I’m with you, David Byrne: do we want to live without friction?
David Byrne has published an article addressing non friction, that is, the gradual elimination of contact and friction between humans in labor relations today and in the future. Concerned about the negative impact of technology in human relations, the musician generated discussion. Do we want to live without friction?
(this opinion article was first published in the Portuguese news media Visão)
The question that immediately pops-up my mind related to David Byrne’s article “Eliminating the Human” is: considering the elimination of friction in work and business relations, will we gradually assume automated behaviors and become mechanic in thought, or instead will we extrapolate dehumanization and thus potentiate in each one of us what distinguishes humans from machines?
For the sake of humanity’s mental and spiritual health, we need answers and the antidote to the side effects of the mechanization of life.
The answer, at this stage, will arise from the question:
“What then distinguishes us from robots that can be programmed to mimic almost everything?”
It is important for each one of us to reach their own conclusions and act accordingly. I even say that we must begin right now re-humanizing the species because we can be close to the extinction of the Homo Sapiens Sapiens as we know it.
Becoming bionics and a blend between people and robot is a real possibility in the near future.
By delegating more or less consciously human tasks and organic choices to the machines, we are thus bypassing the human factors of contact and decision. And therefore we retire ourselves from the most advanced and perfect technology we were born with and programmed for as human beings, the most developed that exists and privileges social interaction.
Large industrials and investors see human friction as a bottleneck that causes them to lose a lot of money and time, whether in sales, customer service, product returns, or in the procedures themselves. By eliminating human friction putting machines or robots performing tasks instead of people, speeds up the processes, saves money, and eliminates annoyances.
Megatrends such as automation, digitization and the internet of things, among others, are introducing and will introduce more profound changes in work, education and human relations. Positive and negative. Let’s look at current businesses that exemplify how things can turn out to be massively in the near future: Uber, Spotify or Amazon. By digitizing or removing intermediaries the processes become easier, faster and cheaper.
The negative side of it has to do with the potential automation of human beings in face of the changes imposed by the system of work, commerce and the like. We can become similar to machines while they resemble more like us. And this does not sound good at all.
Removing humans from the interaction process, whether eliminating individuals from shops, customer services, customer support centers, hospitals or driving cars etc., could mean the beginning of the decline of human skills and our innate ability to intuit, infer, understand, accept and negotiate. Will we thus become colder and more inflexible to error, failure and differences? Will we shape our behaviors and criteria according to a normalization imposed by artificial intelligence systems?
“Remove humans from the equation, and we are less complete as people and as a society,” says Byrne in the article.
By eliminating friction of ordinary life such as impasses or complaining, we erase from the equation unique factors that establish the boundary between human and humanoid: accepting the other, knowing how to deal with differences, discussing and abolishing prejudices, arguing for integrating opposite ideas, or even more complex, look into the eyes and knowing how to read what goes inside.
If we are to take this to the extreme, it is possible to slowly erase the emotions of humankind and have control over the birth rate of the population by placing most of the alienated individuals having emotional relationships with operating systems or having sex with robots. It just takes someone with power and considerable money to set this goal in a world where ethics will be fragmented, citizens deprived of rights and privacy, and dependent on virtual life.
The position of some experts displaced from the reality that we will be God by overcoming death through the application of highly sophisticated technological systems such as the DNA editing, reveals that there are megalomaniacs playing with the future with sophisticated tools that are not within the reach of the common citizen, conferring dominion and power to some while placing the majority in the role of submissive.
Therefore, it is foreseeable that there is or will be a war to domain technological power against which we have to be vigilant, to protect ourselves as a species and maintain the democracies. Against radical attitudes that led to David Byrne’s realistic technopanic, we have to start re-humanizing the mind and the actions applying unique and beautiful human skills (compassion, mutual help, kindness) while not allowing aberrations to overcome good sense. Soon ethics will have to be reviewed by each country in order to adjust to new and unexpected realities. As humans, we can expect everything from us, from the worst to the best.
