How my Car’s Fan Endangers Human Dignity #011

Hello, good morning! Welcome once again to Every Dawn, where we get a morning thought every day to accompany us through the day.

This morning, as I was driving to my office at the University, it occurred to me once again how badly my car is designed. It doesn't matter what brand it is, because I'm sure that many cars have the same weird behaviors. But one thing that drives me crazy is the air conditioning unit of the car, which you need around here in Hong Kong because, in the summer, it's horribly hot and it is also very humid. So, you really need to air condition a little bit in order to be able to sit in this car.

And this air conditioning unit has an auto mode, so if you press Auto, then it does whatever it wants. Now, I always switch the auto off so that I can regulate the temperature and the fan as I like, but the infuriating thing is that even if you switch the auto off, the fan will do what it thinks is best for you. And so, I turn the temperature at a particular temperature that's okay, but then how much it would blow to reach this temperature depends only on whatever algorithm the car is employing, and my wishes are completely ignored. Although I can press a button to say how much fan I want, after a few minutes, it just silently reverts to what the car wants to do.

And I know that for me, I want the level three of my fan strength, of its blowing strength, because this level three is just cool enough—it's three out of ten or something like this—it's just cool enough to really be perceptible, to blow nicely at me. While two is too little, with two, I always feel hot. I like three, and if it's four or five, then it's too loud. Then I cannot, for example, listen to music, or I cannot hear the traffic as well.

So, I like it to be three, and when I start the car, I put it to three, and what does it do immediately? It goes up to five because the car is hot. So in the beginning, it says, "Okay, I have to, you know, make you happy by giving you five instead of the three you wanted." And then I put it back to three, and I have to do this while I'm taking the corner, navigating, you know, pedestrians, trying not to crash other people. Now, part of my attention is on this stupid fan.

I put it back to three; it stays there for a moment, pretends to want to make me happy, and when I look away, after I drive for a moment, I have the impression that it's so unbearably hot in here. Why is it so hot? And I look at the fan, and now it has gone to one. And I put it back to three, and I drive a few meters, and suddenly I feel everything is blowing so loudly; there's a storm going on in the car. And then I look at the thing, and it's gone to five again, by itself.

So, half of my attention while I'm driving is now focused on this fan, and why? Because this thing won't do what I want. Now, this sounds silly if I say it like this—it sounds like, you know, I'm locked in a totally futile war with my car—but it is actually a symptom of something much more important. It is a symptom of how these mechanisms and automations that are supposed to serve us don't do this very often. They become what, in German, is called a Selbstzweck—their own purpose. They become autonomous in a way that overrides our autonomy as humans.

Whoever decided this air conditioner clearly thought that his will has to trump my will, that this machine can dictate to me what the right level of blowing is, rather than the opposite. And the same experience you have all the time, only in other respects. It's harder to argue, so this is why we tend to accept it more, for example with computers. Computers all the time do their own thing, no matter what we want. And your phone, you know, this horrible spellchecking and spell correction, which makes you say crazy things, sometimes offensive things to others because it totally misinterprets what you have typed.

It's supposed to be helpful, and sometimes it is, but also very often it's just infuriating. You have to go back and correct the same thing again and again and again, and this spellchecking thing does not get what you actually want to say because the word we want to use is not a common word. And the same even happens in institutions where the institution then becomes the machine that overrides your human autonomy.

I work at a university. We have rules given by the university about how to grade people, when to terminate the studies of someone because of low grades, how to give points for an essay, what to look for, and so on. All these things are mechanized. We are being made into parts of this University machine, and this University machine then overwrites what we think is right as a teacher.

Perhaps I know that this student should get a better grade because I see their effort. I see that giving them a better grade will give them a push that they need in order to restore their motivation, perhaps, and make them into better students, better academics, give them a better future. But I'm not allowed to do it because the system tells me what I have to look at in the rubrics in order to give a particular grade. This is inhuman. This is fundamentally inhuman.

The philosopher Emmanuel Kant emphasized that the highest property of human beings, the most valuable thing we have, is our autonomy. It is our ability to take decisions and to act according to what we have really decided that we want to do. And this is exactly what these systems are putting to danger. Our human autonomy.

When this stupid air conditioner always goes back to two or to five, or whatever, which is not three, which is not what I want, then it's overriding my human autonomy. It is essentially telling me, "Not I am there to serve you, but you are there to, you know, serve me. You are there to endure whatever air I blow at you because I know best."

And I think that this is a great danger, and we must resist it. We must do whatever we can, as futile as it might seem. Now, I am every morning fighting with this thing, but I will keep fighting, although I know it's useless. I will eventually change the car. I will change the car because of this. I will get a car that has a manual fan setting with a button that I can, you know, press and then it stays where I want it.

So, when you go out to your life today, have a look around. What are these mechanisms that enslave you, that take away your autonomy, your freedom, and your power to decide things freely? I mean, there are rational ways, there are justifiable ways, of course. You want a pilot of your commercial flight to follow particular rules. You don't want them to do whatever they like. You want them to pilot you according to the best ways of doing it, or your surgeon when he operates on you, you want him to follow the best practices of his profession.

These are rational limits to the freedom that these professionals have. But it's not rational to take away my freedom in my car to say how much I want to be blown at by the stupid fan, right? This is not just. So, when we go out today, let us have a look at our lives. How often do actually institutions, people, machines, computers, automation in any way, even the most primitive like the button on a car fan, how often do they take away our freedom? How often do they endanger our autonomy?

And try to think if there are ways how you can get around that, how you can make sure that you maximize your autonomy because eventually, if we don't do anything, we will become completely slaves of the system, not only of machines but even more of institutions. Because this is, in the end, what our governments want. Our governments want us to be their servants. Our society wants us to be serving it. Capitalism wants us to be serving it.

We should just consume and spend our money and not complain and be good citizens in the sense that we are easy to handle, we are obedient, and we do what everybody wants. But this is not what a human being is about. Being a human is something much more. It means being free. It means making a decision and then having the power to execute upon it.

So don't let them. Don't give away your freedom. Don't give away your autonomy because this is what makes you into a human being.

Thank you, and see you next time. Bye-bye!