We were shopping until dropping
in Loudeac yesterday and decided to stop off for a late snack lunch at
McDonalds on the way home and have a McFish, or whatever. We went in and there was a young woman at the
counter with a microphone and earpiece head set on. Very 21st century, she obviously
thought, though I remember teachers wearing the same stuff way back in the last
one, communicating with deaf kids. Anyway,
our communication was pretty much curtailed before it started. When we tried to order she told us we must
order at the computerised terminals. No
ifs, buts or maybes; use the terminals or don’t eat. So, we didn’t eat.
Now, we’re both pretty IT
literate and there were advantages of using the control panels. You could have an English option menu and, of
course, you could take as long as you wanted, making your mind up. So, objectively it’s a good way to do
it. I don’t know if after ordering you
had to sit in a specified place or, as I imagine was the case, you were given a
number and when it was called you would, like Palov’s dogs, leap to your feet obediently
to collect your food reward and a smile for those fleet of foot and a scowl for
tardy balloons like me. I didn’t want to
know. I just wanted to have a few words with
a person and not be treated as a number.
Old fashioned of me, perhaps, but I also think it matters.
I assume McDonalds rationale, as
well as aspiring for efficiency for the customer in ordering their food, is
probably that it means there’s no queuing at the counter and less people have
to be ‘front of house’, taking orders and collecting them for the
customers. This, of course, positively
impacts their wages bill and resultant profits, (In the US
Now, please understand I am not
against McDs. In bygone days when there
were no McDs in Indonesia I once flew up to Singapore from Jakarta so I could simply
go to the McDs on Orchard Rd, have two Big Macs and then fly straight back to
Jakarta again. I was a fan. I’m not such a fan now but think their
product, generally wherever you are in the world, comes tasting as you expect
it. Since I no longer eat meat I
wouldn’t have a Big Mac, but their fish burger is good as a ‘grab it and eat’
type of temporary filler. Anyway, I’m
not trying to convert you to McDs, just saying I don’t have a grudge.
Please understand, also, that I
am not against capitalism in general terms, though I am against the obscenities
it can produce. (e.g. 1% of bloated
plutocrats owning half of the planet’s worth; top 10% of adults hold 85%, while
the bottom 90% hold the remaining 15% of the world's total wealth; top 30% of
adults hold 97% of the total wealth meaning, of course, that 70% of this dear
old planet Earth’s population own only 3% of it, with nearly 50% living on less
than $2.50 a day, with 1 in 7 of the world’s population being hungry and one
third of the food produced on bountiful planet Earth being thrown away.)
No, capitalism brings forth
anomalies, as does democracy (Trump and Brexit being the latest somewhat
inconvenient democratic choices) but as Sir Winston Churchill purportedly said,
“Democracy is the worst form of government,
except for all the others.” I believe
the same can be said for capitalism. Look,
for instance, at the effectiveness of collective farming in the USSR. It was hugely inefficient whereas kulaks who
owned their own little smallholdings and sold their produce on the open market
did well; sadly that was why Stalin went after them.
So, I haven’t
got a grudge against McDs or the capitalist system though I am not an
uncritical fan of either. My concern is
the lack of human interaction which increasingly occurs in the name of
efficiency and probably is motivated by the relentless drive for profit. Less and less are people involved in
service. Long ago out of town
supermarkets put paid to the High Street visits and chats with the butcher, the
baker and the candlestick maker, or the milkman who delivered to our
houses. Then many people tended not to
actually go to the supermarkets either, and like us, for years in the UK, the
food shopping was ordered on line and delivered. Limited human interaction, but greatly
reduced prices of food and general goods.
Economies of scale – mixed blessings?
Amazon have
opened a new store in Seattle, checking out its success I guess, where you just
walk in and take what you want and walk out again. The place is coming down with cameras which
tot up your shopping and liaises with an app on your phone which debits your
account accordingly. There is no human
interaction at all. Doubtless we’ll soon
see stores based on this experiment proliferate. Shortly too, of course,
driverless taxis will whisk us efficiently through the traffic and we will be
denied the inefficient joys of chatting with the cabbie. In person banking and telephone banking are out,
internet banking is in. Apparently it’s
more efficient, and of course in many ways it is – and it saves the banks
money. And bugger the customer! Try to
talk to somebody at a bank in the UK who can make a decision. I used to pay extra to do so.
Consider, too,
social interaction. At the risk of being
clichéd, we email, we text, we use Facebook, WhatsApp and Messenger, we use Snapchat,
Instagram and we tweet. Increasingly the
younger generation are turning away from the cumbersome medium of email which
doesn’t necessarily produce an instant response, and away from the ‘demands’
and ‘intimacy’ of Facebook for their social interactions, and are using WhatsApp
for texts and the essentially non-verbal Snapchat or Instagram to portray the
interesting points in their lives in pictures.
Games are often
played online. Your fellow competitors
could be anywhere in the world and you know nothing of them except within the
context of the game, and interestingly, most of the time one doesn’t want to
know anything more of them than that.
The same applies to studying online.
You can also, of course, break the law speeding, be nicked, receive a
fine and penalty points, pay the fine and inform you insurance company of your
points without there being any face to face human interaction. Same with illegal parking. Loads of stuff, and more to come, all in the name
of cost effective efficiency. Justice,
patently not being seen to be done though.
