Thursday, March 10, 2011
Imperfect humans, perfect machines
Efficiency is the aim of business, obviously, but this goal undermines the importance of a human. In an age where people are already replaced with atms, voicemail, and self check-out we are marginalizing humanity. People with mental handicaps were once capable of contributing to society, but nearly all jobs have become too technically advanced for a company to bother educating their employee. Though personal service is still preferred because it is often more efficient, one day this will not be the case. Programming out glitches will make more and more people useless, running contradictory to increasing populations. One must wonder what everyone will do in the future, and how we are becoming inferior to our own creation.
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Once again we have to consider the implications of blurring the line between man and machine. You may feel that we're marginalizing humanity, but take voice mail for instance - is it artificial, or is it (at least with a complete message recorded) simply a "construct" of sorts that holds a person's personality as it would be should they be required to take a message?
ReplyDeleteI don't think we're becoming inferior to our own creations so much as we're perfecting it before we merge with it. One can only hope it fails to become self-aware and doesn't attempt to reject us a la Neuromancer.
I agree with Nemo, I do not think we will be inferior to our own creations. We may merge with it as closely as we can, but the machine will never be superior. I think that humans naturally have a tendency to perfect themselves with technology (as we saw in Neuromancer), but it is a utopia that can never be reached.
ReplyDeletePerhaps the increase in technical capacities will be a cause for celebration rather than despair. It seems that humanities progress historically, if I might modestly make a conjecture, has been limited solely the amount of necessary labour time required to reproduce the existing relations of production. Advances in machinery and hence the amount of value or wealth that humans will be able to extract can offer great hope for social progress on a few fronts.
ReplyDeleteThere's nothing wrong with being inferior to a machine as long as its constrained in a sense. Looms have always been superior to men at weaving, this increased productive capability allows us to spend our times doing other things, such as designing the tapestries to weave with them. The increasing irrelevance of humans in manufacturing and production will mean that man can finally be freed from his burden of engaging in idle labour. This will allow for the final emancipation of man from the tyranny of toiling.
Yet I do not want to seem overly optimistic. I don't think that just because machines will solve the problem of satisfying our physical needs that the regime of wage labour and inequality will magically be wished away. What I do think however is that the increasing change in the kind of labour we engage in will affect how people imagine a future social world. The fact that labour is becoming more and more immaterial and abstracted from classical understandings of production has meant that labour has become more autonomous in a certain sense. The products of labour no longer abide the laws of scarcity or diminishing returns, rather the more they are consumed the more it augments their value. In this respect people's consciousness may change as a result of increased machinic production, because it shifts the way that they view value from the neoclassical economic point of view to a more liberatory one. Yet it could just as likely slip into its opposite..