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>When these technologies become embedded in society, he argues, life is reduced to checkboxes.

This idea is part of why I think it's so crucial to teach the humanities to all people, especially those in STEM fields where the humanities are lacking at best and received as hostile at worst. I firmly believe most of what it means to be a human is not quantifiable and we lose a tremendous amount of meaning in our lives when we're literally reduced to "going through the motions": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therblig

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>I firmly believe most of what it means to be a human is not quantifiable

This is a tired argument, especially because it itself is taking the first step towards quantifying what it is saying can't be quantified. First you have Boolean categories ("what it means to be human," and "what it doesn't mean to be human"), and later on you refine them into more subtle models, models which sometimes use real numbers to express their parameters. Even by suggesting that "what it means to be human" is a coherent category into which things can fall, you are already on the road to quantifying it.

While I think you have an excellent point, I believe what most people mean when they say “not quantifiable” is “not fully quantifiable” as opposed to “completely indescribable”. I think this phrase reflects acceptance of the underlying principle behind Gödel’s Incompleteness and the Halting Problem.

>I believe what most people mean when they say “not quantifiable” is “not fully quantifiable” as opposed to “completely indescribable”.

Describing something and quantifying it are not distinct actions. If you think you can make any progress at all in describing something, then you are doing the same thing as those enigmatic "quantifiers." The only reason it seems different to say "this apple is red," versus "this apple weighs a half pound" is because people are a lot more handy with colors than fractions.

Quantifying requires numbers, while description does not. I find your comment lacking (description), but I don't have a meaningful numeric value handy for how much so (quantification).

>Quantifying requires numbers, while description does not.

That statement is equivalent to, "Uantifying requires words that start with U, while in complete contrast Wuantifying requires words that start with W." Granted I should have said, "not meaningfully distinct," but the point is that the only reason there appears to be a boundary between Uantifying and Wuantifying is because there is one group of people that know a lot of W-words and almost no U-words, and another group of people that know almost no W-words but many U-words. Each group thinks they see a "material" boundary while in reality the only distinguishing line is edge of their own familiarity.

The fact that you're reducing my comment to mere categorization kind of proves my point. "What it means to be human" is not a category of activity, it's an ongoing process that we create through living in a world with other people and finding meaning in our interactions with our predecessors (e.g. examining ancient art or living with the insufficiencies of a building that was built centuries ago), our peers in the present, and our considerations for those that come after us in the future.

A number is the process of selecting a point out of infinite possibilities on a number line. Life is the process of selecting things out of not quite infinite possibilities but unimaginably large. These things are similar when you look at them like this, and numbers are richer than the real world, because they aren't finite.

I think a lot of the problem is education. Without education a lot of these ideas wouldn't occur.

And UI design?

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