A guide to orient yourself in the debate on the subject, to understand what the so-called actually consists of digital revolution, on how it should be placed in the long-term perspective of human history and, above all, to get to know AI – artificial intelligence – and the value of data more closely. This is how Andrea Prencipe, rector of Luiss University, defines Nicholas Hagar's book, professor of ethics at MIT.
A text that certainly turns out to be anything but an obvious reading on the theme of the digital revolution that affects the contemporary world but whose journey will determine what will be the near and distant future of the entire planet.
The Digital Revolution is transforming human lives. Much of the upheaval caused by the Industrial Revolution was due to the automation of muscle power. The Digital Revolution however, underlines Agar, is automating human mental work. It therefore poses a threat to occupations whose intellectual content is high, i.e. those occupations which usually require long years of study and pay high wages.
Advances in artificial intelligence appear to lead to a progressive pulverization of human agency. It really seems that we will have to face a future in which control over societies and human lives will be increasingly and inexorably ceded to digital technologies "with clearly superior decision-making powers".
Hagar believes that men, in general, have a tendency to assume that things will continue exactly as they do now. We tend to underestimate the threat to human agency – human agency – by the machines. This also happens because many of today's artificial intelligences do not seem to pose a real threat to our workplace. In doing so, however, the rapid rate of improvement that they have in absolute terms and in comparison with the human one is ignored.
Men therefore manifest a prejudice towards the capabilities of future machines and, in parallel, an altered vision of real human abilities. Hagar claims this bias in favor of human beings is as untenable as pre-Copernican geocentrism.
The goal Hagar set for himself when writing the essay Don't be a machine it is to describe what must be done to safeguard human agency in the digital age. Safeguarding the human contribution certainly does not mean rejecting the technological marvels that the Digital Revolution has brought, rather it will require careful consideration of the domains of human activity that we will yield to machines.
The societies that will emerge from the Digital Revolution should be structured around what Agar calls socio-digital economies.
The main value of the digital economy is efficiency.
The main value of the social economy is humanity.
In a fully enlarged social economy we should be free to choose the work we want to do. This type of economy, for the author, could be a response to one of the typical evils of our age: social isolation.
Dispossessed of work positions based on efficiency, we should therefore be free to devote ourselves to "new types of work that meet the social needs of human beings". Jobs that we will also have to be able to invent from scratch because, in all likelihood, "if we don't create them, those tasks will not exist".
Some argue that we should respond to digital advances by offering men a universal basic income. But for Agar, without the social glue of work, another way should be found to prevent our societies from breaking up into sub-communities defined by ethnicity, religious affiliation and other socially appreciable characteristics. When we work together, in a sense, we cross the lines between race, religion, gender and ability. Agar defines work as the social glue that helps transform outsiders into cohesive societies who trust each other. When he endorses the rule of work, however, Agar does so on concepts that go beyond many of the forms that work takes in these times of economic uncertainty. Indeed, he believes that “much of today's work is unsatisfactory”.
Another context in which you need to work with others to achieve results and success is sport.
Other visions of the future see all the wealth generated by digital machines in the hands of the few who own them.
Agar's vision of the future would be a Digital Age in which we will be surrounded by fabulous digital technologies but still be able to enjoy intensely social existences.
In both the case of climate change and the threat to human agency from the Digital Revolution, the rewards for success and the penalties for failure are so great that we are forced to make the greatest efforts.
The author returns several times theme of data, to be considered as the true form of wealth that distinguishes the Digital Revolution: “We are giving up control of our data to Google, Facebook and 23andMe, just as early XNUMXth century Texan farmers were happy to accept paltry sums of money in exchange for the right of others to survey their land for petroleum, useless for their activity as farmers or ranchers". Instead, these data are the new gold that seems to dictate the rules of the "digital stock exchange".
One could also choose not to realize the ideal of the socio-digital economy, comments Agar, and continue to consider technologies as influences of principle on the collective human experience, but we should then expect or fear a dehumanized future, dominated in every way from the efficiency value. A real choice of extinction programmed with awareness, having deliberately opted to “give up our occupations to the robotic and better versions of ourselves”.
After all, in a world where there are machines to be the master, we really risk becoming a sort of new gladiators, and Prince in the preface to the book of Agar wonders if we will come to depend on "an algorithm-emperor who will decide our life and our death with a thumbs down".
Gladiators appealed to feet of emperors, but it seems really difficult to be able to count on such a human feeling when dealing with machines. And he too agrees with the author that "preserving humanity even in the digital age, or at least making it more human, may then be the only way out of this apparent dead end".
Reference Bibliography
Nicholas Hagar, Don't be a machine. How to stay human in the digital age, Luiss University Press, Rome, 2020. Translation by Anna Bissanti from the original text in English How to be human in the digital economy, MIT Press (Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press), United States of America, 2019. Italian edition with a preface by Andrea Prencipe.
