Are humans still necessary?

Practitioners SummaryUnderstanding the changes in discretionary, as compared to obligatory, roles of human users and operators in systems is central to Ergonomic practice. Envisioning this path of potential progress, and then witnessing and impacting its actual realisation, permits practitioners to optimise their professional and personal strategies as they deal with this next critical step in the relationship between humans and technology. Our long accepted and historically-persistent human narrative almost exclusively places us at the motivational centre of events. The wellspring of this anthropocentric fable arises from the unitary and bounded nature of personal consciousness. Such immediate conscious experience frames the heroic vision we have told to, and subsequently sold to ourselves. But need this centrality necessarily be a given? The following work challenges this, oft unquestioned, foundational assumption, especially in light of developments in automated, autonomous, and artificially-intelligent systems. For, in these latter technologies, human contributions are becoming ever more peripheral and arguably unnecessary. The removal of the human operator from the inner loops of momentary control has progressed to now an ever more remote function as some form of supervisory monitor. The natural progression of that line of evolution is the eventual excision of humans from access to any form of control loop at all. This may even include system maintenance and then, prospectively, even initial design. The present argument features a 'unit of analysis' provocation which explores the proposition that socially, and even ergonomically, the human individual no longer occupies priority or any degree of pre-eminent centrality. Rather, we are witnessing a transitional phase of development in which socio-technical collectives are evolving as the principle sources of what, may well be profoundly unhuman motivation. These developing proclivities occupy our landscape of technological innovations that daily act to magnify, rather than diminish, such progressive inhumanities. Where this leaves a science focused on work as a human-centred enterprise serves to occupy the culminating consideration of the present discourse.