Post-trauma: Humans as blackboxes, machines as transparent

Humans as blackboxes, machines as transparent

Humans as blackboxes, machines as transparent
— Read on markcarrigan.net/2019/11/11/humans-as-blackboxes-machines-as-transparent/

Interesting problematic.

What might this say about us, that we might look to machines and thier analysis of behavioral data to tell us what’s going inside a human being?

I tend to agree with the impetus of the excerpt; that empathy between human beings is being devalued in this look to machines.

Yet another, less practical view, might see machines as indeed producing nothing larger or extraneous than an ability for humans to perceive one another. Maybe the transhumanists speak similarly, but I think what we are really looking at is the abuse, or disconnection which occurs in the institutional use of data to tell us what humans are, and not really, what we could call, the mere use of machines to tell us about ourselves.

We might then return to a question of what is occurring here. Might we ask what kind of mental picture is being relied upon? Which is to suggest that the view itself, that one would see institutions and machines as something which supplants something which is otherwise human connection, might represent a case of a kind of insanity, an upheld view placed at the extended end of a finger of blame, but then acted upon as the view as if the indictment is indeed indicating something which is wielding power to displace inter-human connection.

For for sure we could point back to the fears of the beginning of the modern industrial era located in the movie METROPOLIS to find a confirmation of a culmination that might come to pass in our present day. But might we stop pointing there and see that there is no culmination which has lead to some great terrible turn to machines, to see that we have already turned over our humanity in the fear itself which misses the event already having occurred? Such that we are merely replaying a trauma in the viewing and thus reenact the products of an event which we have yet to acknowledge ?