Stephen Downes

Tim Klapdor uses the example of a hamburger to illustrate the difference between process and product, but I think a better example might be the shirt on your back. My grandfather used to manufacture those shits on a farm in rural Quebec. Today, they're manufactured by poverty-level workers in Asia. In the future, they may be manufactured by AI. The shirts are in all cases identical, but the process - and the lives and values it sustained - are very different. Would it be better to have robots make shirts? Maybe. Did people care when the manufacture switched from my grandfather to a wage-slave in a sweathouse? Not really. As Klapdor says, "This isn't a new argument." I think process matters, but I also think the use of new technology is often a better process what what we do now.