Is the machine us?

Wait a minute. Learning analytics are always mediated by a human, or by humans (plural).

Sheila MacNeil, in a thought provoking post subtitled … analytics of the oppressed, launches into “… the learning analytics interventions should always be mediated by a human debate later this week at Digifest.”

Software and machinery always embed human values and beliefs about what is good and how to achieve it. And when it is asserted that “the machine says…” the first point holds true. The machine says only what people have enabled it to say. Whether the machine is reflective and self-aware, with anything like a recognisable value system? This is a question we can no more meaningfully ask of a machine than we can of a lobster, except to the extent that we can recognise the machine as an emergent phenomenon of human technology, and the lobster, arguably, not.

Unless, as Mike Wetsch put it, the machine is us? And then we have to ask, who are we?