In the quest for efficiency, what are we really losing? Read Rumination 61: Automation Visualised on Lounge Ruminator for more.

@martinfeld My concern is that every time we remove a human interaction—especially a public one—we are forgetting, a little bit, how to act towards other humans, how to connect, how to empathise, how to live with people different than ourselves.

It can’t be a coincidence that as we replace all of these human interactions with clicks and scans and even shopping and watching movies at home, we’ve become so perilously and militantly divided in our societies, right?

@smokey I'd bet that the social trends behind removing interactions have more to do with societal divisions than the lack of interactions themselves. We've been militantly dividing ourselves for eons – we're very good at it – and there are a lot of different, interlocking reasons. Economic scarcity, non-existent support structures (e.g. all those systems we built post-WWII to help avoid social fragmentation that we've spent the last thirty years trying to tear down lol but there are variations throughout time), feelings of insecurity, all that good stuff.

That said, I agree that feelings of social exclusion are part of it. I just don't think that's a result of dehumanised interactions, per se. They're a symptom, not a cause. In much the same way there's a difference between being alone and being lonely, you can feel disconnected from a community (and avoid all human interaction wherever possible) even if you have to talk to people all day every day.

@smokey It’s a very difficult issue and I can see a connection between the dehumanising elements of technology and issues with socialisation. It may not be the entire cause of social division that we see today, but is certainly an excuse for some people to avoid others or a way to encourage them to stay in their own niches.

@bix It is important that we avoid repeating the same fears and criticisms towards technology as it develops, absolutely. We just need to remain critical! 🙂

@cz @martinfeld @bix I didn’t mean to imply causation (at least not entirely), rather that it’s not surprising that they’re coincident—but also that the removal of human interaction has contributed to a worsening, or at least started removing an element of life that could partly serve to counteract, division.

(So much for writing clearly to remove ambiguity, right?!)