So, its arrived. The brave new world is here. I just wish the Giles cartoonist was still alive. I’d love some light relief with his take on Grandma and the family’s use of Alexa..
Alexa, I feel anxious… what will Alexa say? What advice will be given.. who is the expert ?
Through the NHS portal it will be a case of a diagnosis, an illness, a medical intervention, an adjustment in thinking. This feels so impossible to challenge, so huge… yet, of course this was going to happen. I saw the research that was going on five years ago into digital apps for depression. Of course someone picked that up and saw the potential to exploit those moments of vulnerability and make a lot of dollar, under the plausible intention of ‘helping’.
People are so very expensive aren’t they? How inconvenient and costly we are when we don’t seem to behave properly. What better than having a product that lives in your house, a seemingly benign portal to the world, to music, to ideas, to information.. But beware of who is writing the code. Who has programmed the response, who has the answers? Question the paradigm you are led towards. If Alexa is spouting advice in regards to emotional distress or any mental health diagnosis, then beware. Alexa will be responding through the lens of the medical approach, through the NHS. You will be led down a particular narrow path.
As Rogers said : •We regard the medical model as an extremely inappropriate model for dealing with psychological disturbances. The model that makes more sense is a growth model or a developmental model. In other words we see people as having a potential for growth and development, and that can be released under the right psychological climate. We don’t see them as sick and needing a diagnosis, prescription and a cure. And that is a very fundamental difference with a good many implications’ (Rogers 1976)
Who agreed this inclusion of Amazon in the NHS? Whose manifesto spoke about this? Who agreed to thousands of new satellites to be launched across the universe to increase the digital net? Where were the philosophers, the thinkers, the provocateurs to stimulate a dialogue, a questioning, a consideration in regards to these world changing decisions? The dumbing down of the world in order to prevent dissenting voices to the ever increasingly powerful agenda that has a price for everything and a value for nothing has been in force since the nineties. The person seeking to be our Prime Minister characterizes challenge as being inconvenient, as being ‘negative’. Think positive. Yes, the ground has been laid for so long now. Think positive. Keep calm and carry on.
There are no drones here.
Being Human Being 