Machines of Loving Grace

Never mistake a clear view for a short distance,”

Licklider wrote in 1960 about the distance between “mechanically extended man” and “artificial intelligence,” and warned about the early direction of automation technology: “If we focus upon the human operator within the system, however, we see that, in some areas of technology, a fantastic change has taken place during the last few years. ‘Mechanical extension’ has given way to replacement of men, to automation, and the men who remain are there more to help than to be helped.

An experiment in an impoverished village in India in 2013 guaranteeing basic needs had just the opposite effect. The poor did not rest easy on their government subsidies; instead, they became more responsible and productive

is a strange time—workplace automation has started to strike the white-collar workforce with the same ferocity that it transformed the factory floor beginning in the 1950s.

EPIGRAPH
I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.
—Richard Brautigan,