Words&Dirt

“I still haven’t found that place where I can be my true self. But maybe you never get to be your true self, either.”

––We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, by Karen Joy Fowler, pg. 298

“Will machines supplant human workers or augment them? On one level, they will do both. But once again, that is the wrong question to ask, and it provides only a partial answer. Both software and hardware robots are flexible enough that they can ultimately become whatever we program them to be. In our current economy, how robots––both machines and intelligent systems––are designed and how they are used is overwhelmingly defined by cost and benefit, and costs are falling at an increasingly rapid rate. In our society, economics dictate that if a task can be done more cheaply by machine––software or hardware––in most cases it will be. It’s just a matter of when.

The decision to come down on either side of the debates is doubly difficult because there are no obvious right answers. Although driverless cars will displace millions of jobs, they will also save many lives. Today, decisions about implementing technologies are made largely on the basis of profitability and efficiency, but there is an obvious need for a new moral calculus.”

––Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots, by John Markoff, pg. 18