Houses are hidden in the shadows of subtropical rainforest in Brisbane’s western suburbs. Horses graze on pastures and road signs warn of deer and kangaroos.
The suburb of Anstead, nestled between a bend in the river and the foothills of the D’Aguilar Mountains, may seem like the wrong place to live for a Polish-born management professor who believes we must embrace the age of artificial intelligence.
But all is not as it seems at Marek Kowalkiewicz’s home, surrounded by rubber trees.
“When I moved here from Silicon Valley, my kids were about 5 years old and had no idea what an iPad was,” he said from his balcony overlooking his property. “From 9pm to 5pm, where I am, there is a world that is permeated with technology, and then there is a world that is superficially less permeated with technology.”
Today is the first Monday in March, and Kowalkiewicz is just hours away from the release of The Algorithmic Economy: AI and the Rise of Digital Minions. In his debut book, the Queensland University of Technology professor explores how a new era, driven in part by non-human agents, has been emerging for years, in ways that are not always visible and little understood. have gradually reshaped our economies and societies.
Mr Kowalkiewicz admits that until recently, even he, the founding director of the QUT Center for Digital Economy Research, had no idea what it was. At the time, he believed that algorithms cannot be thought of as agents in our world, but simply pieces of code that follow human instructions.
“I was wrong,” he admits in the book.
With eyes opened to this new form of agency, Kowalkiewicz realized how it has affected our lives over the years in a variety of ways, from the absurd to the transcendent to the horrifying. I noticed that. And, an extremely optimistic person when it comes to technology, he believes that if we want to ensure that algorithms contribute to a better world rather than a dystopian future, “the role of people is more important than ever.” I realized that there is.
In this “weird” new economy that Kowalkiewicz describes, one that we are steadily accepting as reality, algorithmic controllers assign jobs to rideshare drivers and essentially fire drivers with poor ratings. do. When you step into a robotaxi in San Francisco, you’ll be driven by an algorithm. When you apply for a job, your resume may be scanned by an algorithm. And this is just the beginning. A new cryptocurrency trading venture capital fund is “completely devoid of humans” from the CEO down.
Kowalkiewicz is not afraid that technology will replace us. Rather, he argues, we are living at the dawn of an “age of expansion.” With the advent of the Internet in the 90s and his 00s, we ushered in the “age of digitalization”, that is, the “people’s economy”, in which individuals can compete with companies, but today new agents, viz. Algorithms are empowered. But humans can maintain and strengthen their power if we learn to assert our agency.
In fact, later that night, he wore his trademark “Minion Yellow” Nikes, jeans, a fitted T-shirt and a blazer to his book launch at the Queensland AI Hub in the Fortitude Valley nightclub district. He plans to perform in front of an audience of about 100 people. Rather than fearing the algorithmic economy, smart companies and individuals can now summon “superhuman” serfs to do their bidding.
“For me, I welcome the digital minions,” Kowalkiewicz says to applause.
BA squat creature crouches beside a weed-choked ravine on the border of Kowalkiewicz’s Anstead property. If you look at it from a distance, it might look like a wombat. Kowalkiewicz somewhat sarcastically refers to the robot lawnmower as “Bolt.” It’s electrified, but it’s not Usain.
A robot vacuum cleaner roams the pool. Inside, Bumper 1 and Bumper 2, like Goethe’s magic brooms, mop the wooden floors. When Kowalkiewicz enters the room, the lights turn on.
“As soon as we leave the house, the house starts getting busy. All the robots come out,” he says. “Robots that move, robots that see, and robots that listen.”
According to Kowalkiewicz, robots are embodied algorithms. Perhaps not as much as Kowalkiewicz, but most of us have been inviting robots and algorithms into our homes for years, and they now form a kind of wallpaper. We realize that algorithms with agency swirl around us until we actually encounter them.
They even catch Kowalkiewicz by surprise. On a rainy winter night, Kowalkiewicz slipped on a trail through the nearby Mogill Forest. Before he could assess his injuries, a “digital minion” on his wrist determined the fall was serious and alerted his wife if he couldn’t react within 20 seconds. Mr. Kowalkiewicz gave the OK and canceled his call.
Kowalkiewicz’s book is full of anecdotes about encounters with such algorithms, not all of which are instructive.
In some cases, such as the hilarious bidding war between rival algorithms in 2011, which failed to sell a biology book about flies on Amazon for more than $23.6 million, Some are incompetent.
Other far more sinister real-world effects of algorithms are well-documented. In the United States, pedestrians have been mowed down by robot taxis. Prisoner refused bail partly on software advice. In Australia, welfare recipients are unfairly and illegally pursued by algorithmic debt collectors in what has come to be known as robodebt. In 2020, students in the UK took to the streets after being denied university admissions based on digital calculations. Their cry of “fuck algorithms” was a “defining moment” for Kowalkiewicz and the inspiration for his book.
To a technology enthusiast with a background in software development, it seemed confusing that students were disparaging the software. Algorithms simply follow instructions from human programmers. It implied a kind of subjectivity that Kowalkiewicz initially rejected.
Yes, the algorithm was simply following human instructions, but its level of autonomy meant that doing so could result in “unexpected” and even “unjust” consequences in the eyes of its creators in the real world. It meant. Here Kowalkiewicz realized that a new kind of subjectivity, as such, should not be left alone.
Kowalkiewicz’s book is aimed at businesses and entrepreneurs about how to corral algorithms to their benefit.
But while this is primarily a guide to making money in the new economy he describes, he also implores us not to let it “spiral out of control.” The key to this, he argues, is to assert human agency through digital literacy.
“Instead of quitting, [generative] We need to start AI experiments, GenAI education. ”
Kowalkiewicz argues that what unites many of the strange and malicious encounters between humans and algorithms is our misunderstanding of what algorithms are capable of.
An algorithm is a “recipe-like” set of step-by-step instructions for a computer. Algorithms may be very good, even “superhuman” at doing their job within defined parameters, but these minions are more capable of overcoming unforeseen challenges. It requires an adaptable human brain.
Flexibility and interpretation are skills that “cannot be easily reduced to coded rules,” Kowalkiewicz writes, and are areas where humans can outperform algorithms in the “foreseeable” future. There is.
Kowalkiewicz was asked at the book launch how to develop these skills. Try new technology, harness its power and learn its shortcomings, he answers.
“That’s exactly why we have so many robots in our homes, some of which are completely useless,” he says. “Some of them… we spend more time fixing them and dealing with them than we actually save time. But we wouldn’t have it any other way.”
Kowalkiewicz has to rescue Bolts from fallen branches every few days, and replaces the ground cable that marks the robot mower’s boundaries every few years to keep it from disappearing into the wild. Must. And like the minions in his series of animated cartoons Kowalkiewicz drew inspiration from, the algorithms require constant human oversight.
“Minions want to be helpful and work full of energy 24/7, right?” he says.
“But if you take them out of your sight for half a day, they start wreaking havoc.”
