary craftsmen that were known as Kami-sama, or “gods” who had the ability to make anything, according to Toyota president Akio Toyoda.49 The craftsmen also had the human ability to act creatively and thus improve the manufacturing process. Now, to add flexibility and creativity back into their factories, Toyota chose to restore a hundred “manual-intensive” workspaces.”
― John Markoff, Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots

“What will happen if our labor is no longer needed? If jobs for warehouse workers, garbage collectors, doctors, lawyers, and journalists are displaced by technology?”
― John Markoff, Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots

“One of those was Gary Bradski, an expert in machine vision at Intel Labs in Santa Clara. The company was the world’s largest chipmaker and had developed a manufacturing strategy called “copy exact,” a way of developing next-generation manufacturing techniques to make ever-smaller chips. Intel would develop a new technology at a prototype facility and then export that process to wherever it planned to produce the denser chips in volume. It was a system that required discipline, and Bradski was a bit of a “Wild Duck”—a term that IBM originally used to describe employees who refused to fly in formation—compared to typical engineers in Intel’s regimented semiconductor manufacturing culture. A refugee from the high-flying finance world of “quants” on the East Coast, Bradski arrived at Intel in 1996 and was forced to spend a year doing boring grunt work, like developing an image-processing software library for factory automation applications. After paying his dues, he was moved to the chipmaker’s research laboratory and started researching interesting projects. Bradski had grown up in Palo Alto before leaving to study physics and artificial intelligence at Berkeley and Boston University. He returned because he had been bitten by the Silicon Valley entrepreneurial bug.”
― John Markoff, Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots

“I believe that sociable technology will always disappoint because it promises what it can’t deliver,” Turkle writes. “It promises friendship but can only deliver ‘performances.’ Do we really want to be in the business of manufacturing friends that will never be friends?”
― John Markoff, Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots

“It may take seconds for a human sitting in the driver’s seat, possibly distracted by an email or worse, to return to “situational awareness” and safely resume control of the car. Indeed the Google researchers may have already come up against the limits to autonomous driving. There is currently a growing consensus that the “handoff” problem—returning manual control of an autonomous car to a human in the event of an emergency—may not actually be a solvable one.”
― John Markoff, Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots

“The separation of the fields of AI and human-computer interaction, or HCI, is partly a question of approach, but it’s also an ethical stance about designing humans either into or out of the systems we create.”
― John Markoff, Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots

“There is a fundamental distinction, however, between approaches to designing technology to benefit humans and designing technology as an end in itself. Today, that distinction is expressed in whether increasingly capable computers, software, and robots are designed to assist human users or to replace them.”
― John Markoff, Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots

“Today Shakey’s original DNA can be found in everything from the Kiva warehouse robot and Google’s autonomous car to Apple’s Siri intelligent assistant.”
― John Markoff, Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots

“In his first year at Intel he met some superstar Russian software designers who worked under contract for the chipmaker, and he realized that they could be an important resource for him.”
― John Markoff, Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots

“Nevertheless, the DARPA Robotics Challenge did what it was designed to do: expose the limits of today’s robotic systems.”
― John Markoff, Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots

“What Homestead-Miami also made clear was that there are two separate paths forward in defining the approaching world of humans and robots, one moving toward the man-machine symbiosis that J. C. R. Licklider had espoused and another in which machines will increasingly supplant humans. Just as Norbert Wiener realized at the onset of the computer and robotics age, one of the future possibilities will be bleak for humans. The way out of that cul-de-sac will be to follow in Terry Winograd’s footsteps by placing the human in the center of the design.”
― John Markoff, Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots

“Google’s acquisition of an R & D company closely linked to the military instigated a round of speculation. Many suggested that Google, having bought a military robotics firm, might become a weapons maker. Nothing could have been further from the truth. In his discussions with the technologists at the companies he was acquiring, Rubin sketched out a vision of robots that would safely complete tasks performed by delivery workers at UPS and FedEx.”
― John Markoff, Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots

“work. At the same time, Zakos attended conferences, making assertions that when companies ran A-B testing that compared the way the Cybertwins responded to text-based questions to the way humans in call centers responded to text-based questions, the Cybertwins outperformed the humans in customer satisfaction. They boasted that when they deployed a commercial system on the website of National Australia Bank, the country’s largest bank, more than 90 percent of visitors to the site believed that they were interacting with a human rather than a software program.”
― John Markoff, Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots

“between 2007 and 2012 the U.S. workforce gained 387,000 managers while losing almost two million clerical jobs.”
― John Markoff, Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots

“That is at the heart of the concept of “scale,” which is very much a common denominator in motivating the region’s programmers, hardware hackers, and venture capitalists. It is not enough to make a profit, or to create something that is beautiful. It has to have an impact. It has to be something that goes under 95 percent of the world’s Christmas trees, or offers clean water or electricity to billions of people.”
― John Markoff, Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots

“Although driverless cars will displace millions of jobs, they will also save many lives. Today, decisions about implementing technologies are made largely on the basis of profitability and efficiency, but there is an obvious need for a new moral calculus. The devil, however, is in more than the details. As with nuclear weapons and nuclear power, artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and robotics will have society-wide consequences, both intended and unintended, in the next decade.”
― John Markoff, Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots