Abstract
Artificial assistance is about to become a major intermediary between humans and the world. Siri, Alexa, Cortana etc. are positioned to become tomorrow’s everyday life djinns that will grant all sorts of wishes at a magical wake word. They are positioned to unburden us even of the slightest effort of lifting a finger. At the brink of a possible future assistive society, the relation between human actors and the world’s resistance has been transformed by interposed artificial assistants. The comprehensive saturation of all spheres of life with such comfort oriented assistants calls again for a philosophical reflection on our relation to labour, work, and action. This article focuses on the nexus of work, competence, and comfort, of automation, assistance, and autonomy. It analyses the emerging human-assistant-world relation in the light of a master-slave-thing relation leaning mainly on Hannah Arendt. The following key questions are addressed: If we proceed on the path to an assistive society, how would this development alter the behaviour of individuals within that society, what would be the consequences for the relation between humans and the world, and how would this rearrange the distribution of competencies among human actors and artificial agents? In an assistive society, the loss of the things’ resistance is not regretted as an incapacitating development; on the contrary, it is celebrated as a gain in comfort. Yet, this means to submit ourselves to a regime of pseudo-magical effortlessness of a simple-and-easy society no longer capable of lifting a finger and no longer knowing what for.
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Notes
- 1.
In this article, if not otherwise specified, ‘assistance’ and ‘assistant’ will be used exclusively for intelligent artificial assistive systems, assemblages of components, interfaces and services that work together to provide unspecific everyday life support.
- 2.
“Alexa—the brain behind Echo—is built in the cloud, so it is always getting smarter. The more you use Echo, the more it adapts to your speech patterns, vocabulary, and personal preferences.” Amazon (2016b).
- 3.
“Pepper is a human-shaped robot. He is kindly, endearing and surprising. We have designed Pepper to be a genuine day-to-day companion, whose number one quality is his ability to perceive emotions. Pepper is the first humanoid robot capable of recognising the principal human emotions and adapting his behaviour to the mood of his interlocutor.” Aldebaran Robots (2016).
- 4.
“Jibo isn’t an appliance, it’s a companion, one that can interact and react with its human owners in ways that delight. (Mashable)“Jibo (2016).
- 5.
“BUDDY is the revolutionary companion robot that improves your everyday life. Open source and easy to use, BUDDY connects, protects, and interacts with each member of your family.” Blue Frog Robotics (2016).
- 6.
In this article the words work and labour are used interchangeably unless otherwise specified and except in the context of Hannah Arendt’s special concepts of Labour (Arbeit), Work (Herstellen) and Action (Handeln), see Arendt (1998, chapter 5). I do not necessarily argue that artificial systems can actually act in Arendt’s sense but that task delegation to those systems influences the users’ capabilities to act.
- 7.
“Who is not able to achieve what he or she wants, wants what he or she can achieve. […] So he or she withdraws his or her wanting from what he or she cannot achieve.” (my translation).
- 8.
„You always have to want to be able to do what you have to.” – or – “Always desire to possess the necessary competencies.” (my translation).
- 9.
“Action, the only activity that goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter, corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world. While all aspects of the human condition are somehow related to politics, this plurality is specifically the condition—not only the conditio sine qua non, but the conditio per quam—of all political life.” Arendt (1998, p. 7). Interestingly the Romans even linguistically identified ‘living’ with ‘to be among men’ (inter homines esse).
- 10.
With the ‘right’ technology concept – if only chosen broadly enough – there is no human-world relation without any technical aspects. For instance, the concept of technology as a medium grasps technology as an all-pervading medium like water surrounding the fishes. Or if – as another example – being human means being a homo technologicus, then human-technology-world relation would be a pleonasm. However, such broad technology concepts then tend to lose their suitability for most analysis. See Gransche (2015, p. 146–176).
- 11.
These relations are widely called interaction even though the relation type of ‘interaction’ is just one of the possible relations, besides co-action for instance. See Gransche et al. (2014).
- 12.
Acting is used here in the general sense of the word, not in Arendt’s rather specific definition. See Arendt (1998, chapter 5).
- 13.
“[E]ven though capitalism’s ideology is indeed antithetical to slavery, in practice capital nonetheless not only subsumed and reinforced existing slave production systems throughout the world but also created new systems of slavery on an unprecedented scale, particularly in the Americas.” Hardt and Negri (2000, p. 122).
- 14.
“Skills add even more capabilities like ordering a pizza from Domino’s, requesting a ride from Uber, opening your garage with Garageio, and more. Enabling skills lets your Echo do even more—simply discover and enable the skills you want to use in the Alexa App. New skills are being added all the time.“Amazon (2016b).
- 15.
Biofacts are biological artifacts with mutation and growth capabilities, see: Karafyllis (2003).
- 16.
“Tenemos, pues, que la técnica es, por lo pronto, el esfuerzo para ahorrar el esfuerzo o, dicho en otra forma, es lo que hacemos para evitar por completo, o en parte, los quehaceres que la circunstancia primariamente nos impone.” Ortega y Gasset (1964, p. 333). “Let us record the fact that technology is, for the time being, the effort to safe effort or, in other words, it is what we do to avoid entirely or in parts the tasks that the circumstances primarily impose on us.” (my translation).
