Can we say that human beings are behaving more and more like machines?

Question

In all societies people complied to some behavioral expectation. In the middle age for instance people felt that they were assigned by God their position in society, and they would comply to the behavior required from a peasant, a knight, a handworker etc with very little social mobility and room for singularity.

Today we might have the feeling that we live in an unprecedented era where people are behaving or expected to behave more and more like a machine. An unprecedented conformism seems to rule behaviors, and singularity seems to be banned and rejected as all behavior trend toward the norm and seems to be programmed to trend towards the norm.

Everyone seems to be called to fit into a job category (software developer, business developer, entrepreneur, science scholar) and comply to the expected speech and behavior expected in this category, with close to no space for identity or singularity.

Is it an impression, that our times see an unprecented conformism and social programming of behaviors ? Are people just more aware than before of the social determinism and social forces which have them comply to some behavior ?

Can we say that people are behaving more and more like machines, and that personnality is deprecated, depreciated and being eradicated ?

Answer 1

No.

The pre-Black Death feudal era was incredibly regimented, with extremely limited social or physical mobility for most, & being largely born in to whatever job, & mobility only intergenerationally. We find something similar in many places, serfdom, restrictions on movement. Guild or family control of industries. It lasted longer in Japan. It's still present in Indian culture. And it was resurgent on the fascist corporatist model. This makes humans cogs in a machine, or cells in organs.

Lack of job autonomy is linked to range of negative outcomes. But increasing autonomy has been consistently prioritised - even at the cost of uncertainty and precariousness of employment, and need for retraining across most work lives. But people have consistently chosen that side of the balance, from leaving agricultural labouring jobs & domestic servitude for the mills, to the Gold Rush, to a consistent cultural focus on education once a society has rule-of-law & demographic transition to low birth rates. Coding is giving people unprecedented flexibility of where & when to work, & it's a very creative industry - because if a task can be automated, it will be. Automation has mainly taken working class jobs, but will increasingly take middle class jobs, but, mainly ones of rote drudgery. It doesn’t lead to less jobs, but does require new skills & retraining.

Durkheim the foundational sociologist, identified the key characteristic of religion as binding together, through shared attitudes to what is held sacred - both taboos and what is valued or set beyond beyond questioning. Jonathan Haidt’s Moral Foundations theory links conservative views to a broader moral palette, that includes sanctity/purity, and respect, which left wing people don’t value or prioritise much at all. There is a positive place for some types of valuing tradition, of enforcing boundaries and norms like respect for others, and even some kinds of pressures to conform.

But, conservative views have been linked to threat perception and intolerance of ambiguity, propagating a culture of seeking and hyping up threats, and using that to justify violent oppression of difference, or out-groups. Racism and treating groups or individuals as ‘not human’ is the way to make humans have to be more like machines, and return to the fascist atavism of corporatism where some humans are treated as having no dignity or concerns, only there to serve others. Discussed in more detail here: How would you apply John Rawls "Theory of justice" to everyday decisions?