In an Automated Society, What If the Algorithms Stop Working?

If there is anywhere that proves the world-leading level of automation Japan achieved, it would be the country's public restrooms.  To prevent the spread of bacteria, more often than not, the use of levers and buttons have completely been made obsolete.  To flush the toilets, to let water out of spigots, to turn on the machines that blow-dry hands after washing, and even sometimes for turning on lights, sensors do the job.  A swipe of the hands in the right places, without any physical touch, allow accesses of these services.  Clear signs show first-timers where to put their hands.

But occasionally, the sensor systems go haywire.  Swiping hands in the right places do not flush the toilets or let water out of the spigots, embarrassing and frustrating the users stuck with rather compromising, not to mention unsanitary, situations.  The service staff, fully trusting the capabilities of their automated sensor systems, rarely put up signs of where to call for help when the sensors actually do not work.  And frankly, given the busy schedule of the users, most probably would not call anyways even if the phone numbers are posted.  They'd rather leave the situations as they are and head to whatever they were/are doing.

The kind of frustration and embarrassment that people get out of such rather trivial failures in automation shows the flip side of humanity's automated future.  Often, movies from the Matrix to Terminator portray the dangers of automation as a super-intelligent, rogue machine that evolved to destroy mankind.  Yet, there is a concrete possibility that even without automation grasping such high levels of intelligence that it can seriously dent the productivity of human lives.  As restrooms in Japan show, as people become so reliant on a piece of convenience technology in their daily lives, simple malfunctioning becomes a big deal.

To put in other words, the issue is not so much machines consciously superseding humans, but unconsciously supplementing them.  Humans start to accept automation technology as part of their daily routines to such a degree that often they simply forget that those are indeed machines that could easily break down at any point in time.  They rely so much on the automated pieces of hardware so much on a daily basis that when going about their daily lives, they often assume that they will continue to do what they are designed for.  For without their working normally, humans cannot live their normal lives.

The example of sensors in a Japanese restroom may be extreme, but there are plenty of other examples that humans in relatively affluent parts of the world can all relate to.  People expect refrigerators to continue functioning in order to keep their food fresh enough to be eaten.  They expect washing machines to operate when they have no clean clothes left in the closets.  And they expect elevators to carry them to higher floors that their feet cannot take them in reasonable amounts of time.  These machines are expected to function whenever humans want them to, because humans cannot do without them at those points in time.

Yet, the same humans rarely consider the alternatives when these machines stop working all the sudden.  No one has an extra refrigerator and a washing machine at home.  But they still need to eat now and have clean clothes for tomorrow.  And buying food and clothing may be too far, expensive, and untimely to be viable.  After years of having their expectations of machines working normally fulfilled, these humans have forgotten just how to cook just with non-refrigerated foods and hand-wash clothes.  They have no choice but to go out and buy, wait it out, or bang on the machines in pure anger and frustration.

The anger and the frustration, in essence, however, should not be directed at the broken-down machines that are not doing what they are supposed to do.  Instead, they should be directed toward the fact that over-reliance on machines have caused their users to forget how to do those tasks without help of the machines.  The helplessness of humans without machines to do routine daily tasks, much more than rogue machines destroying the world, is the real danger automation presents to human civilization.  Humans' collective dependence on machines make their absence a matter of life and death in some situations.

Of course, the solution to the over-reliance is not getting rid of the machines as Luddites would happily propose.  Instead, the solution should focus on a re-emphasis on society's collective education of how daily tasks are completed the "traditional" way.  By teaching children and adults alike the joy and sometimes necessity of cooking, washing, and living manually, it becomes possible to instill both a sense of true human independence and realization that machines are not only all-powerful but quite vulnerable.  An objective view of automation, rather than blind acceptance and worshipping, can then become the social norm.