What makes you different from a robot?
We’ve been inundated by media reports about how robots are going to take over our jobs and replace humans in general, taking over the world.
Fear sells; and in cultures that thrive on paranoia, fear sells a lot. Fear, anxiety and hysteria about robots making you obsolete are drivers that feed the hype promoted by the media.
Behind all this is a basic cultural assumption that people’s worth is determined by what they are capable of doing, by how well they can perform. This is a specially strong assumption in the Anglo Saxon cultures such as the US, UK and Australia, the so-called “Contest Cultures” (see Huib Wursten & Fernando Lanzer’s “The EU: the third great European cultural contribution to the world”).
A friend of mine says that this is treating people as “human doings,” rather than as human beings. You reduce people to what they are able to do, rather than looking at who they are. When you consider that doing is more important than being, then it is logical that you can be replaced by a robot. And if you reduce yourself to what you are able to do, you probably also deserve to be replaced by a robot.
The basic flaw in this line of thinking is that it overrates rational thinking and doing, while ignoring that the human condition includes four dimensions in its totality: Logos (rationality, logic)…
