How to Be Human in the Digital Economy

by Nicholas Agar

Overview

An argument in favor of finding a place for humans (and humanness) in the future digital economy.

In the digital economy, accountants, baristas, and cashiers can be automated out of employment; so can surgeons, airline pilots, and cab drivers. Machines will be able to do these jobs more efficiently, accurately, and inexpensively. But, Nicholas Agar warns in this provocative book, these developments could result in a radically disempowered humanity.

The digital revolution has brought us new gadgets and new things to do with them. The digital revolution also brings the digital economy, with machines capable of doing humans' jobs. Agar explains that developments in artificial intelligence enable computers to take over not just routine tasks but also the kind of “mind work” that previously relied on human intellect, and that this threatens human agency. The solution, Agar argues, is a hybrid social-digital economy. The key value of the digital economy is efficiency. The key value of the social economy is humanness.

A social economy would be centered on connections between human minds. We should reject some digital automation because machines will always be poor substitutes for humans in roles that involve direct contact with other humans. A machine can count out pills and pour out coffee, but we want our nurses and baristas to have minds like ours. In a hybrid social-digital economy, people do the jobs for which feelings matter and machines take on data-intensive work. But humans will have to insist on their relevance in a digital age.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780262349161
Publisher:	MIT Press
Publication date:	03/12/2019
Series:	The MIT Press
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	232
File size:	587 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Nicholas Agar is Professor of Ethics at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. He is the author of Humanity's End: Why We Should Reject Radical Enhancement and Truly Human Enhancement: A Philosophical Defense of Limits, both published by the MIT Press.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction: Taking the Long View of Digital Revolution 1

The Threat to Human Agency 3

We Should Avoid a Present Bias about Computers and a Belief in Human Exceptionalism 6

Forward to a Social-Digital Future 9

A Note on Philosophical Method 15

An Outline of the Book 16

1 Is the Digital Revolution the Next Big Thing? 23

Will the Digital Revolution Fizzle? 26

The Magic Combination of Artificial Intelligence and Data 30

How Al Could Transform Transportation 33

How Al Could Transform Health 38

Concluding Comments 42

2 Al's Split Personality-Minds or Mind Workers? 43

Philosophical and Pragmatic Interests in Machine Minds: A Focus on Making Minds or on Doing Mind Work 45

The Difference between Authentic and Ersatz Minds 51

Hyperactive Agency Detectors and Human-Like Machines 54

A Moral Reason to Avoid Creating Machines with Minds 57

Concluding Comments 59

3 Data as a New Form of Wealth 61

How Could Data Be Wealth? 62

Unfairness and the New Forms of Wealth 66

Does Data Want to Be Free? 68

Do unto Facebook and Google … Micropayments for the Use of Our Data? 73

Concluding Comments 79

4 Can Work Be a Norm for Humans in the Digital Age? 81

Searching for Work that Is Both Productive and Therapeutic in the Digital Age 82

The Inductive Optimism of the Economists 84

The Protean Powers of the Digital Package 88

Will Humans Always Control the Last Mile of Choice? 92

A Conjecture about the Labor Market of the Digital Age 99

Gaining Philosophical Perspective on the Dispute between Optimists and Pessimists 102

Concluding Comments 106

5 Caring about the Feelings of Lovers and Baristas 109

What Is It Like to Love a Robot? 110

From Romantic to Work Relationships 118

What Counts as a Social Job? 123

Can I Justify My Pro-Human Bias? 125

Concluding Comments 129

6 Features of the Social Economy in the Digital Age 131

Two Economies for the Digital Age 132

Some Noteworthy Differences between Social and Digital Goods 135

The Ambiguous Digital Futures of Sales Assistants 143

The Different Digital Age Futures of Uber and Airbnb 145

Space Exploration as Social Work 149

Concluding Comments 153

7 A Tempered Optimism about the Digital Age 155

The Different Logic of Predictions and Ideals 156

We Should Prefer Robust Ideals 162

The Social-Digital Economy versus the Collaborative Commons 163

The Social-Digital Economy versus a Jobless Future with a Universal Basic Income 165

The UBI as an Inadequate Response to Inequality in the Digital Age 167

An Expanded Basic Income? 171

Concluding Comments 173

8 Machine Breaking for the Digital Age 175

See through the Digital Halo Effect! 176

Don't Fall for Tech TINA! 179

If You Can Cheat an Algorithm, Then Why Not? 181

Work for Free for Oxfam, but Make Facebook Pay! 183

Don't Fight the Last War! 184

Concluding Comments 189

9 Making a Very Human Digital Age 191

Welcoming a Social Age 196

Notes 199

Index 217

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Nick Agar hopes that the Digital Age will be followed by the Social Age, because the preservation of humanity depends on it entering the Social Age. Agar's book points to this issue and is therefore of pivotal importance, while Aga&rgrave;s argument is visionary. Whether his vision of the Social Age will be realized, is going to be revealed to the coming generations. Hopefully.”

—Vojin Rakic, Director of the Center for the Study of Bioethics, University of Belgrade, Serbia

“With this book, Agar seals his place as the foremost philosophical defender of humanness in a robust technological age. Agar has now done for the digital world what he did for human biomedical enhancement, mounting a systematic defense of distinctively human values in the face of a technological revolution that promises to transform human nature and society in ways both imagined and unimagined. Agar makes a persuasive case for the unprecedented threat of artificial intelligence to the future of human work and agency. Rather than resorting to dire predictions, however, he lays out normative ideals worth fighting for in an increasingly digital world. This book epitomizes philosophy at its best, carefully integrating disparate threads from history, social science, popular culture, and contemporary philosophies of mind and morality into an eminently readable romp through the blooming buzzing confusion of our technological landscape, from social media to sex bots. It is a refreshingly sober antidote to the unbridled optimism and blinding panic that so often greets technological revolutions, giving us a glimpse of the way forward and offering concrete steps to humanize our technological future. Everyone who feels lost in the maelstrom of technology swirling around them, and all those who feel right at home in the digital age, should read this book.”

—Russell Powell, Department of Philosophy, Boston University

“Thoughtful and informative. How to Be Human in the Digital Economy helped me understand the digital revolution and its impact on our societies. This book will be of great interest to a wide range of readers. While philosophically driven, the narrative is nevertheless easy to follow and accessible. The author has skilfully assembled a wide range of ideas and based his central arguments on many sources. I found the overall assumption that the digital revolution should be accompanied by a social revolution to account for the human factor to be very compelling. The topic will certainly receive a great deal of attention in the future, and not only from philosophers of humanism.”

—Marius Turda, Professor, School of History, Philosophy and Culture, Oxford Brookes University, UK

“A clarion call to place the value of the human at the heart of the digital revolution. We ignore it at our peril.”

—Robert Sparrow, Professor of Philosophy, Monash University, Australia