Human/Machine

CHAPTER TWO

The state of human–machine partnerships

Evaluating human–machine partnerships: the importance of finding common ground

So that we can get a useful and practical understanding of human–machine partnerships, we must have a way of evaluating them. But how?

There are many ways of doing this. For instance, we can look at where certain categories of human–machine partnerships fall on a spectrum of societal, economic and political needs. We can take a classical business approach and use the tried-and-true SWOT analysis model to evaluate human–machine relationships based on their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. We can take a simple binary approach: valuable vs not valuable; harmful vs beneficial; expensive vs cheap; necessary ...