Human touch is still vital in age of technology

Recent decades have witnessed advances in technology so staggering that someone living half a century ago would surely struggle to comprehend quite how far we have come. Granted, the 15-hour work week predicted by economist John Maynard Keynes as the pay-off of automation, has not quite come to pass.

But be it Zoom calls keeping people connected during the pandemic, or Nasa’s Ingenuity helicopter taking flight on Mars, humanity has shown how technology can harnessed to achieve feats both everyday and out of this world.

Only the most resolute Luddite could argue this progress is a bad thing.

Our capacity for scientific advancement is a benefit to all. Yet the risk comes if we make the technology our lord, rather than our servant.

Amid the onward march of the tech titans, are we in danger of losing the vital human touch? The sense that it is we who command the computers, rather than the other way around?

This week we report the story of a Post Office manager wrongly convicted of false accounting in the Horizon IT scandal.

Hundreds were swept up in a Kafka-esque series of criminal prosecutions brought about by errors in accounting software used in branches across the country.

Many accused of fixing the books as a result of the erroneous computer data were convicted on the basis of the faulty evidence.

Some chose to plead guilty on lesser charges, because it seemed impossible to counter the data being provided by the Horizon system.

This serves as a warning. Technology can still be fallible, just like those who created it.

‘Amid the onward march of the tech titans, arewein danger of losing the vital human touch?’