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This, from Dune: "Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to
by molteanu 9y ago
This, from Dune:
"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."
- Animats 9y agoWith the bozos running things in Dune, it might have been better with machines in charge.
- leggomylibro 9y agoMaybe that's just what you get after generations of royal and wealthy-elite inbreeding slowly but surely shrinks the available gene pool.
- jerrycruncher 9y agoWhich is exactly why Lynch was a brilliant choice to direct the first film adaptation: owing to his own artistic idiosyncrasies, he was able to convey how deeply strange such an inbred interstellar gentry might be, millennia into the future.
- yung_endian 9y agoDon't talk shit about my boy Leto II like that. It's not easy to navigate the Golden Path
- Radim 9y agoWorse! "The machines themselves condition the users to employ each other the way they employ machines." - God Emperor of Dune Frank Herbert was a genius.
- JKCalhoun 9y ago"Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind." OCB
- wslh 9y agoWe cannot forget Momo [1] by Michael Ende with greymen buying the time of people: why are you wasting your time talking with your neighbour when you can profit from it? [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Momo_%28novel%29 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Momo_%28novel%29
- elihu 9y agoI think the grey men in Momo are different; the grey men encourage people to save time by being more efficient (and thereby neglecting human relationships and the things that made them happy). Facebook, on the other hand, encourages people to use their human relationships to waste time via superficial interactions with so that Facebook can profit directly from ad sales. Some strategies work well against either threat; spend time with people away from the computer, don't go along with whatever everyone else is doing. But they are exploiting different vices: the grey men exploit people's long term greed to entice them to accept an intolerable present, whereas Facebook exploits short-term procrastination and addiction psychology: "I wonder what's going on on Facebook right now... it'll just take a couple seconds to check." (This isn't unique to Facebook. I tend to waste a lot more time on Hacker News and Reddit than Facebook. At least HN doesn't have a profit motive, and I do learn a lot of interesting things here.) edit: I'm not sure how this relates to the Dune quote, as it's been a long time since I read it and don't remember the context of that quote.
- forapurpose 9y agoYet so many readers of sci-fi that I know seem willingly oblivious to the risks of modern surveillance and centralization of power.