#agenticshift — Public Fediverse posts

As a teacher of budding scientific and technical professionals, I’m again and again struck by how little sense of personal autonomy is part of today’s education, our modern ›Paideia.‹ Students hope to master the fundamentals of, say, one of the branches of engineering, get a ›good job,‹ come up with some lucrative ›innovation‹ and live happily ever after. Very often they simply lack any sense that they might reflect upon, talk about, and seek to realize an independent, personal understanding of life’s possibilities. Thus, the autonomy of technology often comes to the fore when ascertaining people’s sense of basic priorities. But the intellectual and moral autonomy of today’s students, employees and citizens? Not so much.

... surprises and troubles attributed to technologies that seem to have become ›autonomous‹ can often be traced back to the persons and groups that are ›in charge.‹ Marx describes the kinds of mechanical apparatus that fully claimed the bodies and minds of factory workers in his day. As he explains such calamities in his h#TheoryOfCapital, it’s clear that the owners of the #MeansOfProduction bear full responsibility for what happens.

> Why blame people? We may call this line of thinking an “#AgenticShift,” a term.. from #StanleyMilgram to name the process whereby humans transfer responsibility for an outcome from themselves to a more abstract agent. When this happens, we have relinquished control, which in the case of #TheComputer [#AI] means that we may, without excessive remorse, pursue ill-advised or even #InhumanGoals because the computer can accomplish them or be imagined to accomplish them.
#NeilPostman #Technopoly