Harvard Business Review posts this article on the threat to humanity posed by the rise of the machine. It quotes Peter Drucker, arguing that in the age of automation we need to embrace our traditions:
We already know that in terms of sheer processing power the race against the machine is one that humans can’t win. So more than ever we – and managers in particular – need to understand what it means to be what Peter Drucker in Post-Capitalist Society calls the “educated person” in the machine age: someone who lives in the digital present but inflects it by drawing on the accumulated great tradition of the past. That includes films like Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, which is thus a double tell-tale: so long as it still evokes a frisson, and we can recognize it as a warning – but only so long – we’ll know the fight to stay human is still there to be won. Or lost.
This is a disturbing conclusion, since humanities programs, where the tradition is taught and explored, have been eviscerated by the cold demands of commerce, and the value of education is increasing understood only in terms of future earnings. This is particularly true of legal education since 2008. As the application pool has dwindled, legal education has turned against its heritage. This in a time when technology threatens to profoundly alter the profession, and the humanity of the law is called into question, even at the theoretical level.
