What do robots do?

Yesterday I posted anexcerptfrom the start of Paul Goodman’s 1969 NYRB essay “Can Technology Be Humane?” Here’s another bit, equally relevant to our current situation, from later in the piece, when Goodmanturns his attention to automation, robots, and what we today call “big data”:

In automating there is an analogous dilemma of how to cope with masses of people and get economies of scale, without losing the individual at great consequent human and economic cost. A question of immense importa...