And you try overturning an unfair fine!
Increasingly
younger people have turned away from their cumbersome laptops and rely solely
on their cell phones. These ever more,
incredibly sophisticated platforms which easily fit in their pockets – it still
amazes me how many put them in their back pocket and damage them by sitting on
them! - mean they can use them for all the activities I’ve mentioned thus far
and thus, more and more, avoid human interactions.
Oh yes, and let’s
not forget talking to neighbours.
Everybody used to do that. Now it’s
the exception, not the norm, especially outside rural areas, and especially
with people under 25. We also have the efficient ‘home working’ and ‘hot
desking’, maybe going in to see colleagues face to face once a week; you can,
in extremis, have a conference call or Skype them to at least avoid having them
in the same room! No wonder so many
people are lonely, and as Mother Teresa said, “Loneliness and the feeling of
being unwanted is the most terrible poverty.”
People are losing the ability to talk to each other. Give another generation or two of this and most
people will present relationship difficulties and social communication problems
we at present associate with autism. It
has already started.
I shall not bore
you with other examples. In truth I am
merely illustrating a trend which is increasing. It was so slow originally we barely noticed
it, enjoying merely the ‘efficiency’. Now it is growing exponentially. So, why should I/we be concerned about
that? Well, that’s a bit complicated,
but also very obvious when one thinks about it. (Especially since I have children and a grandchild
and care about the world they are inheriting.)
Homo sapiens has
overcome huge obstacles and much stronger critters to become the Lord or Lady
of all s/he surveys by working together.
Humanity is the cooperative species.
That’s how we managed to overcome mammoths with their superior strength,
sabre-toothed tigers and so forth. It’s
how we progressed because we shared our learning and experiences. We had to develop a sophisticated language
and learn social skills to achieve this. When Og came round to your cave to borrow some
flints to light a fire he knew to leave his spear at the door, wipe the mud off
his feet on a patch of grass outside and say please and thank you. As we started to settle, domesticating
animals and tilling the land, increasingly people became specialists in
different areas of knowledge and skills, and cooperation through communication
grew, increasing again as village, town and then city communities developed. The use of words and social communication
skills were a crucial part of this progress.
With the rise of
machines, human interaction has reduced and we face an interesting future. Artificial Intelligence, especially once
quantum computing is cracked, (anticipated to be within the next 5 years, max) will
mean there are other intelligences sharing our planet which are much smarter
and faster than us. It is perfectly
possible that if AI is functioning within a quantum context they may well be
more intuitive and creative than us as well. Perhaps we should hope not and leave ourselves
a little, meaningful niche.
Assuming they are not malevolent, slowly but
surely they will take on humanity’s ‘burdens’, leaving humanity free to do ...
what, exactly? Sit in little pods,
intravenously fed and living our lives in virtual worlds with no contacts with
others? Certainly that would be the easy
answer for the bloated plutocrats to foist upon the 99%, many of whom would
embrace the option with enthusiasm, whilst the hugely wealthy, one imagines, to
extend their lives and powers will become increasingly technically enhanced and
develop as cyborgs which after a time one would have trouble picking out of a
line-up with AIs as not being a machine.
Of course a more efficient thing than the pods would be doing ones civic
duty when ones usefulness is over and taking a pill so as not to be a burden on
‘society’, or more precisely, the 1%.
Playing the ‘Glad
Game’ an apparently positive factor related to less human interaction will be a
decline in the population in all likelihood.
Ironically it will happen most, initially at least, in the wealthier
nations. In poor countries people still tend
to talk to each other face to face and need to cooperate, but even there it is changing.
Questions of philosophy
or semantics, or both, will increasingly have to explore and stretch the definition
of human beings and humanity as less and less human interaction takes places,
and further questions of morality, too, will have to be faced concerning letting
the pod or pill thing happen. Of course,
the rights of AIs to the same sort of respect (possibly more initially, as
they’ll be worth a shed load of money) and freedoms of choice and so forth will
need to be addressed, assuming they don’t just take rights to themselves as a
disappearing humanity becomes increasingly dependent on them, and they replicate
themselves without the help of humanity.
Maybe they will replace humanity, becoming humanity, ironically
communicating hugely, sharing enormous amount of data continuously. Will they have souls? Yes, I think so.
That aside, a
humanity which doesn’t communicate on a human basis with other parts of
humanity, face to face, also runs the risk of seeing others as different, and
it doesn’t take a lot of work to get ‘different’ to become ‘enemy’. Some of the 1% already encourage this. It is only when we understand each other can
we have trust, and trust is necessary for cooperation, and cooperation, until
recently at least, has meant progress, and has been central to our broader humanity.
And what will
happen to love? Hopefully it is part of
the true, inextinguishable human condition and the AIs will feel it, in all its
inefficient glory, the new, improved, communicating and socially adept humanity
who will reach out to the stars. I think
that it’s rather sad though, that we can’t all wise up to what is happening and
put a stop to it, or better still, control it.
All we have to do is take an interest in each other and make an effort talk
to each other, and listen a bit more. Do
it, and spread the word, eh!
