“Man Becomes the Sex Organs of the Machine World” (2012)

[Jedi72]

"We refer to the question: What sort of creature man’s next successor in the supremacy of the earth is likely to be. We have often heard this debated; but it appears to us that we are ourselves creating our own successors; we are daily adding to the beauty and delicacy of their physical organisation; we are daily giving them greater power and supplying by all sorts of ingenious contrivances that self-regulating, self-acting power which will be to them what intellect has been to the human race. In the course of ages we shall find ourselves the inferior race.

...

Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life. The upshot is simply a question of time, but that the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants is what no person of a truly philosophic mind can for a moment question."

- Samuel Butler, 1863

[mgolawala]

Perhaps humans wont end up being inferior instead we will just end up being part of the system that creates the next level of life.

When I was a kid, and learned about the billions of cells and bacteria making up my body, and how they communicated with molecules and worked together in immensely complex ways. Specializing and signaling and coming into existence and dying, and so on... I wondered if they were aware that they were part of a huge complex organism, or if they were just "doing their thing" oblivious to my existence.

Ofcourse, cells aren't conscious so they aren't aware of anything, but wouldn't it be interesting, if we humans end up acting like these cells and bacteria, completely unaware of the next level of life we were creating. We could just be "doing our thing" building our networks, and computers and machines, and going through our lives and such.. meanwhile it is all to sustain a level of life that we, like our own cells, do not realize we are a part of.

[PavlovsCat]

    The horseman serves the horse,
    The neatherd serves the neat,
    The merchant serves the purse, 
    The eater serves his meat;
    'T is the day of the chattel,
    Web to weave, and corn to grind;
    Things are in the saddle,
    And ride mankind.

    There are two laws discrete,
    Not reconciled,--
    Law for man, and law for thing;
    The last builds town and fleet,
    But it runs wild,
    And doth the man unking.

-- excerpt from "Ode Inscribed to W. H. Channing" by Ralph Waldo Emerson

[amelius]

> we are daily adding to the beauty and delicacy of their physical organisation

... to make people click ads.

[ultimape]

I like this quote because my research into the spread of information systems speeding up and accelerating the decline of man goes back to the 1700s. It suggests others have been seeing the pace of change in how society is structured and noticing the patterns.

By the 1850s, the pooping duck machine might as well have been in a museum http://www.weirdhistorian.com/the-pooping-duck/

[kodz4]

Superior/inferior story is a very misleading starting point. There are 10^7 billion ants crawling around the earth, doing robotic mindless things for reasons no human can understand, without any machines controlling them. What's up with that? Does Samuel Butler sit around wondering what comes after the ants?

[indigochill]

What he seems to have missed is that no matter how complex the machine, it always has a creator and a master. Even the most sophisticated AI was designed someone who, deliberately or not, encoded that AI with biases likely mirroring that of its creator (e.g. racial bias in facial recognition software). Even if we achieve the singularity and have software making other software ad infinitum, the biases are there in the original program.

[dalbasal]

I've always been interested in notional "starting points" like the appearance of writing representing the beginning of "history."

Since reading "Sapiens" I buy into YNH's definition of the beginning as the point where culture takes over from genetics as the driver of progress. He attributes this to the paleolithic revolution, and supports the hypothesis that this poit represents a breakthrough in language, enabling cultural concepts like tribalism, money, priesthood or whatnot and leading to much more sophisticated group and intergroup behaviours. That resulted in a creature that was no longer an animal a meaningful sense.

From that point on, human behaviour evolves so much faster than genetics that natural selection is replaced, as the meaningful driver of change. Biology becomes a legacy and a platform, but the culture grafted onto biology is what matters historically.

It's hard, with our biases, to put younger events like the industrial revolution into context alongside palaeolithic events... but it certainly seems like a revolution on that scale.

In any case, speculating about the present... It seems plausible we are currently at a point where technological advancement is (a) driving change rather than culture and (b) cultural institutions can't keep up.

