Chapter 7: Social Design
For this week's reading, I'd like to respond to principle 7.11B, which discusses an idea that I have only begun to consider over the past year or so. The principle states
"THAT WHICH CANNOT BE MEANINGFULLY AUTOMATED SHOULD NOT BE" (pg 376).
I always found automation to be fascinating since I was a kid. In Minecraft, I was obsessed with building automatic resource farms, and would create redstone (Minecraft's electrical wiring) contraptions to harvest crops for me. In an online game called Cookie Clicker, I used to set up automatic screen clickers to click the cookie for me. During my first high school internship, I wrote a script to automatically open Chrome and fill out my weekly time card (even though it only takes a couple minutes to do manually).
Even in college, I have had an interest in automation. One project that I worked on a couple years ago was "Ghostwriter", where we used LLMs to automatically write lyrics for a given piece of music. We would input a midi file, and the model would output lyrics to try and match the theme/rhythm of the music. At the time, this project seemed like a really fun way to blend my interests in music and machine learning. However, I have changed my perspective on automation pretty significantly since working on Ghostwriter. When working on that project, I didn't really consider the fact that automating lyric writing defeats the purpose of lyric writing (creativity, self-expression, etc.).
Although my perspective on meaningful automation has changed, I'm still really struggling to draw a line between what can be automated meaningfully, and what cannot be. For example, automating play doesn't always make play lose its meaning. In the Minecraft example I gave earlier, I built farms that essentially "played" the game for me by collecting resources. However, for me, the process of building the farms was the playing. Some players may "derive intrinsic value" (pg 376) from collecting resources manually, but I derived intrinsic value from designing redstone circuits to automate that process. So I don't think we can simply say automating play is meaningless, since for some people, the automation might be the play in itself.
Exploring this idea further, let's think about music machines. Music machines are designed to automate musical performance -- an activity from which many people derive intrinsic value. Does that mean there's no meaning in the existence of music machines? On one hand, they do reduce the need and meaning of musical performance. However, on the other hand, musical machines can be a person's form of art, and a way to express themselves. In class, Kunwoo showed us a series of musical machines from the Museum Speelklok, each of which had clear artistry and care behind their designs. So it feels wrong to ignore that artistry and declare that music machines shouldn't exist just because they automate musical performance.
Another example that I'm somewhat torn on is self-driving taxi cabs. One could argue that it's meaningful to automate a task that is monotonous for most people like driving through traffic. However, there are probably many taxi drivers who love their job, and find it to be meaningful, so automating the task feels wrong (especially if it puts those drivers out of business).
Deciding what exactly can be automated meaningfully feels quite subjective, and is a concept I am still grappling with.