Yochai Benkler: Complexity and Humanity | Free Souls
To deal with the new complexity of contemporary life we need to re-introduce the human into the design of systems. We must put the soul back into the system. If years of work on artificial intelligence have taught us anything, it is that what makes for human insight is extremely difficult to replicate or systematize. At the center of these new systems, then, sits a human being who has a capacity to make judgments, experiment, learn and adapt. But enabling human agency also provides scope of action for human frailty. Although this idea is most alien to the mainstream of system design in the twentieth century, we must now turn our attention to building systems that support human sociality-our ability to think of others and their needs, and to choose for ourselves goals consistent with a broader social concern than merely our own self-interest. The challenge of the near future is to build systems that will allow us to be largely free to inquire, experiment, learn and communicate, that will encourage us to cooperate, and that will avoid the worst of what human beings are capable of, and elicit what is best.
Source: Free Souls (Joi Ito's new book)
