The Perils of Letting Machines into the Hive Mind

In the preface to Saint Joan, his play about Joan of Arc, the teenager whose visions of saints and archangels stirred soldiers into battle early in the 15th century, George Bernard Shaw makes a surprisingly compelling argument that following Joan of Arc’s mystical visions was at least as rational as following a modern-day general into today’s battlefield full of highly technological and incomprehensible weapons of war. His argument is that the warrior of the 20th century was driven as much by faith as the warrior of the 15th century:

In the Middle Ages people believed that the earth was flat, for which they had at least the evidence of their senses: We believe it to be round, not because as many as one percent of us could give the physical reasons for so quaint a belief, but because modern science has convinced us that nothing that is obvious is true, and that everything that is magical, improbable, extraordinary, gigantic, microscopic, heartless, or outrageous is scientific.

Hyperbole, for sure, but it is remarkable how much we depend on what we’re told to get by in the modern world. So little of what happens to us is understood through direct sensory experience. From the alarm that wakes us up, to the toilet that we wander to, to the smartphone that we turn on (before or after our visit to the bathroom), to the coffee machine that welcomes us into the kitchen, to the tap that we use to fill the coffee machine, nothing is completely within our conceptual grasp. But we use these tools; we even rely on them, because they work (except when they don’t and our life goes a little out of balance). We can thank the experts who created them, for we are dependent on their know-how. We have faith in the masters of modern technology after years of successfully using their