What will it mean to be human in the age of machines?
Humanity isn’t something to be taken for granted. It needs to be built.
As a species, humanity has gone through three important revolutions in its history: the agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution, and the digital revolution, through which we’re living today. The way we organize the available workforce has allowed us to move from small semi-nomadic hunter-gatherer villages to vast cities in which live millions of people. According to various indications and research, we’re facing a new civilizational revolution, the fourth of its kind, and probably the most radical that we’ve faced: the revolution in automation.
It’s a frequent theme in science fiction movies and books: artificial intelligence is increasingly able to solve tasks and problems that humans used to solve over a much longer time and with less satisfactory results. In the long run, the trend towards the automation of the functions of labor is a reality determined by factors of technical and economic efficiency, the “natural” path, as it were, of capitalism. A machine doesn’t need to work shifts of eight hours and doesn’t rest periods. Machines don’t form unions nor demand that their rights be respected. They’re tireless workers who require little maintenance and can work non-stop until they become obsolete. What perspectives result from such a world for humans and their own dependence on that labor force for meeting their most basic necessities?
It’s estimated that automation will increasingly become a visible reality within a matter of years. Numerous companies, including Google, Amazon, Uber and Tesla, are investing in research into driverless vehicles and automated transport which will render millions of drivers and urban transport systems obsolete overnight. There are algorithms that can review legal paperwork more accurately than can their human counterparts, the lawyers, and in the medical field, nanomedicine and genetic editing promise extraordinary results in diagnosing, operating on, and caring for patients, being able even to give second opinions.
Depending on how the transition to the automation of work is made, we’ll be speaking during the next century of either a utopian or a dystopian society.
Let’s look at it optimistically first. A society where work has been abolished through something like a universal income for all could signal the dawn of a new era in which manual labor and working to survive could cease to be a drag on millions of people. They’ll be freed from the yoke of the office, as modern, optimistic philosophers like HD Thoreau and Bertrand Russell predicted.
On the dystopian side, current inequities could be sharpened to levels unseen since feudalism. A war between algorithms using game theory could lead artificial intelligence to conclude that people are actually an unnecessary burden to technological development. Historically, great discoveries and scientific innovations occurred as a result of countries’ military needs. And so blind automation could mean the strengthening of militarily-sustained, nationalist policies, and then the impoverishment and unemployment of millions of people whose jobs directly depend on more developed economies. The gap between the elites and the poorest grows even wider.
In this context, asking about what constitutes the human being is not a trifling or idle question, because it’s at precisely these moments of greatest tension when people become aware of their purpose as individuals and as a species. Until we realize that our freedom doesn’t depend on the available choices of consumer lifestyles, we can’t truly be free to transform the world and to seek better conditions for everyone by thinking as a species. The decision is as to whether we continue to nurture a system that will sooner or later judge us obsolete, or we fight so that human life is recognized as something valuable in itself and worth preserving. As the sociologist, Jean Baudrillard said promisingly, the challenge of generations and across centuries is to create the survival conditions for the human being as a species on the planet or to face its disappearance.
Related Articles
Pictorial spiritism (a woman's drawings guided by a spirit)
There are numerous examples in the history of self-taught artists which suggest an interrogation of that which we take for granted within the universe of art. Such was the case with figures like
Astounding fairytale illustrations from Japan
Fairy tales tribal stories— are more than childish tales. Such fictions, the characters of which inhabit our earliest memories, aren’t just literary works with an aesthetic and pleasant purpose. They
A cinematic poem and an ode to water: its rhythms, shapes and textures
Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water. - John Keats Without water the equation of life, at least life as we know it, would be impossible. A growing hypothesis holds that water, including the
Watch beauty unfold through science in this "ode to a flower" (video)
The study of the microscopic is one of the richest, most aesthetic methods of understanding the world. Lucky is the scientist who, upon seeing something beautiful, is able to see all of the tiny
To invent those we love or to see them as they are? Love in two of the movies' favorite scenes
So much has been said already, of “love” that it’s difficult to add anything, much less something new. It’s possible, though, perhaps because even if you try to pass through the sieve of all our
This app allows you to find and preserve ancient typographies
Most people, even those who are far removed from the world of design, are familiar with some type of typography and its ability to transform any text, help out dyslexics or stretch an eight page paper
The secrets of the mind-body connection
For decades medical research has recognized the existence of the placebo effect — in which the assumption that a medication will help produces actual physical improvements. In addition to this, a
The sea as infinite laboratory
Much of our thinking on the shape of the world and the universe derives from the way scientists and artists have approached these topics over time. Our fascination with the mysteries of the
Sharing and collaborating - natural movements of the creative being
We might sometimes think that artistic or creative activity is, in essence, individualistic. The Genesis of Judeo-Christian tradition portrays a God whose decision to create the world is as vehement
John Malkovich becomes David Lynch (and other characters)
John Malkovich and David Lynch are, respectively, the actor and film director who’ve implicitly or explicitly addressed the issues of identity and its porous barriers through numerous projects. Now