Robot Magician Rejected by Magic Circle for Lacking Human Touch

A robot magician called D4YRL was rejected as a member of the Magic Circle last week for being insufficiently human.

While D4YRL’s tricks were exemplary, the organization decided “he” did not engage the audience’s emotions as a flesh-and-blood performer would.

In her new book, We Are Not Machines, the FT journalist Sarah O’Connor examines how AI is changing jobs and, in the process, changing people. She spends time with Amazon employees whose tasks are constantly surveilled and with staff in India and Costa Rica who watch hours of video footage to train the AI systems monitoring warehouses.

“We think we’re robotising our work, but what if we’re robotising ourselves?” she asks.

She talks to translators who feel the joy has drained out of their work. They now spend their days correcting mediocre AI-generated text for a fraction of the pay instead of exercising their creativity, a job known as machine translation post-editing.

“I want to have something creative, but I’m not sure that I can have a creative job that’s not endangered,” one translator, Petr, tells her. “Everywhere you step, there’s AI.”

O’Connor also reviews evidence that people may be reading, thinking and understanding less as they lean on technological shortcuts, potentially changing the nature of human intelligence.

Her conclusion is not that society should resist AI altogether but that people should think more carefully about which aspects of work should be automated. Just because a robot may technically be able to perform a task does not mean it should, she argues.

O’Connor makes that point as she watches a Dutch nurse caring for an elderly patient at home with a humour and empathy that a robot carer could not provide.

“Technology is designed by people, made by people, and adopted by people,” she says. “It is perfectly reasonable for policymakers, business leaders, workers and consumers to say ‘yes’ to some uses of new technology, or workplace changes induced by technology, and ‘no’ to others.”

O’Connor finds stark differences in how technology affects working lives depending on workers’ bargaining power. In Sweden, she visits a mine in Renström where staff and bosses worked together on bringing in autonomous underground trucks that now operate 800 metres below the surface.

She also talks to organisers of the Hollywood writers’ strike, whose leverage over the studios allowed them to win considerable control over whether and how AI is deployed in the creative process.

For most workers who lack that leverage, governments may have to set the boundaries. In the UK the Trades Union Congress and the Institute for Public Policy Research have called for employees to be given the right to negotiate before new technology is deployed in their workplace.

O’Connor notes the disproportionate influence of the men behind the AI models. She points to Elon Musk’s growing power after the SpaceX IPO and a paper showing that SpaceX holds a 75% market share of everything humanity sends into space. The paper’s author, Alessio Terzi of the University of Cambridge, compares Musk’s dominance to the East India Company at the height of its power in the 1820s.

Musk envisions a growing role for humanoid robots and refuses to cooperate with unions, claiming they “create a lords and peasants kind of thing.” O’Connor argues that policymakers and the public should not accept without question the vision of relentless AI and robotics in every aspect of work.

With the aid of technology, she writes, “the future of work can be more worthy of the human mind, more careful of the human body, more satisfying to the human soul, but not without a fight.”