What if Barbie could pass the Turing Test?

If you’re a movie fan or a cryptologist, you probably know who Alan Turing was.  In the movie ‘The Imitation Game’, the code breaker savant was portrayed by the omnipresent Benedict Cumberbatch.  Among his contributions to society is the Turing Test. A machine passes the test when a human interlocutor cannot determine if they are conversing with said machine or with a human.

Toymaker Mattel now endeavors to have its classic doll, Barbie, pass the Turing Test – at least when conversing with a 9 year-old girl.  In a wonderful article in the New York Times magazine, James Vlahos describes the development of a soon-to-be released Barbie with the artificial intelligence to hold a real conversation with its (her?) human companion. 

What most interested me is the idea that it’s not necessary to pass the Turing Test if your human companion knows a machine’s limitations but treats it like a human anyway.  If you’ve had kids (or remember being one), you know that a youngster can have elaborate, imaginary conversations with a stuffed bunny, the family pet or with Barbie.  No response required. 

So, what if Barbie could talk back?  Would a child know that Barbie is just a toy just as she knows that Fido is just a dog?  Probably.  Would Barbie pass the Turing Test?  Probably not.

The implications are interesting if not yet well understood.  A study done by economists at Deloitte and Oxford University reports that technology has been changing the nature of the work we do for centuries, eliminating the most monotonous, dangerous or physically challenging work.  Yet, when technology destroyed jobs, it created many more new ones.

The report also provides a list of those likely to lose their jobs to technology in the next 20 years. At the top of the list – are you ready for this? – Telephone Salesperson.

It took a moment for that to sink in.  What if the recorded robo-call you received just as you sat down to dinner was from Barbie instead of a recorded message?  Or, to turn it around, what if Barbie were programmed to answer 800 numbers instead of being programmed to talk with 9 year-olds?  Hold queues would disappear. 

Could she handle it?  Maybe not today…. But soon!

What of the workforce as a whole?  It’s easy to assess the historical impact of creative destruction on people’s jobs.  Assembly line workers who lost jobs to robots needed to be retrained for something new. 

On the other hand, it was once thought that accountants would lose their jobs to Excel Spreadsheets.  Instead, they have prospered by using that tool to offer new services. 

And, so it goes.  Jobs that barely existed at the turn of the Century are now plentiful --- webmasters, solar panel installers, optical engineers – while others have faded away – telephone operators, draftsmen, travel agents.

Futurists like MIT’s David Autor and Andrew McAfee suggest that we might see a barbell effect.  Those in very high skill professions – brain surgeons, for example – will use technology to be more productive and effective at their jobs.  Others, like legal secretaries and the aforementioned Telephone Sales people, are vulnerable to being pushed down the compensation ladder to personal service jobs like nursing assistants or hotel workers. So, high-income professions will become more productive and create more value while low-income jobs become more numerous.  The middle gets hollowed out.

McAfee is optimistic, telling the Huffington Post “the technological progress we are experiencing is the best economic news on the planet, bar none. It will increase the material bounty of our world, giving us higher volume, more variety and better quality goods and services at lower prices.”

He worries, however, about how quickly the workforce can adapt.  Our public schools still prepare students for the jobs of the 20^th Century.  Our infrastructure is crumbling and our government’s policies stifle entrepreneurs.

Technology improves productivity and drives economic growth.  People lose jobs as it happens.  It’s an unstoppable force. 

Big companies and government are not driving these changes.  Consumers are.  We prefer low-friction, efficient service.  It’s easier to shop on your smartphone than to go to Wal-Mart.  It’s easier to print your boarding passes at home than to wait in line at the airport.  And, it’s easier to send an email than to mail a letter. 

We can’t stop the unstoppable.  We need to find ways to deal with it.

WHO WILL LEAD?

Governor Cuomo, thanks for the big, fat favor

Welcome to New York… That’s what my property tax bill might have said when we moved back to our home state.  My taxes are higher than my mortgage payments.

I suppose that may or not be true for every resident of the state.  However, this much is true:  New York has the highest tax burden and the secondhighest amount of public debt per capita in the country.  So, despite taking more of my income than any other state, our government can’t seem to improve its balance sheet.

All of this was rolling around in the back of my mind while I was listening to one of my favorite talk shows on public radio.  At noon each weekday, Evan Dawson interrogates reality on WXXI, our local NPR affiliate.  He is incisive and upbeat.  Listening to his show is a great way to learn about our community – locally, nationally and globally.

Last Tuesday’s show featured University of Rochester President Joel Seligman and others leading an initiative to “win” one of three $500 Million economic development “prizes” being offered by the state government and touted by our governor, Andrew Cuomo, as part of his commitment to upstate New York. 

I came away impressed by Seligman and his colleagues and feeling that our endeavor was in good hands. 

But, here’s the question no one bothers to ask…  Why are competing to “win” back our own money?

The very idea that we should compete for the benefit of tax dollars is appalling. 

And, if we “win” (I can’t seem to stop myself from putting the word in quotes), the governor will no doubt show up in town and act like he is doing us a big, fat favor.

He’s done it before.  During his reelection campaign, he designated $3 Million to the environmental cleanup of a new commercial development in a nearby Finger Lakes community and then declared that it was the kind of “investment” the state would make “all day long”, as though he was doing us a big, fat favor. 

No doubt the project will create some construction jobs for the duration of the project.  And, no doubt the resulting development will provide some retail and service jobs for the longer term.  However, the $3 Million goes into the pockets of the already wealthy real estate owners and developers driving the project.

Thanks for the big, fat favor, Andy.

This paradigm is so ingrained in the public mind that no one even questions it anymore. 

The mentality also affects our thinking in other endeavors.  The state takes some of our tax dollars and gives it back to the school districts that educate our children.  Now, the governor – in an apparent effort to make scapegoats of teachers – is specifying how they should be evaluated.

Whether you agree with his ideas on how to evaluate teachers of not, you have to wonder why our money has to go to Albany so that some group of bureaucrats can decide how our school systems should be managed. 

There is a financial cost to sending money to a central government (economists call it ‘agency cost’).  And, there is a non-financial cost to our community to placing our future in the hands of people who don’t live here and are subject to political and social agendas that don’t necessarily serve our local interests.

It’s time to place these events in perspective.  Our high taxes and bureaucracy have cost us jobs and endangered the future of the (once) Empire State.  Local employers who have the resources often invest in projects to expand their businesses in other states.  Others have left the state completely.  Meanwhile, a recent study has judged New York to be one of the hardest states in the nation to start a small business. 

If the governor wants to do us a big, fat favor, he could start by eliminating a bloated state bureaucracy and lowering our tax bill so we don’t have to compete to “win” back something that was ours to begin with.

Then he can stop doing us big, fat favors.

WHO WILL LEAD?