| >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. |