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

2012diaries.blogspot.com

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

#3
post #2

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

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

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

#7
post #3
post #2

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

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

You Right they both are same. Thanks to give right place to read.

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

#8
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.

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

#9
"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

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

#10
post #9

"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…

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.
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