[unclebucknasty]

The glorification of tech/denigration of humans juxtaposition is getting old fast. This attitude may seem benign, but it's insidious, carries a hint of elitism, and spills over into labor, class, and other aspects of human life.

Why can't we appreciate tech advances without devaluing people?

[avar]

Because certain types of technical advancement requires an element of devaluing people.

"Calculator" used to be a job performed exclusively by humans. Moving to mechanical & digital calculators didn't only require gains in efficiency, but also a recognition that this was a job humans were simply worse at than machines, so it was irresponsible to task a human with it.

Similarly self-driving cars can't simply be a nice thing to have, eventually we have to have the discussion that it's irresponsible to have human driven vehicles on the road.

[unclebucknasty]

Promoting the tech and respecting people are not mutually exclusive.

I'm not arguing that we should endanger people and my comment is not about this one instance. It's about a general attitude of devaluing people. Where do you think that road leads?

When Uber vehicles were found to have run red lights a couple of weeks ago, Uber's response was that these were human operated and served as an example of why they must rid the roads of error-prone human drivers as quickly as possible. This, as if humans were a scourge that must be eliminated. There is a strange rising anger with people for being human.

And, once we've ridded the roads, labor force, economy, etc. of all the pesky humans, then what? Who owns the tech? Who has the power? Will they be as benevolent as the machines we've learned to worship? What is the value of a human life by then?

Quote whatever stats you like, but normalizing this attitude of fallible, dispensible humans is dangerous in many ways.

[avar]

What do you even mean by "devaluing"? Of course a more error prone, dangerous and expensive driver has less value.

Is pointing this out somehow wrong? I think not pointing it out devalues human life.

The road of getting rid of fallible humans from boring automatable jobs leads to Utopia, and I reject your notion that this is somehow inherently different from e.g automation in agriculture or computing

[unclebucknasty]

>What do you even mean by "devaluing"?

I've been clear about my meaning. Can't simplify it any further.

>Because certain types of technical advancement requires an element of devaluing people

That's your quote. What did you mean?

>Of course a more error prone, dangerous and expensive driver has less value.

There's a difference between preferring tech to do the driving and saying the human has "less value". You don't see that?

In any case, a hostile regard for human fallibility that approaches promotion of the dispensability of humans isn't a good thing.

[swasheck]

A nice sci-fi trope is that the unpredictability of humanity, and when/how it will "fail" when something better would "succeed", results in the preservation of humanity itself. It's nice to consider in the wake of the elitism.

[unclebucknasty]

Well, I think there's something to the notion that there is value in humanity, in spite of--or perhaps even because of--its flaws and non-binary approach to the Universe. And, of course, there's the whole "I Robot" deal, wherein the robot elects to save the life of the adult vs. the child based purely on a sterile odds-of-survival calculation.

That's not really what I had in mind with my comments here, but it is an interesting point.

And maybe it is another reason to consider prudence as we rush headlong into a world increasingly reliant upon technology.

[avar]

> I've been clear about my meaning. Can't simplify it any further.

You really haven't. This entire thread is you taking disposablezero's "Relying on error-prone, distracted, slow humans to guide massive killing machines is playing Russian roulette" comment out of context as some moral statement about human beings.

There's a bunch of things humans are worse at than machines, you're the only one asserting that this somehow "devalues" people without any further clarification.

I'm also worse at shoving nails into wood than a hammer is. How does that devalue me?

> [Because certain types of technical advancement requires an element of devaluing people]. That's your quote. What did you mean?

The set of things machines are better at than humans is only increasing over time. Today nobody disputes that a combine harvester is better for the task than a team of humans, but there's a tendency to overvalue human work as machines are getting better.

I've noticed that changing with "handmade" within my lifetime, and we're probably about to see it change with "human-driven vehicle" within the next decade.

> There's a difference between preferring tech to do the driving and saying the human has "less value". You don't see that?

No, I really don't. You haven't defined what you're talking about when you're saying "value" or "devalue", but I will. I'm talking about value in the economic sense. I.e. if you've made a combine harvester instead of needing 50 people to do manual labor for 16 hours a day you've optimized your economy and added net value to our civilization.

I really don't buy this argument that saying a human has less value is a negative. The logical conclusion to that argument is saying that we should unwind civilization and technological advancements until we're all hunter-gatherers again. Because surely the existence of the food industry devalues hunters everywhere.

> In any case, a hostile regard for human fallibility that approaches promotion of the dispensability of humans isn't a good thing.

No, it's the exact opposite. It's saying that we shouldn't waste a human being's potential on some menial task like manually picking corn in a field or driving a car.

To someone living in the future we're hopefully heading towards the notion of someone needing to make driving a vehicle their full-time job will be as ridiculous as the notion of of a human being needing to manually carry freight is today, as opposed to using a truck.

[unclebucknasty]

>You really haven't.

Well, I guess I haven't. Perhaps that's because there are really a myriad of contexts for the word "value" here. For instance, you've chosen to focus mostly on "economic value".

And, sure, I have an argument with that too. For instance, you say this:

>It's saying that we shouldn't waste a human being's potential on some menial task like manually picking corn in a field or driving a car.

Sounds great, but nothing in recent history bears out a desire for this as a driving force or even a significant consideration. In fact, the reality is so far off that this argument is intellectually dishonest. That is, we're not handing over millions of people to a life filled with purpose, now that they are released from the "menial tasks" that were once destroying their potential. Instead, we're really just leaving them rudderless (and penniless) in a society where our value as humans is significantly defined by our work/economic-output.

