Is evidentialism a dead philosophy?

[bennyboy]

An interesting thought experiment suggests itself. Let's suppose the military developed a similar system to that of Amazon, only its purpose is to suggest suitable replacement parts or supplies on military contracts. At the beginning, it is only used to make suggestions about substitutions. A human double checks all recommendations at first. However, they find that the human overrules the machine's suggestion extraordinarily rarely, and as often as not, the human makes a mistake in overruling the machine. So in practice, the machine is as effective as the human at choosing substitutions. Should we eliminate the human from the loop and let the machine make the decisions directly? Why or why not? And remember, these are military contracts, so lives are at stake.

I think we already have many examples of machines which have completely replaced humans-- i.e. we have MORE trust in the machines to do their jobs, exactly because they are not human. Starting with electric calculators, and moving up to Google and Amazon, what you are talking about has become a growing reality. Perhaps an army of drones with some clever computing, or nano-"viruses" with clever computing, is really going to be our future.