This bugs me. He laments that using Amazon removes a human interaction. Then he says:
"Note: I don’t consider chat rooms and product reviews as “human interaction”; they’re mediated and filtered by a screen."
Well, I don't consider a sales person swooping in to sell me something I didn't come looking for human interaction. I don't consider someone ringing up my order to be meaningful human interaction. I guess it's in the eye of the beholder, but as soon as online shopping became feasible I switched to it for as many transactions as possible because of the low quality of human interactions I was getting at physical stores. The amount of wasted time and energy spent dealing with people who were instructed to up-sell me on the stupidest things was just such a turn-off. No interest in going back to that.
I feel he makes a mistake in introducing the issue of engineering introversion and (dread the word) the spectrum.
This desire to reduce human interaction is driven by the desires of the average consumer. In many of the projects I've worked on this is explicit. People want control, transparency and automation. There are services whose entire selling point is reducing the unpredictability of human interactions for consumers. For example, many people would not use taxis historically because they felt the pricing was not transparent and at the whim of a person they would have to negotiate with. People find this stressful.
Sometimes the automation makes the rules of interaction much more explicit too. A lot of people are nervous of picking up the phone to, say, something as simple as a restaurant and being told, NO you can't have a table for Saturday. If they book online they can see the availability and not have what they find the social embarrassment of even such a mild rejection.
Personally, I am all for human interaction. I positively seek it out. But I do not think this is the trend. A lot of people are almost afraid to pick up the phone, or ask for something that isn't on a menu, or ask for a discount, or negotiate a price. And the number of those people is, in my personal experience, growing.
I don't feel like this argument holds up as soon as he goes into examples.
AirBnB: this might be a Euro vs US thing, but my Airbnb experiences have involved a lot more human interaction than I'd expect at a hotel, as my hosts show me around.
Fiverr, Upwork, et al: if you're expecting to use these with no human interaction you're going to have a very bad time. Detailed and frequent communication is a must if you want to get good work out.
Self-driving cars: for me and a lot of other people, the primary interaction they replace is between my hands and the steering wheel. Yes, they will, if they work, also eliminate the taxi, but that's very much a side-product.
Video games: OK, this one just feels like him being a Luddite. As a frequent DOTA2 player, I can assure him that the interactions I have, whilst not always pleasant, are most definitely human in nature - and often even involve human voices! Single-player video games obviously don't involve interaction, but they compete for time with other non-interactive leisure activities like TV or reading.
It's an interesting thesis - and his points on recommender systems and music are probably the most interesting part of the article - but I don't think he proves his case very well.
> Is music as a kind of social glue and lubricant also being eliminated?
I definitely grew up in a different decade than David Byrne but for me music has always been a digital experience. I know very, very few people in real life who have the same tastes as I do and where tastes do overlap it's often very surface-level (who doesn't like Radiohead?). However I've consistently found little communities online which have had a huge influence on the music I listen to -- from BBSs to Soulseek to 4chan -- which has allowed me to craft my tastes in a way that wouldn't scale to a local social network. It's not bad, just different.
The purpose of reducing human interaction when providing services is to reduce the cost of those services. Looks like nearly all of the examples cited involve one human providing paid services to another. In the name of productivity, the human providing the service is put in play because they are expensive.
It would be more telling to look at social behaviors that don't involve transactions. Family reunions, nights out with the gals, little league games, religious ceremonies, ... Is there a technological force reducing human interactions there? Distracted by the smartphone, perhaps?
And one could argue that technology enables in-person human interraction as well: Flashmobs, Meetups, etc.
I admit. I am an introvert and I have by and large welcomed with open arms every advance in technology that has allowed me to deal less with other people.
Maybe subconsciously I have reflected this to some of the work and innovation I've been involved with over the years. With so many other introverts in the field, I am sure others have as well. But I want to thank the author for I've never consciously thought this aspect of technology with such a clarity.
Oddly, I found this graphic more informative than the a16z "AI Playbook" currently ranked first on HN:
http://davidbyrne.com/images/made/images/uploads/todomundo/m...
>The counterargument to the dangers of social media has been “look at Arab Spring”.
My impression of the Arab Spring is that most countries emerged in worse shape than they started in.
The article conflates eliminating human interaction that is a side effect of something else, with eliminating all human interaction. But there's no reason why that must be the case. Eliminating human interactions as side effects ought to leave more room for human interactions that aren't constrained by being side effects and so can go wherever the humans in question want them to. It's a lot easier to have an interesting conversation with someone if you don't have to finish your transaction quickly to make way for the next person in line.
There is an idea that the dominant form of production in our age is done in a manner that causes alienation on a number of fronts for those who do the producing.
Part of this is commodity fetishism, where people can see commodities, but not the social relations surrounding the production of commodities.
This sounds like the taking of this to the next level - where the social aspect of exchanging currencies for commodities becomes more and more hidden. You press some buttons on a website, and two days later a box shows up in an Amazon locker or on your front porch. Not only is the social aspect of the production of the commodity hidden, the social aspect of the exchange of currency for that commodity is now hidden as well.
