Techno-Philosophy | Are Human beings reduced to mere interfaces in the Ecosystem? Some Perils of Modern Forms of Technology
Kapoor Ramalingam recently tested positive for COVID-19. Being a pessimist, he realizes that he won’t be able to live much longer and so interestingly, he decides to go for a trip. He decides to travel by an automobile to a distant place and chooses his route from the highway maps. Cities, forests and mountains appear as obstacles to be bypassed. The Country side is shaped and organized by the highway. Many signs and posters tell Kapoor Ramalingam what to do and think; and even point out the magnificence of the nature or the hallmarks of history. Others have done the thinking for him, and perhaps for the better. Parking spaces have been constructed where the broadest and most surprising view is open. Huge advertisements tell him when to stop and find the pause that refreshes. And all this is indeed for his benefit, safety and comfort; he receives what he wants. He would fare best if he follows the given directions, subordinating his spontaneity to the anonymous wisdom which considered everything for him.
In the above scenario, Kapoor Ramalingam can be described as an inforg, i.e. an informational organism who forages for, produces, cultivates, curates, processes and consumes information, inhabiting an environment also made of data and computational process. Further, interpreting this in political, social, economic and political terms and upon upgrading our level our abstraction, he can even be described as an interface. All the actions taken by him can be dissolved into a sequence of semi-spontaneous reactions to prescribed mechanical norms-which is not only perfectly rational but also perfectly reasonable. The entire ecosystem, i.e. Business, Technology, Human needs and Nature have combined utmost expediency with utmost convenience, saving time and energy, removing waste, adapting all means to the end, anticipating consequences, sustaining calculability and security for him.
In fact, not just Kapoor Ramalingam, we all are becoming human interfaces, i.e., spaces of interactions between, on one side (human, artificial or hybrid), interfacing agents, who want something from us, and, on the other side, something that we have, which they want, the interfaced resources. The categorization of people into human interfaces happens in many contexts. For the world of social media, we are interfaces (human interface) between them (interfacing agent) and our personal data (interfaced resource). For the world of commerce, we (human interfaces) are interfaces between them (interfacing agent) and our money or credit. For the world of politics, we (human interfaces) are interfaces between them and our attention, consent and votes (interfacing resource).
Furthermore, man in the technological age can be classified as an “objective personality,” one who has learned to transfer all subjective spontaneity to the machinery which he serves, to subordinate his life to the “matter-of-factness” of a world in which the machine is the factor and he the factum. This point is made clear when we take the example of a notorious 10,000 steps to do every-day fitness app which Kapoor Ramalingam fondly uses. Herein, the app becomes the interfacing agent that uses Kapoor Ramalingam (human interface) to get some pre-established performance, i.e. 10,000 steps (as a target) by him, the interfaced resource.
Metaphorically, man has merely become a keypad: get the numeric sequence right and you can “open” them to access what you need or want on the other side of interaction. Hypothetically, if Kapoor Ramalingam uses “open sesame” as his password for a service, the joke is on him, because fiction increasingly meets reality: he becomes what he thinks he is describing, an interface.
This course of technological process has led to a new rationality and new standards of individuality have spread over society, different from and even opposed to those which initiated the march of technology. The critical rationality that promoted the growth of technological process has been subordinated to the technological rationality whose primary goal is the creation of efficient members of society. To quote Marcuse,
“The efficient individual is one whose performance is an action only insofar as it is the proper reaction to objective requirements of the apparatus and his liberty is confined to the most adequate means for reaching a goal which he did not set.”
The Technological Rationality is an exhibition of Marcuse’s performance principle wherein the members of the society must perform according to the dictates of their pre-established function. This requires that members must be manipulated in such a way so that these restrictions seem to function as rational, external objective laws which are then internalized by the individual. For that, the modern forms of technology come into play in which the manipulation of power is inherent. They promote authoritarianism and discourage dialectic thinking. Technology espouses one dimensional thinking eroding any potential social contradictions and in fact a form of ideology is put in place where the oppressed identifies with the oppressor. For instance, people feel a sense of unity because they watch the same TV programs, or support the same sport teams. In religion, vague terms are used such as the Hindu way of Life to hide the very different ways that people actually experience Hinduism. Another example of one-dimensional thinking can be found in the concept of tolerance. The term is now used by the Establishment to legitimate its own oppressive views and policies. It is the idea of pure tolerance or tolerance for the sake of tolerance that puts under erasure the real concrete social conflict out of which the concept emerged. Marcuse’s point is that domination no longer requires force or the presence of an authority figure. The function of one-dimensional thinking is to produce a one-dimensional society by whittling down critical, two-dimensional consciousness.
As member of crowd, Kapoor Ramalingam has become the standardized subject of brute self-preservation. He realizes that obedience to the direction is the only way even to fulfill his last wishes. Human instincts, desires and thoughts have been co-operated into channels to feed the interfacing agent/apparatus. Sadly, even when Kapoor Ramalingam is at a stage when he would soon be breathing his last, he realizes there is still no room for exercising his personal autonomy.
REFERENCES:-
Marcuse, Herbert (1941). Some social implications of modern technology. Studies in Philosophy and Social Science 9 (3):414–439.
Floridi, L. Marketing as Control of Human Interfaces and Its Political Exploitation. Philos. Technol. 32, 379–388 (2019).
