Skip to main content
Log in

Nothing but a human

  • Original Article
  • Published:
AI & SOCIETY Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

The dream of the perpetual motion charms us since millennia, the desire of machines substituting men was present already in the imperial China and the classical Rome; the medieval alchemists tried to build automata, automata showed up in the Renaissance princes’ plays. In the Aladdin fable, the sorcerer satisfies on the instant all wishes of the lamp’s owner. In other words, the fiction of omnipotence accompanies humanity from the very beginning. Is God omnipotent? So, why not humanity? Building automatic factories, digital modelling of human work, both makes realistic what looked utopian. It can perhaps be achieved an unmanned production mode, and where machines can produce whatever we can desire, endlessly. Are numbers not from zero to infinity? There is, nonetheless, an obstacle. Human desires are subjective; therefore, from the standpoint of the producers, of the automatic factory’s owner, there is a very difficult problem to go through. How to manage human desires? How to transform the desire itself in an automatic factor of the production? Digital modelling of human work is not enough; the human itself must be modelled. The full control of him/her must be achieved. It means understanding a priori each of his/her desire. It means leading him/her step by step all their lives long. It means, shortly, to transform him/her into automata. The nightmare of a bees’ or ants’ society, the nightmare of losing his/her free will comes closer and looks menacing. It looks like the black clouds of a threatening thunderstorm.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. To Hayek, the extended order is the way to connote capitalism.

  2. We due to Zuboff the possibility to know two important articles by Varian.

  3. In the experiment, the experimenter has a collection of Chinese writings, a language he does not know and which symbols he cannot distinguish from Japanese ones, but he has a set of rules showing him a set of symbols that correspond to other symbols. In this way, he can answer questions in a way that an outside observer can check as correct answers, but the experimenter didn't understand anything.

References

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Francesco Garibaldo.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Garibaldo, F., Rebecchi, E. Nothing but a human. AI & Soc 33, 313–321 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-017-0741-4

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-017-0741-4

Keywords

Navigation