Robots

At the Hannover Messe robotics fair in Germany yesterday, UK company Mobey Robotics launched the world's first robot chef, capable of watching and mimicking the kitchen skills of a human chef and recreating them with superhuman consistency. There is already a restaurant in Soho with touch-screen tables where you can place your order and pay your bill, and restaurants in Japan where robotic waiters serve food. As these new technologies become cheaper and more widely available, they are likely to replace the need for human labour in restaurants altogether. If you find this a bit unlikely, remember that we've already accepted robots at the supermarket checkout, the airport check-in, the train station, the cinema and the bank.

There’s something wrong with the relationship between patients and their GPs. I’ve spent much of this winter in my local surgery, what with one thing and another, sitting among the stoic and snivelling, drifting between different doctors. They’re pleasant, if perfunctory, but with each visit I became more sure that something fundamental is awry. The docs seem ill at ease, as if their collective nose is out of joint, and I don’t think it’s overstretching or underfunding that’s the problem. My unprofessional diagnosis is that there’s a change under way in the balance of power between patients and medics; the status of GP as unimpeachable oracle is under threat, he feels the first tremors of what may be a seismic shift, and he doesn’t like it.

Having written (for a Times diary) a few sentences about consciousness in robots, I settled back to study readers’ responses in the online commentary section. They added little. I was claiming there had been no progress since Descartes and Berkeley in the classic philosophical debate about how we know ‘Other Minds’ exist; and that there never would be. A correspondent on the letters page referred me to Wittgenstein’s treatment of the subject and so I studied his remarks. I have to confess they are, to me, unintelligible. But I cannot let the matter rest. My earlier thoughts had been prompted by newspaper reports of the adventures of a talking, hitchhiking Canadian robot called Hitchbot. Every time such a ‘Whatever will robots learn to do next?

Will computers make humans redundant? It might be the biggest question of our time. Last night Spectator Events, in partnership with Microsoft, hosted a panel discussion to answer the question 'Will Artificial Intelligence put my job at risk?' A fascinating and wide-ranging conversation about the technological revolution ensued. The Spectator’s chairman Andrew Neil was joined by Microsoft’s Laboratory Director Professor Andrew Blake, journalist Bryan Appleyard, the TUC’s Nicola Smith and Jamie Bartlett, Director of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at Demos. Professor Andrew Blake, up first, sounded an evangelical note, emphasising the positives of technological change.

‘The US stock market is rigged.’ That’s the j’accuse headline that screams out from Flash Boys, the new book by Michael Lewis. It’s a very big claim, made by America’s foremost financial writer. It’s also a claim that, after years of accumulating evidence, warrants extremely close and sustained official scrutiny. Lewis produced Liar’s Poker, his first bestseller, in 1989 — after a four-year stint as a fresh-from-the-Ivy-League bond dealer at the now defunct firm Salomon Brothers. The book, an insider’s account, brilliantly lampooned the macho, aggressive behaviour of the ‘big swinging dicks’ who paced the carpet-tiled trading floors.