“Worrisome evidence
suggests that our own intelligence is withering as we become more dependent on
the artificial variety. Rather than lifting us up, smart software seems to be
dumbing us down.
…
The philosopher
Hubert Dreyfus of the University of California, Berkeley, wrote in 2002 that
human expertise develops through “experience in a variety of situations, all
seen from the same perspective but requiring different tactical decisions.” In other
words, our skills get sharper only through practice, when we use them regularly
to overcome different sorts of difficult challenges.
The goal of modern
software, by contrast, is to ease our way through such challenges. Arduous,
painstaking work is exactly what programmers are most eager to automate—after
all, that is where the immediate efficiency gains tend to lie. In other words,
a fundamental tension ripples between the interests of the people doing the
automation and the interests of the people doing the work.”