IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2022 - 87

to we humans, that power is both sustained and grown
by ever smarter feeding on extractable gradients in our
environment and deploying the acquired organized,
purposefully transformable matter and energy in the
building and maintaining of internal power enabling
structures of brain, body, and relationship through
mental, physical, and social exertion. Effort maintains
and raises inner human gradients. When a technology
comes along eliminating the need for human effort,
pandering to the principle of least effort [45]-[48],
the deep-seated urge to minimize the built-in discomfort-pain-of
calorie consuming exertion that once
made survival sense in a world sans food-on-demand,
what it is in effect doing is degrading the exertion generated
difference that makes a difference. Thanks to
increasing reliance on technology to do more and
more of the work, the advancing sum of losing it for
not using it exertion removal is weakening our mental,
physical, and social muscles by rendering their
exercise unnecessary; it enfeebles us through increasing
loss of the need to use, rendering us ever more
dependent, collectively and individually ever more
deeply in the grip of addiction by design to the promise
of convenience, the intelligence trapping dependency
that consumes, the illusion that sells and hooks
[47], [49], [50].
Degrading our gradients: Self-similarity
at work
Schneider and Kay propose that not only can gradient
degrading order spontaneously emerge from
disorder in physical or chemical systems, networked,
self-similar, self-organizing processes apply on up to
living organisms, to ecosystems, and we contend,
state-of-the-art technical advance as a leading edge of
evolving intelligence. In a nutshell, the technical order
creates an order in one's life that eliminates the need
to produce an equivalent order in one's brain, body, or
social engagement skill. More than this, it dissipates an
existing inner order, or more significantly, eliminates its
development in children through the loss of the need
to use [22]. The issue, however, is not one particular
hi-tech system like GPS taking over the hippocampus
cognitive map enabling mental navigation mental
work for us. It is the doing it all for us technology taking
over more and more of the work, faster and faster [47].
Prescience
In Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-Control
as a Theme in Political Thought, political theorist,
March 2022
Langdon Winner, believes Mary Shelley's quotation
from Paradise Lost10 at the opening of her prescient
novel, Frankenstein, captures the problem's essence
as " the plight of things that have been created but
not in a context of sufficient care " [51]. The plight
of Victor Frankenstein, Winner argues, is the plight
of us, that his problems " have now become those of
a whole culture. " Frankenstein discovers but refuses
to ponder implications [51], [52]. Thanks to " a pervasive
ignorance and refusal to know, irresponsibility,
and blind faith...toward the technical...powerful
changes [are being released] into the world with
cavalier disregard for consequences " [52, p. 314].
We " 'use' apparatus, technique, and organization
with no attention to the ways in which these 'tools'
unexpectedly rearrange " us. We " participate without
second thought in megatechnical systems far beyond
[our] comprehension or control. " We " endlessly proliferate
technological forms of life that isolate people
from each other and cripple rather than enrich the
human potential " [52]. We " stand idly by while vast
technical systems " ever more cleverly reverse adapt
human ends " to match the character of the [increasingly]
available means " [52, p. 229], [49].
And so here we are
Artificial machine intelligent software and hardware
have finally rounded the exponential bend
upward to " smart enough to do the job themselves. "
When more and more lose their jobs to technical systems,
those systems will be discharging entropy into
their lives as they lose access to life sustaining order,
the differences that can make a difference called
jobs, money, food, housing, opportunity, fulfillment,
meaning, power, health, family, community...crushing
their future freedom of action.11
10 " Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay
To mould me man? Did I solicit thee
From darkness to promote me? "
11The flip side of the push toward automation is those who still have jobs are being
forced to work more and more like machines, faster and faster, longer and longer,
with maximal cost reducing/profit swelling, rich getting richer, inequality escalating
efficiency. In " The Amazon that customers don't see " by Jodi Kantor, Karen Weise, and
Grace Ashford, Amazon warehouse workers are compelled to take AI-Taylorism to
new levels setting them up for future automated replacement. " Amazon continue[s]
to track every minute of most warehouse workers' shifts, from how fast they packed
merchandise to how long they paused " [53]. But workers doing repetitive physical
tasks that are currently being replaced by automation as in groceries being picked
out not by a worker in a local supermarket but by a robot in a nearby warehouse
are not alone [54], [55]; the tentacles of automation are reaching for much higher
paid professionals with college and graduate degrees, including lawyers, bankers,
and accountants, as New York Times technology columnist, Kevin Roose, points out in
" The robots are coming for phil in accounting. " According to Roose, " [As] bots learn
to do higher-value tasks, they are climbing the corporate ladder. " Not unexpectedly,
" executives generally spin these bots as being good for everyone, 'streamlining
operations' while 'liberating workers' from mundane and repetitive tasks. But they are
also liberating plenty of people from their jobs...[T]he consulting firm, McKinsey,
which predicted before the pandemic that 37 million U.S. workers would be
displaced by automation by 2030, recently increased its projection to 45 millio " [56].
87
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2022

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