Further, the economic benefit of this automation accrues to a relative few at the expense of those "newly freed" individuals. It is dramatically redistributing power and wealth and threatening self-determination as well as the democratic model. In short, it tacitly promotes a very real form of oppression.

So, piling onto that with a further denigration of the value of those being disenfranchised is unhelpful to maintaining a healthy society--to say the least.

>The logical conclusion to that argument is saying that we should unwind civilization and technological advancements until we're all hunter-gatherers again.

You have to know that's classic reductio ad absurdum. I've never advocated that we don't leverage tech. But, if you really want to carry an argument to a logical conclusion, consider the very real eventuality that all jobs will be displaced by technology, including "knowledge-workers". That's the difference between the current reality and the relatively low-tech technological displacements of the past to which you keep alluding: here, even skilled labor is at-risk.

This is happening on a continuum. So, I'm suggesting that it is becoming increasingly more important to define our relationship to technology in healthy ways.

Instead, what I'm noticing overall is that there is a certain hostility towards humans (devaluation) when championing tech these days. Whether it's in the labor force, with autonomous vehicles, or otherwise. Until more recently, we've known about and relied upon various tech to keep us safer and perform other critical functions. But, they played those roles as enhancements to humans. Increasingly, however, we speak overtly about replacing humans and we juxtapose the value (any value) of a human with that of technology. It's a dangerous framing.

But, it seems we just disagree here. You think there's nothing wrong with that. I do.

[disposablezero]

People tend to hate on anything which threatens their job/identity, even if it rationalizes not addressing preventable causes of million of injuries and deaths. That is the definition of a SJW.

[unclebucknasty]

That's actually not the definition of SJW. You may want to look up the history of the term and consider what your eagerness to bash people over the head with it says about you.

[brainfire]

This is something that kills tens of thousands of people per year in the US alone- already greatly reduced by technological advances, and still falling. Excuse me if I don't shed a tear for the feelings that might be hurt among human drivers who consistently and measurably overestimate their abilities.

[unclebucknasty]

>Excuse me if I don't shed a tear for the feelings that might be hurt among human drivers who consistently and measurably overestimate their abilities.

Indeed. If only we could find them all and kill them before they strike again.

[aidenn0]

Or, you know, replace them with machines that are safer.

[unclebucknasty]

My point was in how we frame these things--the human relationship to technology. Specifically, it's about how we can raise the important point that humans can be made safer by technology, without it being a value statement about the human race.

[aidenn0]

I don't know how one can relate how good humans are at a task with how good a state-of-the-art machine is at a task without making some sort of value statement about the human race.

Either way there is a huge difference between "I'm fine with hurting people's feelings" and "I'm fine with killing people"

[unclebucknasty]

>there is a huge difference between "I'm fine with hurting people's feelings" and "I'm fine with killing people

Those aren't the choices.

[Nadya]

Every death in my family that I'm capable of remembering was auto-related and the driver was at fault. All of them were easily preventable if the driver was not distracted or wasn't straight up breaking the law. That is 6 family members I would still have if not for complete human incompetence.

The romanticism of "human control" is not an idea I am willing to support. Humans are terrible at most things they do. We get tired. We get distracted. We become complacent. We bend the rules. We forget steps in the safety protocol. We make incorrect decisions. If there are only 99 ways to do something wrong a human will invent the 100th way of doing it wrong.

If mechanical failures and software errors can be proven to be a safer risk than human error - then humans should be exchanged for robots. Jobs and hobbies be damned if there are lives at stake.

[unclebucknasty]

I don't advocate that we needlessly endanger lives; just that we don't devalue those same humans we claim to want to save.

[fixermark]

To avoid this devaluation, I think we'll need to find other ways in which people are to be valued than "driving acumen."

But that should be pretty straightforward; there's a lot of things people can do that aren't "drive a car."

[unclebucknasty]

As I stated previously, it's not about this one thing.

[Sir_Cmpwn]

The numbers support disposablezero. Humans deserve this devaluation.

[unclebucknasty]

No, we don't. We can promote the value of the tech without the denigration.

[fixermark]

In general, probably yes.

I'm a lot less inclined to take that attitude in a space where there were 35,000 deaths due to vehicular accident and the most common causes of accidents are distracted driving, drunk driving, speeding, and reckless driving. That's basically "humans," "humans," "humans," and "humans;" I suppose we could spin that by pointing out all the millions of miles per year people drive successfully without killing themselves or each other, but that doesn't change the fact that removing humans from the equation should push the death numbers down further.

Driving is at that special saddle-point of attention-thirsty and tedious that people can be good at, but not perfect; the models of how attention wanes in a tedious environment are pretty solid. It's precisely the sort of thing we should be trying to automate if we want to drive the fatality rate below the current 11 per 100,000 population number in the US.

[aidenn0]

Human drivers have been denegrated for over 100 years now; from 1909: http://cf.collectorsweekly.com/uploads/2014/03/puck-number-2...

[marcosdumay]

Humans weren't built to drive. We can't support our attention during an entire trip, we can't deal with several variables at the same time, and we have all those emotional heuristics that are completely counterproductive when driving.

That's stating the obvious, not devaluing people.

[disposablezero]

Joking? People can't fly an f-16 or most rockets, but computers can. People get drunk and plow into traffic in the other direction, run over a crowd of people because they're nuts. That's the truth, get used to it.

[unclebucknasty]

People also create computers.

In any case, your argument would be extremely effective--if my argument was that people are infallible.