Machines' inhumanity to Man?

Part of the Earthquake Series. What new narrative will win the day?

It is surely reasonable to consider whether or not our species is in the process of going through one of the every-few-hundred-years mutations that are the most significant changes humans ever have to confront?

I know! Hell of a topic, huh? But it has to be worth a look, hasn’t it? I mean, if it ain’t important, what is?

Image at top: copyright Shutterstock

To investigate, I’ll start with The Big Issue of human existence. What the … ? The simple fact that each of us arrives here unbidden from some state of non-existence, experiences life for a minuscule period of time, then drops back into the state of non-existence.

“Blimey, is this existential stuff really necessary?” I hear you enquire. I think it is. I think that exploring what’s going on at the moment requires us to at least briefly consider some fundamental aspects of human existence.

A cup of coffee may help, or maybe two fingers of something stronger if that’s your preference.

All set? Here we go.

To begin at the beginning …

We all are born into a story. We have no control over the choice of that story - we can only deal with whatever set of circumstances we find ourselves in. This is made more abstruse by the fact that any and all of our stories have no author. They just are.

It’s why religions exert such power, don’t you think? Religions provide stories, narratives, that assure us there is an author. More than that, the author is entirely certain of the veracity of whatever story that particular religion proposes. And you know it must be true because there are rules that, if adhered to, lead to some form of pleasant everlasting existence and, if not adhered to, lead to some form of … er … unpleasant everlasting existence. Which is to say, either way, death is conquered. Job done!

The only snag, of course, is that there are around four thousand recognized faiths in the world and they can’t all be right. Even the fact that about three-quarters of that total boil down to some variant of just five religions - Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Judaism, Islam - doesn’t resolve the dilemma.

Anyway, whatever, we each of us find ourselves here on planet Earth which we usually learn during the first bit of our brief span is situated in a Very Big universe. Very Big? It is, in fact, Unimaginably Bloody Enormous.

According to an online search, there are an estimated 2 trillion galaxies, each of which has around 100 billion stars, each star having an average 1.6 planets. I leave it to you to do the math but I’m pretty sure you’ll quickly run out of fingers. And let’s not even get started on the question of such finicky details as ‘infinity’ and ‘eternity’.

Suffice to say, we are infinitesimally small in an unimaginably large universe. And yet, each of us figures large, front and centre in our own personal world.

It is, so to say, the mother and father of all micro-macro mind-benders.

So, let’s bring this to bear on our local environment …

Down to Earth

Okay, we’re here. So what does that mean? Over to Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) because I don’t think anyone could improve on her wonderful words:

The vita activa, human life in so far as it is actively engaged in doing something, is always rooted in a world of men and man-made things which it never leaves or altogether transcends. Things and men form the environment for each of man’s activities, which would be pointless without such location; yet this environment, the world into which we are born, would not exist without the human activity which produced it, as in the case of fabricated things; which takes care of it, as in the case of cultivated land; or which established it through organization, as in the case of the body politic.

So, Arendt concludes, here, that there are three basic conditions within human groups. First, the labour necessary for humans to stay alive (animal laborans). Second, the work of making things (homo faber). But neither of these necessarily implies change or development. That comes from, third, the world of action, where we reinvent, reimagine, reshape, our environment - the political and social bit.

Pause for a moment to think about the level of change that is currently being both contemplated and initiated across all three of these dimensions. Perhaps it’s not surprising that there is a heightened level of anxiety?

The present is a foreign country …

You know the famous opening line of The Go-Between¹ - “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there”. Is it possible, I wondered, whether those of us who are not Millennials or Gen Z (who have known only some version of a digitalized world) may now be experiencing an inversion of that claim: “The present is a foreign country ...”?

You have to be careful, of course, about such an observation. To remind you, the title of this Substack is an acronym: Aargh! stands for Age-activated reportage, grumbling and humour, and I recall a speech given by Lord Saatchi (Maurice Saatchi, former adman) back in 2008 that included this:

We are victims of a drug administered by the Gods to all humans. As people grow older, they grow more disillusioned. The Gods are being cruel to be kind – it is easier to leave the world if ‘The country is going to the dogs’ or if ‘It’s not like it was in the good old days’.²

Is that what this is all about? Disillusionment? To some extent, maybe, but it feels as though there is much more to it than that.

