Human machines
These creative posters should be placed in any university cafeteria.
The message? Let machines deal with things and money. Humans are the only semantic engines we know of in the whole universe.
We are far more suited for jobs that require intelligence, understanding, insights, inspirations.
Technology should be liberating. A way to gain time to think.
After all, if we do not practice this rare art, who will?
posted by Luciano Floridi at 17:27
1 Comments:
Indeed, humans are the only semantic engines (so far known), but not all of them are good at it or even like doing a "semantic job".
I don't agree that if a job can be automated, it therefore should be automated.
Not only for the benefit of people who like doing this or that particular job (and at the end lose their job), but also for the benefit of the people who enjoy the results of that job.
With the automatisation of a task comes, not always but often, a standardisation of it, and altough this could lead towards a higher quality of the product, it not always does (sometimes it only leads towards a higher benefit of the manufacturer). But I have the feeling it does frequently lead to a loss of diversity of the product and the way it is being handed over to the user/customer/buyer/enjoyer.
This diversity is I think an implicit quality of the whole set of the products or services of one type, in the sense that people as "users" of the real world can experience the fluctuations in it - this can be enjoyable or irritating but never monotone. At the user-side, the interface changes frequently, which is stimulating, at the serving-side, manufactering in an archaic, non-standard way can lead to unpredictable results and even improvements "by pure chance" if noticed (and it will be noticed because human semantic engines are around at that time :-).
This can never happen when automates do all the jobs that can be done by automates. At that imaginary point innovation by coincidence will stop. There will be innovation but only by developement after research (which will be on demand of those looking to innovate and willing to pay for that research). This "searched" innovation will always be function of the purpose of the one who pays. One can only hope that purpose is not always (financial) profit.
sorry for my bad english!
luk
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