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Technology and a new religion
Here's a nugget worth reflecting on:
We must instead take responsibility for every task undertaken by a machine and double check every conclusion offered by an algorithm, just as we always look both ways when crossing an intersection, even though the light has turned green.
Well said.
Now the fun part. Can you guess who wrote it?
The author is hardly a smash-the-machines luddite. It's Jaron Lanier, in his recent NYT op-ed. Lanier is the technologist who coined the term "virtual reality." (See his speaking bio.)
Lanier argues that the technology elite in Silicon Valley are forming "a new religion, expressed through an engineering culture." Believe enough in technology - or anything, I suppose - and it's inevitable for a religion to form around it. Not a religion expressing divine powers, necessarily, but a religion as in a framework that explains the universe around us.
That raises an interesting question about what our "religious beliefs" are around technology. Is the machine at the center, or the user? I'd say the human should be fully responsible for their decisions and the outcomes.
We improve ourselves because we choose to and not because technology makes us better.
The notion of "religion" is "where do you place your trust?" You can trust in yourself, or in God, or in Global Warming, but it's certainly a reliance on *something* which defines your actions.
Technologically speaking (and not too dissimilar to the above beliefs), the more people give up a thought process to a machine, the more dependant they become on that machine. Now, if the machines are infallable, then you can certainly depend on them. However, people are at the heart of those machines (their design and logic), and so even with complete trust, there will still be failures and complications.
My first guess was Ray Bradbury. But then, reading some of his quotes, he seems to be much more of a humanist than his novels would suggest.
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/r/ray_bradbury.html
Some view technology as the God, and some view the end user as the God. Fortunately, some of us remain agnostic when analyzing the interaction between the two.