So, might this be the real thing - A Human Mutation Event? Perhaps. In a 1993 publication, Peter Drucker, 20th century giant of management thinking, identified the phenomenon:

Every few hundred years in Western history there occurs a sharp transformation. ... Within a few short decades, society rearranges itself – its world view; its basic values; its social and political structure; its arts; its key institutions. Fifty years later there is a new world. And the people born then cannot even imagine the world in which their grandparents lived and into which their own parents were born. We are currently living in such a transformation.³

“Interesting”, I thought when I first read that, “Somewhat hyperbolic, but I guess that helps make the point.”

Hyperbolic, my foot: I now realize that Drucker was simply telling it like it is. The only quibble I have with his text is his reference to ‘Western history’. I think it’s bigger than that; it relates to the whole world.

No wonder there’s a disorienting sensation, particularly for those of us who are long in the tooth, of having been born into one world and now being thrust, without the option, into another. Let’s call it a Drucker Transformation, a DT. The outcome can be a bit like the other DT, delirium tremens, but without the need for even a drop of the hard stuff.

I conclude that it is highly likely that a DT is happening right now: a fundamental shift in the way that we humans regard ourselves. Yup, that big.

To explore this, let’s start with the technological elements.

Technologically speaking …

Technological change upsets the status quo. Of course it does. That’s its purpose. Do some existing thing better, faster, cheaper. Or, better still, do something entirely new.

Whenever any significant tech development happens, we humans have to respond to it and accommodate it into our lives.

We need also to understand it. Not necessarily to understand the minutiae of the technology but to understand the implications of the tech-enabled change for humans. That’s always the hardest part.

With that in mind, here’s an assertion that links technology with a historical claim …The iPhone has a place in history on a par with the wheel.
Which is to say, it is a technological innovation that is proving to be a first order of magnitude game-changer for humanity.

It can be tempting to think that many technologies over the ages have had similarly universal impact, but that’s not really true. Yes, many technologies have brought about great changes in our lives but, in the vast majority of cases, those changes were of a lower order of magnitude.

So, the iPhone is, to my mind, the representative technology that figures prominently in the current Drucker Transformation.

And, to emphasize the key point: in this case, as when technology triggers any change, the outcomes of greatest impact and concern are not technological.

The outcomes that really matter have to do with changes and stresses imposed on the wetware that we call the human body. Sure, that wetware includes the brain but, unlike a stand-alone computer, the human brain is an integral part of a body-wide complex and emotionally-infused human system.

This reveals itself by the emergence, alongside the tech development, of a socio-moral panic and some form of censorship. Which is to say, there are three ingredients of any Drucker Transformation: a technology, a socio-moral panic, and censorship.

Drucker Transformations

Let’s put some flesh on the bones of this proposition with a quick overview of a few DTs.

800 to 200 B.C.E. China, India and the West: human consciousness, from gods to God

The first DT that we know of doesn’t even have a known technological trigger. We might surmise that it was helped along by advances in marine navigation but who knows. That’s because it took place between 800 and 200 B.C.E.

Karl Jaspers (1883-1969), a German-Swiss psychiatrist and philosopher, labelled this period The Axial Age and described it like this:

The most extraordinary events are concentrated in this period. Confucius and Lao-tse were living in China, all the schools of Chinese philosophy came into being, including those of Mo-ti, Chuang-tse, Lieh-tsu and a host of others; India produced the Upanishads and Buddha and, like China, ran the whole gamut of philosophical possibilities down to scepticism, to materialism, sophism and nihilism; in Iran Zarathustra taught a challenging view of the world as a struggle between good and evil; in Palestine the prophets made their appearance, from Elijah, by way of Isaiah and Jeremiah to Deutero-Isaiah; Greece witnessed the appearance of Homer, of the philosophers - Parmenides, Heraclitus and Plato - of the tragedians, Thucydides and Archimedes. Everything implied by these names developed during these few centuries almost simultaneously in China, India and the West, without any of these regions knowing the others.⁴

So, this is the period when four of the five major religions mentioned earlier - Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Judaism - came into being. It marks a hugely important step change in human development.

