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Make things better by making better things.
The first week of baseball is underway. And with the new ABS (Automatic Ball-Strike) system, balls and strikes have never been more accurate. Except, I am not so sure we should have them. Just because we can doesn't mean we should.
Robots have been replacing humans for quite some time. The printing press wiped out the scribing industry. The steam engine replaced human labor. I don't think we can even remember when we started using self-checkouts, but they are everywhere these days. Anyone under 30 won't even know what the world was like without smartphones and GPS.
We just don't realize how much we like to automate the work we do.
The reason I suspect it stresses us out is that we fill our time with more stuff to do. When something is crossed off the list, we add two more things. Not necessarily more productive things. Just more of it.
In many aspects, we have more, not fewer, choices in how we use discretionary time now. We don't have to go back far in time to a world without a microwave, a range, a fridge, a washer, or a dryer.
Today, we just spend our leisure time differently. Many will be scrolling and worrying about whether the world is going to fall apart. We tune in to watch something on Netflix, only to spend the time picking something to watch.
When you think about it, records killed live music in many ways. So did radio and television for the local theater. And yet, there is still value in going out of our way to see a live show. Technology isn't the threat to human flourishing. As always, it is in the eye of the beholder and how you use it.
In climbing, people will complain about whether a bolt should be placed on a route. And one way to think about it is that nobody is forcing you to use it. Using tech is a choice. How you spend your time is another matter. Automation might be great. And sometimes it isn't. Sometimes we want a human touch. Others, we want a robot to get it more precisely than we can.
If it's crunching numbers, grab a calculator/spreadsheet/AI to assist. But if you are here reading this, I know you didn't click to read a generated AI post. And if we can't call pitches accurately anymore, what are we doing? Further, who even cares?
You can always choose to use the self-checkout — or not. Perhaps with all this technology, we don't need umpires in baseball either. And yet, I think having the chaos of being human and making mistakes is what makes sports so fun to begin with.