As I watch my four granddaughters laugh and play, rough and tumble, learn and create, I wonder what their experience of growing up in this world will be.
In my own lifetime, there have been so many changes. My memory of childhood is of a time spent mostly outdoors, exploring and adventuring without adult supervision or surveillance of any kind, growing streetwise and building resilience.
And yet, now from an early age they get used to an existence lived in tandem with machines – mobile phones, tablets, electronic toys, social media and now AI and robotics – are gradually being introduced.
Today, I read predictions of the future including:
- The rise of cognitive automation that will reshape knowledge-based jobs
- Human labour becoming optional in manufacturing and logistics
- The vanishing of routine cognitive jobs and many physical jobs
- One billion robots globally – one for every ten humans
Who exactly is building this digital world for them and for us and to what end?
And as we lawyers like to say, “Cui Bono?” or who benefits or stands to gain?
Is it the corporations, industries and individuals who increase the speed of productivity and cut the costs of production? Is it the manufacturers of the digital products and robots who will make massive profits? Or is it those who seek to control us and our children through constant surveillance and monitoring?
The benefits sold to us are increased comfort, convenience and of course safety. No need for hard labour when a machine or robot can take the strain. No need to worry when we can be kept safe from every threat.
But the question I keep coming back to is what about humanity itself?
To quote Wendell Berry:
.”..Past the scale of the human, our works do not liberate us—they confine us. They cut off access to the wilderness of Creation where we must go to be reborn—to receive the awareness, at once humbling and exhilarating, grievous and joyful, that we are a part of Creation, one with all that we live from and all that, in turn, lives from us. They destroy the communal rites of passage that turn us the wilderness and bring us home again.”
Will we be living as creatures or machines? Who decides?
“It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.“
– Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition –
“Are we human or are we dancer?”
– from The Killers song ‘Human’ –