Technology with a human face

Technology with a human face

Technologies don't stop by themselves. They need a human to program the balancing feedback loop.

In the book Small is beautiful, Schumacher explains humans lives 3 crisis:

1. Human nature revoltes agains inhuman technology and organisations that make them suffocate and debilating,
2. living environment gives sign of breakdown,
3. Non-renewable resources are too strategic for the road human is taking.

Materialism and limitless expansion in a finite world cannot last long.

The problems seem to grow faster than the solutions. Can we develop a technology which really helps us solv our problems? A technology with a human face?

The amount of leisure a society enjoys tends to be in inverse proportion to the amount of labour-saving machinery it employs.

Schumacher conjoncture

We need skillful hands and creative brains to be fulfilled in work. If the machine takes of them, you just created another problem. Does your work fulfill or empty your soul?

Let's take a look at how many people are actual producers. In the book in 1977: 1/6. We're not counting the people telling what to do, or account for the past, or plan the future, or distribute what others have produced.

The paradox is that the prestige carried by people in modern industrial society varies in inverse proportion to their closeness to actual production.

References

• Small is beautiful