The Axial Age marked the end of a Mythical Age and the start of something quite different. A level of rationality emerged - logos versus mythos - and, as Jaspers went on to write:

What is new about this age, in all three areas of the world, is that man becomes conscious of Being as a whole, of himself and his limitations.⁵

In fact, this Drucker Transformation gave birth to the pre-modern world: its narrative, its story, emerged via its religions, its thinking, its behaviors.

Which is to say, from this time, human behaviour changed en masse.

The result on this occasion was a quite rigid world, one where everyone knew their place, and where success was based upon the quality and diligence of performance in whatever role an individual found himself or herself.

And it enjoyed an impressive time span: all the way through to …

15th century Europe: the printing press, the Protestant Reformation, religious censorship

This DT was initiated by Gutenberg’s invention of printing with movable type (1455 in the Rhineland city of Mainz) and Martin Luther’s Protestant Reformation (1517).

First, the tech. The printing press is an example par excellence of innovation:

It created an original process through the combination of several existing techniques, including those of the Roman wine-press, the goldsmith’s punch and impressionable paper. Also, through the use of movable metal type cast in replica moulds, it was the first application of ‘the theory of interchangeable parts’ – one of the basic principles of the later machine age.⁶

Printing caused huge consternation among the powerful. In Europe, the ruling Roman Catholic authorities were terrified that the wide availability of a mass communication system capable of producing texts in different languages would rob them of the power that, up until then, had safeguarded their possession of ‘secret knowledge’ that ensured their continued dominance.

A clear indicator of this is the fact that it led, in 1486, to the setting-up of Europe’s first ever censorship office, operated jointly by the electorate of Mainz and the city of Frankfurt.

As already mentioned, censorship is a feature of all Drucker Transformations. If a transformation is under way, some form of censorship will be in evidence! Mind you, in this instance, it wasn’t just Christendom that was affected: by this time the Islamic narrative had arrived (in the seventh century), and the Islamic authorities went further, putting in place a ban on printing that remained in force right through to the nineteenth century.

The censorship, however, did not stop the utterly convinced and abrasive Martin Luther (1483-1546) from promoting his view that salvation was not necessarily dependent upon the Roman Catholic church:

For the pope is not above but under the word of God.⁷

The moral panic at the heart of this European transformation related to the shift from belief in the absolute power of the medieval Christian Church, which had fallen into disrepute (e.g. all those indulgences) to the revolutionary concept that humans, using God-given ingenuity, could master the world in which we live. It was not a rejection of religious belief, but a repositioning of it.

The Protestant assertion of faith as a personal and private matter was on the march. Printing was on the march, too. In short order, presses arrived in Basle (1466), Rome (1467), Paris (1470), Cracow (1474), London (1476) ... and on and on.

As a result, most important of all, yet again human behaviour changed en masse.

That’s an extraordinary claim, isn’t it? Human behaviour changed en masse. It changed with the arrival of the Axial Age and it changed to something different with the printing press and the Protestant reformation. How could this be? I’ll expand on this in the next post in this series but, for now, here’s a quote from a text by American literary critic, Lionel Trilling (1905-1975):

Historians of European culture are in substantial agreement that, in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, something like a mutation in human nature took place.⁸

Thus was the world turned upside-down, the result of a combination of a revolutionary technological development, a counter-view to a dominant philosophy that had, so to speak, passed its use-by date, and a liberal helping of illiberal censorship.

Then, it happened all over again with the arrival of the mechanical-industrial age.

18th century Europe and America: the steam engine, Age of Enlightenment, from Georgian to Victorian values

This convulsed Europe (for example, the French Revolution – 1789) and America (the American Revolutionary War – 1775-1783) and was powered by a plethora of Enlightenment thinkers including Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), David Hume (1711-1776), Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), Thomas Paine (1737-1809), Adam Smith (1723-1790), Voltaire (1694-1778) and more.

Again, picking one tech development to represent the transformation trigger we can opt for Boulton & Watt’s perfected steam engine (1775) accompanied by a moral panic to reform the …

manners and morals amid the Sodom and Gomorrah of ... Britain.⁹

This all happened, of course, contemporaneously with the publishing of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776) and a multitude of other contributions from the philosophers and politicians just listed.

