There’s a tendency to reassign shared human endeavors into a corner of impracticality, via labels of theory or thing-without-action-nor-teeth: Philosophy (of science & ethics), art(ists),(fore)play, fiction, IPR, consent & anything in-between measurability of 2 handpicked numbers. Action 1: Imagine a world without these. Action 2: Imagine a world only with these.
Some will state that if it can’t be measured it doesn’t exist. If it doesn’t exist in terms of being confined as a quantitative pool (e.g. data set) it can be ignored. Ignoring can be tooled in a number of ways: devalue, or grab to revalue through one’s own lens on marketability.
(re-)digitization, re-categorization, re-patterning of the debased, to create a set for remodeled reality, equals a process that is of “use” in anthropomorphization, and mechanomorphization: a human being is valued as datasets of “its” output, e.g., a mapping of behavior, results of an (artistic or other multimodal) expression, a KPI, a score.
While technology isn’t neutral, the above is neither singularly a technological issue. It is an ideologically systematized issue with complexity and multiple vectors at play (i.e. see above: that what seems of immediate practicality, or that what is of obvious value, is not dismissed).
While the scientific methods & engineering methods shouldn’t be dismissed nor confused, the humans in their loops aren’t always perceiving themselves as engines outputting discrete measurables. Mechanomorphism takes away the “not always” & replaces it with a polarized use vs waste
Could it be that mechanomorphism, reasonably coupled with anthropomorphism, is far more a concern than its coupled partner, which itself is a serious process that should also allow thought, reflection, debate, struggle, negotiation, nuance, duty-of-care, discernment & compassion?
epilogue:
…one could engage in the following over-simplifying, dichotomizing and outrageous exercise: if we were to imagine that our species succeeded in collectively transforming humanity (as how the species perceives its own ontological being) to be one of “we are best defined and relatable through mechanomorphic metaphors, relations and datafying processes,” then any anthropomorphism within technologies (with a unique attention to those associated with the field of “AI”) might be imagined to be(come) easier to be accomplished, since it would simply have to mimic itself: machine copies machine to become machine. Luckily this is absurd as much as Guernica is cubistically surreal.
Packaging the above, one might then reread Robert S. Lynd’s words penned in 1939: “…the responsibility is to keep
everlastingly challenging the present with the question: But what is it that we human beings want, and what things would have to be done, in what ways and in what sequence, in order to change the present so as to achieve it?”
(thank you to Dr. WSA for triggering this further imagination)
Lynd, R. S. (1939). Knowledge For What?. Princeton: Princeton University Press