David Ewing Duncan Is Ready for the Robot Revolution

David Ewing Duncan, the award-winning science journalist and author, has just returned from giving a talk at Founders Forum, in London, called “Why We Love and Fear Technology.” For the last two years Duncan—a contributor to Vanity Fair, Wired, and the Atlantic—has been pairing his journalistic expertise with his imagination to ponder where advancements in robotics and artificial intelligence may soon take us. The result of this hybrid reporting/fantasizing process is his intensely readable, downright terrifying, and surprisingly uplifting new book, Talking to Robots.

In London, he says, conference attendees seemed preoccupied with the question of whether this technological moment—of A.I., automation, and robotic puberty—is really all that different from the tech revolutions of the past. “I don’t know what happened when fire was discovered, but I suspect there were pro-fire and anti-fire people,” Duncan says. “People who loved fire, ‘Oh, my God, we can cook meat.’ And people who were afraid of fire because it can kill you.” In short order, we’re discussing a timeline of humanity’s greatest achievements: how Roman road-building enabled empire-creation; how the invention of movable type created mass literacy; the ins and outs of the Industrial Revolution; and the mechanization boom at the turn of the 20th century when trains went electric, airplanes took flight, and telephones began to ring in every household.

So, what’s different about this moment? “There’s so many new technologies happening at the same time that they’re feeding off of each other, [creating] this exponential effect,” says Duncan. “The idea with this book was to take several aspects of humanity—from warfare, to relationships, to health—and to take these new technologies and ask, what would it mean to succeed at what we’re trying to put together with these technologies? How can it go really well and how might it go horribly bad?”

Duncan has kept a watchful eye on the rapidly evolving role of A.I. across the spectrum of human experience. The hyperbolic, anthropomorphized—robopomorphized?—versions of what he witnessed became chapters of the book, such as Politician Bot and Journalism Bot, stories inspired by the actual events of the 2016 presidential election and the advent of A.I.-generated news headlines. The effects of such advancements played out in front of the author with incomprehensible speed. Job automation, for instance, became so prolific so quickly—from the near-extinction of blue-collar jobs to the quantum trading skills now required of financiers—that the American workforce is still reeling from whiplash. “We’ve had automation for hundreds of years, but we’ve always been able to find new ways for people to be employed,” says Duncan. “New technologies have created whole new industries. But right now, we’re seeing that, yeah, there may be jobs, but are they the jobs that we really want?” This reality, taken to its potential extreme, is explored in a chapter called The %$@! Robot That Swiped My Job. For a good time, read Coffee Delivery Bot. For a good cry, try Memory Bot or Teddy Bot. If you want to never sleep again, Warrior Bot is for you.

“But everybody just wants to talk about Sex Bot,” Duncan says. He’s talking about robots you can have sex with, in case that’s not clear, and Sex Bot is one of the only robots in Duncan’s book that already exists. “Really, the whole point of that chapter is how technology might impact us in terms of intimacy and relationships,” he says. In other words, “it’s not just sex.”

Duncan, as someone who actually spends most of his time exploring real-world health, biomedical, and technological issues such as gene editing, neuroplasticity, and cloning, is willing to go down any robot-centric rabbit hole. What could have been a dense read, thick with jargon and complex concepts, is surprisingly playful and tender. It’s also uniquely creative. “This book was very experimental, certainly for me,” he says. “I don’t know that many books that are trying to be both nonfiction and fiction, so I needed help from ‘human collaborators.’ That also became a frame for the book, asking smart people, ‘What robot would you like to meet in the future or are afraid of meeting and why?’”

Source: Vanityfair.com

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