- 17.
“Tiene en la mano la posibilidad de obtener el logro de sus deseos, pero se encuentra con que no sabe tener deseos. En su secreto fondo advierte que no desea nada, que por sí mismo es incapaz de orientar su apetito y decidirlo entre las innumerables cosas que el contorno le ofrece. Por eso busca un intermediario que le oriente, y lo halla en los deseos predominantes de los demás. He aquí la razón por la cual lo primero que el nuevo rico se compra es un automóvil, una pianola y un fonógrafo. Ha encargado a los demás que deseen por él.” (Ortega y Gasset 1964: S. 343–344)
- 18.
Arendt’s student Richard Sennett analyzed “the special human condition of being engaged” and emphasizes “the desire to do something well, concretely, for its own sake.” Sennett (2008, p. 20, 144–145). He shows how rewarding labor for its own sake is and positions competences and mastery – not comfort – as a way of life, thus reminding on the Renaissance concept of sprezzatura (see note 30). “History has drawn fault lines dividing practice and theory, technique and expression, craftsman and artist, maker and user; modern society suffers from this historical inheritance. But the past life of craft and craftsmen also suggests ways of using tools, organizing bodily movements, thinking about materials that remain alternative, viable proposals about how to conduct life with skill.” Sennett (2008, p. 11).
- 19.
Sometimes the offered assistance is more than questionable: What is an ‘eject’ button on a CD player’s remote control good for?
- 20.
The name Echo involuntarily reminds on this orientation towards the past. The mystical Echo (Ovid, Metamorphoseon, Lib. III.) was an extraordinarily chatty nymph (“vocalis nymphe”, 357). She was transformed into a stone and condemned to merely repeat the last syllables of other voices, condemned to not being able to refuse an answer (“quae nec reticere loquenti”, 357) nor to speak first (“nec prior ipsa loqui didicit”, 358) and to resonate everything (“resonabilis Echo”, 358). In short: The output of an echo is strictly restricted by the input. It is a self-amplifying system with the deceitful illusion of a dialogue (“alternae deceptus imagine vocis”, 385). What you say is what you get (“quot dixit, verba recepit”, 384) – or – you only here what you ask for. How could one ever learn something this way? To bring in a concept of inquiry by Martin Heidegger (who called Hannah Arendt in letters his coquettish dryad/nymph, “neckische Waldnymphe”): The enquired answer (das Erfragte) coincides thus with the asked question (das Gefragte), which makes gaining knowledge impossible because in order to learn something new (different Erfragte), it would not suffice to ask differently (change the Gefragte) but you would have to be another inquirer (Fragender). See Heidegger (1977, §2), Gransche (2015, pp. 361–363). We shall not forget that Echo was in love with Narcissus and that the illusion of a counterpart that always confirms one-sided inquiries (see Pariser (2011)) and affirms preexistent beliefs reinforces narcissism. In other words, conversing with echo might metamorphose you into a narcissist.
- 21.
- 22.
Parasocial relationships mean an affective relationship with a media character, like actually loving Dr. House, James Bond or Lara Croft (see Rubin (2015). These relationships obviously work without reciprocity, why potential parasocial relationships with artificial agents or robots would not suffer from their inability to return any affection.
- 23.
Levy (2008).
- 24.
Amazon (2016a).
- 25.
“However, Amazon is also exploring how to get non-elite service jobs out of the way of the Siren Servers of the future. The company offers a Web-based tool called Mechanical Turk. The name is a reference to a deceptive eighteenth century automaton that seemed to be a robotic Turk that could play chess, while in fact a real person was hidden inside. The Amazon version is a way to easily outsource – to real humans – those cloud-based tasks that algorithms still can’t do, but in a framework that allows you to think of the people as software components. The interface doesn’t hide the existence of the people, but it still does try to create a sense of magic, as if you can just pluck results out of the cloud at an incredibly low cost.” Lanier (2013, pp. 169–170).
- 26.
Assisted suicide, assisted conception etc. are complicated and medico-ethical special problems that cannot be addressed here, despite the – for some misleading – title Assisting Ourselves to Death that is a reminiscence to Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death and not to assisted suicide.
- 27.
The two types are schematic and simplified for heuristic reasons. As said competence-oriented assistance aims as well at ease and relief and comfort-oriented assistants can just as well be used in a medically enabling context. But Alexa etc. are not designed nor advertised for e.g. paraplegic people.
- 28.
Approximately sprezzatura can be grasped as effortlessness in most demanding tasks, especially in art, literature, poetry, fencing, dancing etc. It is a sort of careless grace, of nonchalance and an indispensable attribute of the perfect Renaissance gentleman (Corteggiano).
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Gransche, B. (2018). Assisting Ourselves to Death – A Philosophical Reflection on Lifting a Finger with Advanced Assistive Systems. In: Fritzsche, A., Oks, S. (eds) The Future of Engineering. Philosophy of Engineering and Technology, vol 31. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91029-1_19
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