Automation Improves Safety

The airports with their self-check-in kiosks and restaurants full of iPads are staffed by thousands of human workers (most using mano machine can do? Or, like operating an elevator and driving a car, is it because at first we don't trust machines to do a job where lives are at risk? Elevators became much safer as soon as the human operators were replaced. The human-hating Skynet from the Terminator movies could hardly do a better job of killing people than we do killing ourselves with cars. H...

 Rise of the Useless Class

As algorithms push humans out of the job market, wealth and power might become concentrated in the hands of the tiny elite that owns the all-powerful algorithms, creating unprecedented social and political inequality. Alternatively, the algorithms might themselves become the owners. Human law already recognizes intersubjective entities like corporations and nations as “legal persons.” Though Toyota or Argentina has neither a body nor a mind, they are subject to international laws, they ca...

 Being in a Car Affects Our Sense of Personal Space

Psychologists have noted that people driving a motor car react in a manner that is often completely unlike their normal social behaviour as regards their territories. It seems that a motor vehicle sometimes has a magnifying effect on the size of a person’s personal space. In some cases, their territory is magnified by up to ten times the normal size, so the driver feels that he has a claim to an area of 9 to 10 metres in front of and behind his motor car. When another driver cuts in front o...

 Humans are "Tool Complexes"

Humans are tool complexes—hands for certain tasks, feet, ears, teeth. etc., for others. Using their human tool complexes, human minds, comprebending variable interrelationship principles, invent detached-from-self tools—the bucket can lift out more water from the well than can a pair of cupped human hands—that are more special-case-effective but not used as frequently as their organically integral tools. Humans invent craft tools and industrial tools. The latter are all the tools that c...