Robot Ethics 2.0, Chapter 6: Skilled Perception, Authenticity, and the Case Against Automation; by David Zoller
David Zoller presents a case against automation by arguing that a skill, that which gets replaced through the process of automation, is more than just a job, an obligation or a chore. It may be constitutive of who we are. How we perceive the world around us. Our identities might be tied to our know-how more than we would like to admit. Skilled activities allow (or force) us to engage with the world through a particular mode of attentiveness, an attitude of a special kind.
“In Automania, we are jacks of all trades, comfortable and capable in any situation with no training at all. Headed for your favorite coffee shop downtown? Virtual arrows on the sidewalk guide your steps. Or maybe your shoes nudge you in the right direction and avoid obstacles while you play an online game in your head. Did somebody say something confusing? Swipe the translator and you’ll hear it translated in a way you can understand. Needless to say, you got here in an automated car repaired by robots. This is a world without limits, and thus without the need for skill to cope with them.” (Lin, P., Abney, K., & Jenkins, R. (Eds.)., 2017)
Zoller paints a world without effort, where life itself seems to be automated. Discipline and training seem to have become a thing of the past. But at what price? In order to clarify Zoller’s point, it is important to rid ourselves of the common-sense attitude that the world is simply a collection of objects in space. The same object looks quite different depending on the particular skill-set of the observer. A sports car will be a very different thing based on whether it is seen by an engineer, a race car driver, an anthropologist etc. The reason for this, is that the human gaze is equipped with an unconscious grid of intelligibility which not only sees something spatially, but also perceives it through various capacities and potentialities. We often “see” things in a way that is perspectival, and subjectively in terms of “what can be done with it”. Different people are trained to see things differently. And this is the reason why the carpenter and the botanist see two completely different objects when they look at a red maple. Automation threatens to collapse these differences onto a single, unified and homogenous worldview, where human identity itself becomes algorithmic and dull.
Zoller refers to this particular and unique human trait as “skilled attention”. He argues that skilled attention possess intrinsic value and/or it is instrumental in securing things that (also) have intrinsic value. According to Zoller, the loss of skilled attentiveness will have deleterious effects on our lives. To illustrate his point, Zoller offers us a phenomenology of skilled and unskilled attention.
A fully automated world will lead to an unskilled attention. Our experience of the world will become “de-skilled”, so to speak. This poses a serious problem for Zoller, since he believes that skilled attention is one of the necessary conditions for leading a good life.
“Thus to have a table in front of me is not just to have a flat visual image that happens to match a little picture card in my memory labeled “table.” To actually have the thing in front of me “be” a table is to have my senses involved with an object that invites me (and my body) toward a certain optimal experience.” (Lin, P., Abney, K., & Jenkins, R. (Eds.)., 2017)
As we can see from this quote and as already discussed above, perception is a highly complex and interpretive activity. Phenomenological analyses reveal the loaded and participatory nature of perception. We are never quite the disinterested onlookers that the history of western science wants us to be. Observation is already an action and an intervention. Skilled attention determines the uniqueness of perception from one human being to another.
As we acquire more skill in dealing with particular objects, we become specialized and then that specific domain of things reveals itself to us in a very different way. If I cannot play the piano, then the instrument confronts me very differently compared to how it is seen by a professional musician, it may even be intimidating and an ominous reminder of my musical incompetence. Whereas to a trained musician, it is a much more familiar object, one that allows for a much wider and more pleasant horizon of skilled attention.
Through training and discipline we condition ourselves to perceive “objective” reality according to the ways we become skilled. Different facets of the lived world are either exaggerated or diminished, brought to the front or made invisible, all in accordance to what we are able to do, in accordance with our know-how. Our skilled dispositions. It is precisely such “niche” forms of perception and attentiveness that testify to our freedoms. An automated world would essentially be an alienated world, where nothing is differentiated and everything becomes algorithmic. All actions would become a matter of calculation without any intuitive or qualitative familiarity with the world. Mopping the floor and playing the cello would involve the same cognitive processes.
REF
- Lin, P., Abney, K., & Jenkins, R. (Eds.). (2017). Robot ethics 2.0: From autonomous cars to artificial intelligence. Oxford University Press.