It was another door-opening to a new world but, at the outset, the general discourse was not all about the technology, not all about steam power.

Rather, it was about social behaviour and morality – especially the issue of ‘cant’ (Oxford English Dictionary: affected or insincere phraseology; esp. language implying piety which does not exist; hypocrisy).

Think the vile Uriah Heep in Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield (1849-50).

We can learn a lot from the reactions of one notable commentator who lived exclusively within this Drucker Transformation period: George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron (1788-1824).

During his short life, Lord Byron achieved fame for his poetic genius, notoriety for his sexual adventures, and a legacy of bravery (his death came about through injury and sepsis when engaged in helping the Greeks fight back against the colonizing Ottoman Empire). Byron it was who labelled it

The Age of Cant.¹⁰

At this time, the liberality or grossness, depending on which way you look at it, of the Georgian period was being supplanted by the more prudish and not infrequently hypocritical attitudes that came to personify the Victorians.

The more puritanical folks did perhaps have a point because some of the ‘liberal’ behaviour does appear to have been a tad excessive. To give just one example, the greatly lauded English Shakespearean actor, Edmund Kean:

In the interval of a play, and sometimes between scenes, he would have sex with a prostitute, sometimes two or three.¹¹

The change of moral mood caused him to be vilified in a campaign by The Times of London. Byron’s behaviour also came in for criticism, which is when he hit back with his ‘Age of Cant’ riposte. X-style twxxt behaviour, it seems, is not as new or revolutionary as one might imagine.

This was, of course, the genesis of what was to become the morally rigid but commercially productive Victorian period, infused with the Protestant work ethic. In 1838, the year of Queen Victoria’s coronation, a historian of rural customs wrote:

We are become a sober people. England is no longer Merry England, but busy England; England full of wealth and poverty – extravagance and care.¹²

It was, in fact, the start of the modern era, including the nation states and social mores and business formats that grew to dominate the 20th century.

Much of this was empowering and beneficial. Indeed, the technological advances of the subsequent two hundred years enabled the human population of our planet not only to increase eight-fold, but also to equip the massively increased population with far greater longevity and relative prosperity.

Crucially, in physical terms, the changes of the mechanical age functioned within the human environment but kept humans and machines separate from one another. They were discrete domains.

The mechanical wonders did, of course, lead to social change on a grand scale: for example, whole populations moving from rural to urban living, and undertaking new kinds of work and the lifestyles that those jobs necessitated.

However, when the sun came up as reliably as ever on Friday 29 June 2007, the day of the iPhone’s launch, the world looked the same but was, in fact, a very different place.

21st century World: the iPhone, global consciousness, an end to anthropocentrism, and the emergence of a secular religion

Throughout the ages, warfare has been a feature of human activity. It’s one of the things we do. But, by the twentieth century, largely courtesy of technology, it had gone from being plain awful to being hideously awful, if such a graduation makes any sense whatsoever.

No surprise then that in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War and the subsequent few decades the longing for stability and peace led to the creation of the United Nations, the European Union, the World Health Organization and other collaboratively-minded regional and global ventures including, not least, the World Economic Forum.

The universal peace-on-earth mindset (which, judging by the number of conflicts in 2024, has passed) was joined by concerns about the overall effects of human activities on our planet. For example, it was 1987 when a United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development report, Our Common Future, pointed up and defined the then-new term ‘sustainable development’:

development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

To most of us, this is a self-evident, worthwhile, even noble goal.

Overall, the message was clear: ‘We’re all in this together. Let there be peace, co-operation and fairness.’ That said, some folks undoubtedly thought: ‘Ooh, this is a fantastic opportunity to make money / build power / rule the roost.’

‘Twas ever thus.

Whatever, the mood marked an end to the anthroprocentrism which had been derived from Christian theology of the Axial Age - see, from the Bible, Genesis 2:15:

And the Lord God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and keep it.

Hmm, if God made Man steward of the Earth it put him at the head of everything, didn’t it? I repeat, this story dates from the Axial Age. Shows you the power of a persuasive narrative.

This must surely help explain why “the melancholy, long, withdrawing roar”¹³ of the Sea of Faith in Christianity just had to be replaced by some other story? We humans are, it seems, disoriented and lost without a story.

