Unintended Consequences

In an article posted on The Atlantic, Nicholas Carr gives a narrow perspective on all the negative impacts of trusting computing and technology with knowledge, over human beings.  He really shows his age and disconnection from the issues he discusses when he puts the term "exponential growth" in quotations as if he does not believe Moore's Law holds true.  Although the specific example used by Carr is pretty compelling, it does not detail the larger picture.  The article should be titled "Pilots and a few other positions are having this specific problem where they forget how to do their job," but that is not as nice and I know that not many would read it, myself most likely included.  I understand that what Carr outlines as the major problem here is where specific high-risk positions have problems generated from the technology replacing the workers in the workplace.  Those workers become, mostly, data interpreters instead of what their previous position was, like a pilot in Carr's example.  However, Carr seems to imply through his writing that he believes this to be a more universal problem than it actually is.  Instead of addressing this as an overarching issue, this specific interaction of technology with pilots should be addressed by the respective governing bodies of the professions affected; most likely by more software to prevent the rash and newly de-skilled actions of panicking pilots.

Carr gives a classic "look how old I am, technology is the devil" sort of view on how technology is stripping away "who we are."  What Carr fails to understand is that the way technology is evolving, it is not "stripping away who we are", it is literally doing exactly as he details when he describes the systems flying the planes and driving cars.  The software is turning something we as people do as a skill into something we do not do; something we do not have to think about or cognitively process in our lives.  It turns a skilled labor into an unskilled labor.  It turns the need for a skilled laborer into the need for an unskilled laborer.  Carr fills a five gallon bucket with ten gallons of previously required water and then is extremely surprised when the excess five gallons of water spill everywhere, "Look at all the water we are wasting with these new buckets!"  As this is happening, gallons upon gallons are being saved by using the software to do the skilled work more efficiently.

Carr says, "...when we automate an activity, we hamper our ability to translate information into knowledge" and he misses the point.  Technology is changing how society works.  Creating more jobs for computing-oriented programming and design, and removing other types of skilled labor.  Technology, and indirectly its manufacturers, are not making skilled laborers dumb, it is making them unskilled laborers.  During the transition, we lose the skill of those who are already supplanted in their previously skilled roles, unless they take that skill elsewhere.  They get the short end of the stick, as more and more kids are trained to fill the newly needed skill-oriented programming roles of computing, instead of the previously needed roles of pilot and stock-broker, used as examples by Carr.

These replacements are something that can be generally predicted (most likely by software), however the ability to actually save the wasted brain power of replaced laborers may not be so easily done; especially in a Capitalist environment where doing so is most likely not profitable.  As Carr says, learning is inefficient and requires time that corporations simply don't have in the budget.  The undesirable consequence of wasted labor (not even addressing the lost jobs from technological improvement), is certainly a byproduct of technological progress.  If it was possible to automate the jobs of these people being displaced, and simply place them elsewhere and have them perform a new skilled task for the same money, it would be done, but new training is not cheap and might require as much as a new degree.

What I am saying is not that I have a better solution to preserving the wasted skills of the labors of these formerly required skilled workers, short of retraining them for new positions, or the much more desirable but not currently possible collective thought solution.  I will leave that task up to those much smarter than myself.  I simply state that we are not rotting because technology helps us drive our cars, lift heavy things, heat our homes, and many other things that free up our time for more intellectual (or perhaps just different in the case of a well-trained skilled labor) pursuits.  Carr asks, albeit rhetorically, "Who needs humans anyway" and the answer, even if he was not looking for one, is that with time, no one will.  The moment we can safely and truly upload our consciousness to the cloud and we stop being human beings is the moment no one needs humans anymore.  That day could be coming, and it will be faster than expected.  When it does, people like Carr would exclaim that we lose who we are, but who we are is more than what we do presently and who we are as society is a hell of a lot more than how we exist presently.