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288 pages, Paperback
First published September 8, 2014
"Resistance is futile," goes the glib Star Trek cliche beloved by techies. But that's the opposite of the truth. Resistance is never futile. If the source of our vitality is, as Emerson taught us, "the active soul," then our highest obligation is to resist any force, whether institutional or commercial or technological, that would enfeeble or enervate the soul.
What if the cost of machines that think is people who don’t?
If you use the calculator to bypass learning, to carry out procedures that you haven’t learned and don’t understand, the tool will not open up new horizons. It won’t help you gain new mathematical knowledge and skills. It will simply be a black box, a mysterious number-producing mechanism. It will be a barrier to higher thought rather than a spur to it.
In the medical field, automated diagnosis has led to increased testing, bloated and unhelpful medical records, and excess billing for procedures that would historically have been routine.
One of the common assumptions about electronic records is that by providing easy and immediate access to past test results, they would reduce the frequency of diagnostic testing. But this study indicates that, as its authors put it, “the reverse may be true.” By making it so easy to receive and review test results, the automated systems appear to “provide subtle encouragement to physicians to order more imaging studies,” the researchers argue.
Some of the subjects were given hand-held GPS devices; others used paper maps. The ones with the maps took more direct routes, had to pause less often, and formed clearer memories of where they’d been than did the ones with the gadgets.
The automation of wayfinding serves to 'inhibit the process of experiencing the physical world by navigation through it.' [...] But while we may no longer have much of a cultural stake in the conservation of our navigational prowess, we still have a personal stake in it. We are, after all, creatures of the earth. [...] It provides a sense of personal accomplishment and autonomy, and it also provides a sense of belonging, a feeling of being at home in a place rather than passing through it. [...] the more you think about it, the more you realize that to never confront the possibility of getting lost is to live in a state of perpetual dislocation. If you never have to worry about not knowing where you are, then you never have to know where you are.
It strains credulity to imagine today’s technology moguls, with their libertarian leanings and impatience with government, agreeing to the kind of vast wealth-redistribution scheme that would be necessary to fund the self-actualizing leisure-time pursuits of the jobless multitudes.