The more than $64 million dollar question is, Which new story will win through?

In conclusion

I’ll draw to a close now and, next time, I’ll expand on the mindset changes that are linked to each of the Drucker Transformations thumb-nailed in this essay.

But, to finish, I must head-on address the title I gave this post:
Machines’ inhumanity to Man?

What’s that about?

Simply that, as digitalization becomes ever more ubiquitous, I do worry, not that the technology becomes too powerful, but that by becoming all-dominant it squeezes out the possibility of human intervention in ways other than those proscribed by the technologies themselves.

As we have moved through the current Drucker Transformation we have:

• as part of a globalization thrust, redistributed corporate entities horizontally across the world;

• then used digitalization to ‘connect’ and control the various parts of these enterprises;

• and insisted that strict protocols are observed to keep the distributed organizations functioning smoothly.

The problem occurs if and when digital systems over-impose their ‘0s & 1s’, ‘On & Off’ protocols on humans. We don’t have an On-Off switch. Human wetware is very different from digital hardware.

You think this over-imposition won’t happen? I hope that proves to be the case, but here’s a list of ‘Deep Shifts’ posited by Klaus Schwab in a World Economic Forum view from 2016¹⁴:

Implantable Technologies - Our Digital Presence - Vision as the New Interface - Wearable Internet - Ubiquitous Computing - A Supercomputer in Your Pocket - (Online) Storage for All - The Internet of and for Things - The Connected Home - Smart Cities - Big Data for Decisions - Driverless Cars - Artificial Intelligence and Decision Making - AI and White-Collar Jobs - Robotics and Services - Bitcoin and the Blockchain - The Sharing Economy - Governments and the Blockchain - 3D Printing and Manufacturing - 3D Printing and Human Health - 3D Printing and Consumer Products - Designer Beings - Neurotechnologies.

Yikes! I’m sure there’s potential good in many of those areas but there is an absolute need to keep the humanness of humans clearly in mind. Not least, as the work of Jonathan Haidt¹⁵ and others is now showing, digital connectivity is perfectly capable of generating isolation, apart-ness and anxiety.

We really do need to get this one right!

The words ‘Man’s inhumanity to man’ are widely known. They come from the pen of Scottish poet, Robert Burns¹⁶. Now, surely, we need to guard against Machines’ Inhumanity to Man? We must ensure that we do not allow machines to add to the pain … but there’s an awful lot of anxiety, disaffection and burnout that suggests it might be doing just that.

Now then, if you’ve read this far, Congratulations! You certainly deserve a reward. How about this? It seemed appropriate to put a definition, by Ambrose Bierce (1842- unknown!), of Existence¹⁷:

A transient, horrible fantastic dream,
Wherein is nothing yet all do seem:
From which we’re wakened by a friendly nudge
Of our bedfellow Death, and cry ‘O fudge!’

Thanks for reading.

1. Hartley, L.P. The Go-Between (1956)

2. Lord Saatchi, in an address to Creative Britain in Golden Square, London. 16 September 2008

3. Drucker, Peter. Post-Capitalist Society (1993)

4. Jaspers, Karl. The Origin and Goal of History (1950)

5. Jaspers, Karl. Ibid.

6. Davies, Norman. Europe, a history (1996)

7. From The Proceedings of Friar Martin Luther, Augustinian, with the Lord Apostolic Legate at Augsburg in Luther’s Works (Minneapolis, 1957-1986). Quoted by Holland, Tom. Dominion: the making of the western mind (2019)

8. Trilling, Lionel. Sincerity and Authenticity (1971, 1972)

9. Wilson, Ben. The Making of Victorian Values: Decency and Dissent in Britain 1789 – 1837. (2007)

10. Wilson, Ben. Ibid.

11. Wilson, Ben. Ibid.

12. Wilson, Ben. Ibid.

13. Arnold, Matthew. Dover Beach (1867)

14. Schwab, Klaus. The Fourth Industrial Revolution (2016)

15. See, for example: Haidt, Jonathan. The Anxious Generation (2024)

16. Burns, Robert. Man Was Made to Mourn: A Dirge (1784)

17. Bierce, Ambrose. The Devil’s Dictionary (1911)