There are lots of reasons one might want to avoid human interaction:
1. Human interaction is perceived as complicated, inefficient, noisy and slow.
Personally, I tried to get away from it as much as possible and it still feels like too much and I have every plan of simplifying down the road.
edit: I found the podcast I think was referenced, but disclaimer I haven't listened to it specifically: http://omegataupodcast.net/184-societal-complexity-and-colla...
> Gig Jobs- TaskRabbit and other services—there are people who perform these tasks in the gig economy, but as a client one does not necessarily have to interact with them in a meaningful way.
The alternative for these gig jobs is often to them yourself. House cleaning, furniture assembly, truck loading, tidying, repainting... Hiring help for these services clearly increases human interaction.
> Is music as a kind of social glue and lubricant also being eliminated?
That's also up to those who compose who compose the music and write the lyrics, isn't it? For me, listening to some music has always been a deeply social experience, and I'd rank the depth of it as such:
1. with good friends 2. alone with headphones on 3. with random strangers or people I know but don't click with or can't open up to
On the other hand, there's (a whole lot of) what to me is soulless, brainless trash, and listening to that alone just feels like staring in the abyss of humanity, while in a social situation (or when doing chores) and small doses it might be some jolly good fun.
Yes, everything points to automation of higher cognitive functions, rendering everyone but a very few geniuses and owners unemployable. The question is if the underlying economic model changes for everyone to benefit from it, or we go through a complete slumization of the whole world with a vast majority fighting for the scraps. It's also questionable if amending economic model would be beneficial to humanity, removing all challenges, as it might lead to complete hedonism and destruction of civilization in a few generations.
Was my experience reading that article a human interaction? Is my comment one? Byrne shared something personal and I respond in turn. I mean, it is certainly less of a human interaction than being at a party with Byrne. But isn't this more of a human interaction than going to a bank and asking a cashier to give me money?
To be honest, most of the human interaction I see being eliminated aren't what I'd call "quality time" to begin with. For the most part, the brick-and-mortar commercial world is full of rote interactions with people who are under the gun meet metrics for middle managers and capitalists, in hopes that some of the excess will trickle down. Slightly better are maybe the brokers, who are now obviated by search and decision engines.
And if we rewind a bit further to a time when human capital was literally disposable, well, maybe the trend isn't so bad.
There's much less haggling and forced pleasantry in the world of online commerce. It's up to us to replace that with more meaningful interactions. Make art, play sports, learn to dance, volunteer.
"...we were not the popular kids that drank, had sex, and partied." - From the current discussion on UploadVR scandal [0]
These are literally the most enjoyable things people do together, which has held for all history, for all people from all cultures. It has been criminalized in modern life in an attempt to sterilize all human interaction.
I have no problem with an app saving me from the frustration of trying to place a food order over a noisy telephone. But what are we going to do to replace the joy and the messiness and heartache of love? Is VR the only place left where a human can be a human?
IMO reducing administrative human friction is fantastic. I want to spend the 10 minutes I save with my friends, family and their respective circles.
I reduce low value (pleasantries etc) human interaction so i can go deeper with my people.
Reducing otherwise involuntary interactions can be a good thing.
David can still use old-fashioned services, dial the landline phone and even order a horse carriage for that organic and natural feel. Perhaps he should even hire a driver. Maybe a cook, a personal assistant and some live musicians to perform in his house. Maybe even a personal library with real books and librarian to help sort them out. Such sustainable, organic human-centric lifestyle should be available to everyone at minimal cost and save on resource wasted on that newfangled "digital technology" or whatever its called.
This is an explicit theme of advertising for Seamless, among others.
ITT: Aspie engineers defend egos.
Tiresome article. This has been happening since the industrial revolution. It's nothing new.
Correlation is not causation. That's what comes to mind. I doubt that it's intentional, it's probably just cost effective.
> Engineers and coders as people are often less than comfortable with human interaction, so naturally they are making a world that is more accommodating to themselves.
Man, you know things are bad for the fedoralords when even David Byrne turns on you.
In my opinion this kind of thought is what happens when you refuse to consider things structurally. The reason for the elimination of humans in these models is to drive down labor costs. Humans are expensive to pay, they get sick, they steal things sometimes, they don't always come to work, they need silly things like buildings to work in, close to where they live. Perhaps a mundane point to Mr. Byrne, but with all due respect it's much more salient than "coders are nerds who hate social interaction".
There's another force at work here: in the name of efficiency and standardization, companies worked to make human interactions less useful.
There's a reason McDonald's is seen as a bottom-of-the-barrel job. There's nothing about it that fundamentally requires judgement, empathy, or decision-making. Sure, the pleasantries are nice, but think about the last time you had something go wrong with a fast food transaction. Did the worker just fix it? Half the time, they have to drag a manager over, or reboot a machine, or some other fix that's above their pay grade.
I love interacting with people who own their car repair shops, because they can help me work things out beyond a simple transaction. But larger companies? There's nothing to the interaction besides just talking with another human who's worried that if anything goes wrong, I'll take it out on them and there's nothing they can do to fix it.