Recently, I read a Bloomberg article (shorturl.at/biiXd) about the possible disappearance of London’s famous black taxis because driverless cabs are set to make their appearance before the year is out. The article also described in detail how black-cab drivers acquire their ‘knowledge’ to pass a famous test of street-by-street city familiarity. It was fascinating. The article left me feeling angry about the whole thing. Technologists do not understand life at all.
If you are a new visitor to London, a ride in a roomy black taxi is one of its attractions. The conversation is typically a taste of the city, with cabbie descriptions of each landmark laced with personal anecdotes in their unique accents setting one up for an exploration of the UK capital.
If you take this away and put visitors in a self-driving vehicle, you erase one of the charms of visiting London. But this is not the only thing that technologists have done to us. It is only the latest in a long list.
Imagining sitting in a driverless car, one can visualize the joy of the ride draining away as one is left in the company of one’s fears, anxieties and, worse, one’s smartphone. Someone may object that the black cab was always a luxury, and that automation makes rides cheaper. But the answer to affordable mobility was never human-less and humourless technology. It was public transport—buses and trains full of humans.
The elevation of technology from a means to an end in itself is robbing human existence of its soul. Or, the soul is being removed from the living. In other words, technologists seem determined to reduce us to zombies. Efficiency is not the be-all and end-all of every human endeavour. There is a need for a human connection. Moreover, it is often our imperfections and oddities that give life its charm and humans a purpose. Strip all these away and we are as good or as bad as corpses.
Conversations with someone behind a ticket counter, or with a bank teller, post office clerk or newspaper vendor, are not mere points of friction to be removed. Reducing humans to atoms in the name of efficiency is not a service but the opposite. Efficiency saves time for humans. But to what end? To savour their loneliness more acutely?
This is not just one traveller’s complaint. In 2019, John Lloyd made the same point in the Financial Times (shorturl.at/tQonw).
He is a shopkeeper’s son. He called the slow death of the high street the loss of something we never thought of paying for: the company a shop gave away for free, which we never counted as worth anything until it was gone.
The shopkeeper, he wrote, makes us ask, choose and say a word before we hand over money. Take the counter away, and you do not just lose a sale, but also one of the last places where buying something also meant meeting someone. The screen sells us those goods and leaves us alone with them.
Slowness and stillness are features of living that enable us to develop awareness of oneself and the world around. This is healthy. Speed and efficiency, as enabled by technology, have the opposite effect. An obsession with them denies us a chance to savour the beauty of human endeavours and achievements. The Western world, with its linear approach to life, cannot do better.
That fixation has even had an impact on sports. In field hockey, the switch from natural grass to astroturf made speed the only variable that mattered. Not artistry, nor ball control.
In tennis, the racquet head became bigger and more powerful. Now, more often than not, the game is reduced to the speed and quality of the first serve. All else fades away.
At this year’s Wimbledon final, Jannik Sinner did not concede a single service game in either the semi-final or final—the first man to do so since Roger Federer in 2003.
When holding one’s service games becomes this automatic, a rally gets a chance only if a second serve puts the ball in play, and artistry becomes an accident rather than the point of the contest.
In cricket too, the power and size of the bat have reduced the bowler to just another spectator.
Most of the time, technologists would point to the popularity of some of these things as testimony to their utility. In doing so, they cater to base human instincts rather than elevating them.
By replacing human endeavours and concentrating the gains of efficiency in the hands of a few, technology facilitates an unfair distribution of payoffs from economic activity. Thus, it destroys people’s purchasing power, and with it, domestic demand for the goods and services that ordinary people with ordinary incomes would buy.
Concentration of wealth in the hands of techno-capitalists would mean a rise in demand for a certain class of goods and services. Their conspicuous consumption breeds resentment—a recipe for social conflict.
There is a reason we use the phrase ‘in the driver’s seat’ to denote our control over shaping the events that unfold. By removing the driver from a vehicle, modern technology removes human agency.
Writing in FT last week (shorturl.at/BDKDJ), John Thornhill saw the same drift in the rush for artificial general intelligence. A handful of firms are steering all of us to a destination that has not even been discussed, let alone got a social mandate. Inevitability is being presented as though it were consent. It is not.
Most techno-optimists point to Keynes, who is said to have extolled technology’s ability to enable humans to enjoy both productivity and leisure. If he were alive today, he might have lamented that technology has obliterated human agency to an extent that a broad spectrum of humanity would not have the means to enjoy the leisure that technology enables for a few.
The leisure Keynes foresaw is real. But it accrues to whoever owns the machine. For all else, it arrives as disempowerment dressed up as liberation.
I am contemplating a slew of product launches: mugs, hats, T-shirts and badges that proclaim, “I am a proud luddite—if what technology produces is the stripping of human choice and agency.” I will not mass-produce it in a factory, but give the contract to a labour-intensive production unit.
These are the author’s personal views.
The author is chief economic advisor, Government of India.