At some point it becomes clear that automation in health and social services is grounded in a discriminating efficiency that neither assures nor necessarily sustains and guarantees affordable or ethically justifiable standards of personal care. We shouldn’t kid ourselves about the commercial motivations and political incentives that drive managerial and policy decision-making in this context. Even the most conscientiously humane aspirations tend to be neutralised by an instrumentalised rationalisation that in the first instance generates and sustains more technology, with or without the happy, healthy humans it was originally intended to assist.
Automation for efficiency is a wonderful thing, but when conducted without a nuanced awareness of its very human consequences, the only winner is a rapidly speciating technological complexity for which the technical and economic raison d’être precisely is such an endlessly unbounded metamorphosis.
Daedelus Kite 