Machine replaced, machine-drivers, machine-overriders, machine-programmers.

Which type of human being and worker are you?

About to board my plane back from Paris to San Francisco, I recently received the help of a machine-overrider.

That man was standing idly by, barely engaging with the passengers, visibly bored by his job.

My mobile boarding pass did not get read by the machine.

The machine spat back a red flash, and the machine-overrider intervened.

He clicked a “cancel” button, which gave me the chance to start the mobile boarding pass scanning process again. This time, it worked. A tilt of the screen a bit too shallow? A bit too steep? A light reflection on the screen?

The machine was not that smart, after all. Something went wrong in the physical world. And although the machine had been entrusted to make a decision between passport, face image, and boarding pass (a decision in the past entrusted into a real human), it could not deliver.

And, so, a machine-overrider intervened.

When you think about the types of jobs around us, we can see the seeds of a new way of thinking about our post-services society.

Machines, computers, are all around us. They spit out the receipt at the local Starbucks. They control the fancy doors of the new Tesla. They regulate the red lights at the intersection, using sensors.

The Internet of Things is upon us.

But what to become of the Spirit of Humanity, in a world where we are fast letting machine make decisions for us, where we’re devolving our human power to make trust-based decisions, to machines?

It goes without saying that we are all machine users.

WE are the ones adapting fast to a world of devices and tools, so-called “intelligent machines” and interfaces. Our brain is pliable, learns faster than the machines. Our kids learn how to exchange and communicate in words without vowels, in under 140 characters. Amazon announces the “Dash” button which lets you self replenishing whatever you need. Soon, we will see our fridge call our basic groceries for us, delivered by a drone, while we’re at work.

[Uncannily, 2 days after I wrote this, Bud Lite just announced a smart fridge which tracks your beer consumption and re-orders Bud Lite beer for you.

I thus see four classes of people and jobs now developing under our very eyes, and for a long time to come.

Machine replaced or soon-to-be-replaced.

Those are the people whose job once was a manual one (or still is, but not for too long). The ticketing agent who used to check you in at the airport. The very same ones who are now re-assigned to other jobs (machine-over rider), or who went on retirement, because we don’t need them anymore. Most services-based businesses rely on them, and they are the workhorse of our economy.

Machine drivers.

May they be an actual Lyft or Uber driver, the machine drivers are (still) essential to the operation of the machine. They live in the world of physicality, aided by machines. An airplane pilot is a machine driver…but, after all, as advanced air traffic control systems are now promising a soon-arriving future of self-landing plane, will the airplane pilot become a machine-overrider? Maybe pilots are Machine-soon-to-be-replaced as well. A car driver (i.e. you) is still a machine-driver, but soon (maybe?), we may become machine-replaced there too.

Machine overriders.

The machine overrider is a passive human, who sits by the machine most of the time idly by, looking at gauges and screens, only intervening when a glitch occurs, or the judgement of the machine needs to be overridden. A banker mortgage specialist is a machine overrider: the mortgage or refinancing decision is, these days, mostly machine driven by algorithms which allocate classes of risk to you. Only when the bank customer interfaces with the machine-overrider, shall the process be changed, with the machine-overrider escalating the decision-overriding to a real, decision making human, whom you will never meet.

Machine programmers.

They seem to be the kings of the hill these days. Coding classes, coding skills are making young and older programmer take a small portion of a human computing process into a computer program. They give the machines instructions, but not a sense of trust. The machine-programmers are the best paid of all of us.

There are actually two classes of machine programmers. The machine programmers of the first degree, who actually write the code. And the machine-programmers of the second degree, who think the architecture of the system, and / or which make the decisions to finance the development of the machine.

So, at the heart of the future of the job market, since we cannot all be machine-programmers, lies this essential question.

What will be the place we leave, as a society, to human trust in a world of machines, programmed to efficiently perform an accumulation of small tasks, which will in the end lead to societal changes without us really understanding or guiding the process?

Can we see that machines, even the best designed and programmed ones, will be light years behind the human heart for a long time to come?

Because trust is borne in the heart, not the brain.

Trust is the foundation of economic exchanges.

It allows a human to make a leap of faith, in a world of imperfect information and a world of imperfect decision making.

By definition, construction, design and programming rules, a machine is part of a tautological system which only contains a universe of possibilities bounded by the objectives, resources and tasks it has been designed with.

Some will argue that computing processes evolution and improvement will create — within a few decades — machines which can replicate the human brain in their complexity. We often hear about “learning algorithms” or the “singularity”… but I claim this “learning process” is nothing more than the expansion of the data set which those computing algorithms treat, within the bounds of their programming.

So, another way to ask the question is this.

Is the human heart reducible to the universe of our neuronal connections? Can trust be modeled, mathematically, and programmed in a machine?

When two people fall in love, they make, subconsciously, a leap of faith.

They cross the chasm of the unknown, they go beyond their programming limitations, and make a decision on someone, and a future, they do not fully know, on the basis of an incomplete and imperfect set of data.

An ethical, human application of those questions and underlying paradigms dictates that technologists should take into account the question of trust when designing systems and programming machines.

Because at the heart of the good functioning of a machine, the human cannot be taken out of the equation.

How will their creation take into account, leave space for, and take input from humans, leaving humans in control of the trust exchange process between two machine human users connected by that machine.

So let’s pose article 1 of the Man-Machine Rights and Constitution:

“The human to human trust establishing bond should never be overridden, replaced or overruled by a machine to human or machine to machine process, decision mechanism, or interaction”.

I’ll continue to explore this theme with a few more practical applications and writings.