The wild card is that technology can influence biology (and culture) in ways that culture could not. But. whether technology replaces us or subsumes us doesn't seem that different to the eye-in-sky perspective. It is technological progress that dictates progress from now on...

[thrav]

Hah, that’s what Sapiens is about? That idea about social/culture vs. biology is almost straight out of Lila, by Robert Pirsig. He sets it up as a progression of giant leaps. Inorganic > Biology > Social > Intellectual, with each level being justified in its own priority over the patterns of the ones below it. (The community is more important than the cows — idea of ending slavery / freedom is more important than the social status quo)

Both of his books are incredible.

[narrator]

Machines can eat petroleum and electricity like cows can eat grass. That's why we have symbiotic coexistence with both of them.

If machines could only eat human food, there would be a lot less of them. For example, it takes two acres worth of land to make enough biodiesel annually to fill up an suv gas tank. Properly cultivated, that could feed a significant number of people.

[pygy_]

In the same vein...

Rich people are only rich because there are poorer people that are economically relevant. We all use dollars to buy food, money gives you the ability to have others do your bidding. It is just a social construct though, a convention.

Once humans are economically obsolete (Sam Altman plans to have OpenAI make super-human investment decisions, and I wouldn't be surprised to see Alpha Zero take an executive seat at Google in the coming years), human money becomes worthless to the industry, and even rich folks will be powerless.

[pygy_]

That's about to become a problem once a sufficiently large share of humanity is economically obsolete and not worth feeding by the industry.

With an automated agriculture and seed production in the hands of a few companies (among which Monsanto/Bayer), it becomes trivially easy to start producing GMO seeds that are toxic to humans in massive amounts.

[ahartmetz]

Title of the year. I like the thoughts provoked by the title better than the actual text, in fact.

[oaiey]

The Butlerian Jihad is coming

[52-6F-62]

Happened before him, didn’t it? (Albeit, with a decidedly less philosophical bent)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ned_Ludd

[incompatible]

A few people may have stopped using Facebook. Take that, machine life.

[michaelvoz]

I cannot wait for it.

[hef19898]

In the end the Ixians found ways around it!

[rumcajz]

Not very effective sex organs at that. Eventually, we'll be dispaced by something that does the job more effectively.

[GistNoesis]

And with the advent of dating apps, we, the machines, are selectively breeding them.

[dalbasal]

If 23 and me buy tinder... constant vigilance!

[314]

The idea that form communicates to us more strongly than function is particularly strong and resonant. We have moved into an era of fashion in hardware and software: look and style sells more than underlying functionality. Apple have rode this particular wave most noticably and successfully out of the tech giants, but the entire marketplace has shifted into this niche.

[jakear]

Don’t miss the “view full essay” link. A user in the comments mentions a different take, worth a read as well.

[dang]

Why don't we just switch to the full essay. URL changed from https://mcluhangalaxy.wordpress.com/2016/04/19/man-becomes-t.... Thanks!

[avip]

I’ve been envisioning a tinder-for-bots app. It could use tinder’s existing bot population (50%? 90%?). It’ll have a “I am not a human” recaptcha on sign up. It’ll feature influential celebs s.a Siri, kortana, Alexa and Tai. I only need to figure out monetization.

[EGreg]

My friend Siqi Chen built Frieds for Sale lol

[snackstarvins]

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Darwin_among_the_Machines

[cryptozeus]

First comment on the site has link to intersting article with same title https://everything2.com/title/Humans+are+the+sex+organs+of+t...

[rodneyg_]

Incredibly insightful. Great timing.

[apexalpha]

So, the Matrix? Kind of?

[molteanu]

Anne Clark - Sleeper in Metropolis [1983]

[ngvrnd]

"Marshall McLuhan, casual viewin', heads buried in the sand."

[adnjoo]

reminds me of the unabomber's tech manifesto

[octabyte]

This site is becoming weirder and weirder.

[drannex]

I mean, finally. We were getting a bit bored of the "latest in web design 1/2/3".