Stephen Downes

This is an interesting way of phrasing the dilemma we seem to be in today: "We are losing empathy, compassion, truth-telling, fairness, and responsibility and replacing them with all these machine values," Bugeja says. "If we embed ourselves in technology, what happens to those universal principles that have stopped wars and elevated human consciousness and conscience above more primitive times in history?" Now, for the record, I can't recall any time we managed to stop wars, but there is nonetheless a shift to what I guess can be called "machine values". But it's not just 'machine': it's an ethos that favours counting over context, that favours competitive edge over compassion. Despite what the author asserts, 'machine values' are not created by machines. They are created by humans behaving like machines.