ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses on how humans entangle with and diverge from machines in learning. Machines like robots are not just shells of plastic or metal filled with nuts, bolts and wires or biomaterial. They are also home to software. This software, sometimes referred to as artificial intelligence (AI) is emerging everywhere. AI and robotics sometimes aim at a “fidelity to human performance” rather than an ideal understanding of how rational systems should work. Robotics and machine learning developed from the computer sciences assume agents are rational and intelligent – only their agents are not humans but machine agents in computers. The ignorance of management on how machines work, along with the ignorance of engineers of the learning effect of their technology, is combined with the ignorance of the people affected by the technologies – sometimes with detrimental effects.