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Have The Robots Already Won?
The other day I was reading this article by Tobias Rose-Stockwell. When I finished the article I was struck by how eerily familiar the problem of algorithmic control of human life felt. It took me awhile to put my finger on why it felt familiar.
The article uses the Facebook newsfeed as the primary example/culprit in how algorithms are driving so much of what we consume and how our brains are effectively being rewired by these algorithms until we end up in an echo chamber of messages designed to incite fear and outrage because those are what generate engagement and engagement is what generates ad dollars. It struck me that through the human creation of these algorithms and our succumbing to their use, we have ceded power, control, and our critical and creative thinking capacities to these bits of code. It’s almost like the machines control us. It’s almost like we are slaves to the algorithms.
Is this starting to sound a bit more familiar? Human enslavement to machines has been a subject of creative imagination for generations now. Creators as varied as Tolkien and the Wachowski siblings have wrestled with how industrialization, machines, and computers which bear the promise of enhancing human flourishing actually come to enslave humans and disconnect people from their humanity and the natural world. In Tolkien Sauron and Saruman use the powers of industrialization to…
