2014 in Review: The Human Element

I play bass guitar in a band. That means that I practice every day. I buy fancy dresses to wear on stage, and I get up there and play.

On most nights, someone from the audience asks: Can you play “x”? Can you play “y”? I want to hear “z”. And they can turn sour if you can’t appease them with something they like, dedicated especially to them.

I’d love to say: “Have you put in the many hundreds of hours that I have to learn to play an instrument? Could you stand up here and remember how to play the 50 songs we will play tonight – with everyone watching you?”

The answer of course is to have a juke box instead of a band; all the songs people want to hear, all perfectly studio re-mastered.

That would take the human element out of live performance, just like some researchers envisage we can do with shipping – take the seafarers off the ships and operate them remotely from shore.

Looking back on 2014, how different would it have been if we did that? Our headlines over the past 12 months (and more) have featured Francesco Schettino, master of the Costa Concordia. Some have given him the nickname Captain Coward. 

A remote controlled, computerised bridge wouldn’t have tried to show off to a lady, wouldn’t have left the ship with passengers still on board. The Costa Concordia captain and the Sewol captain have that last action in common, a memory no doubt that will plague them for the rest of their lives.

The captain of the Bounty sailed his vessel into a hurricane and paid for his decision with his life and that of one of his crew. Before he set sail, he gave all on board the chance to pull out of the voyage knowing that they were heading for bad weather. They didn’t, even though they may have regretted that decision later.

They chose to go to sea.

The Costa Concordia has been refloated in a feat of human ingenuity that has set a new standard for the salvage industry – technically, environmentally and in terms of the human element. It was the outstanding leadership of salvage master Captain Nick Sloane that made it possible. Over 27 months, he brought together a team of 530 from 26 different countries, and he brought out the best in them through teamwork and leadership. 

Reading the news, we could call Schettino and the Sewol captain cowards, we could call Sloane a hero, and we could call the missing Bounty captain reckless, but would we choose to replace them with computers and machines, keep everyone safely ashore, never test the limits of their abilities and never discover their weaknesses.

Would we rather a juke box to a live band? 

I don’t think so. Stephen Hawking recently warned the world that artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race. Maybe so. It could certainly end the richness of the human experience as Sterling Hayden describes in Wanderer:

“…in the worship of security we fling our lives beneath the wheels of routine - and before we know it our lives are gone.

What does a man need - really need? A few pounds of food each day, heat and shelter, six feet to lie down in - and some form of working activity that will yield a sense of accomplishment. That's all - in the material sense, and we know it. 

But we are brainwashed by our economic system until we end up in a tomb beneath a pyramid of time payments, mortgages, preposterous gadgetry, playthings that divert our attention for the sheer idiocy of the charade.

The years thunder by, the dreams of youth grow dim where they lie caked in dust on the shelves of patience. Before we know it, the tomb is sealed.

Where, then, lies the answer? In choice. Which shall it be: bankruptcy of purse or bankruptcy of life?”

Op-Ed by Wendy Laursen