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“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.” -
by tracerbulletx 6mo ago
“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.”
- Dune
"What do such machines really do? They increase the number of things we can do without thinking. Things we do without thinking—there's the real danger."
- God Emperor of Dune
- mrexcess 6mo agoHard times don’t create hard people, they create scarred people. I’ll take the robot farmers, undoing of wage slavery, and time to maintain participatory democracy over my favorite author’s romanticized suffering.
- mmcromp 6mo agoI'll believe it when I see it
- stvltvs 6mo agoWe could have undone wage slavery a long time ago if automation of work was a sufficient condition.
- mrexcess 6mo agoHere’s why I don’t think so. If we look at the milestone efficiency gains over the past century across a broad base of industries, virtually none of those could have been accomplished by contemporary automation technologies. We are only beginning to cross that threshold. It was the sacrifice of our forefathers who brought us there, just as it was the sacrifice of theirs who brought us from dank caves and death in our 30s from curable illness, into the enlightened world.
- yongjik 6mo agoThat's great, but I think Herbert had a vision of this incredible galaxy teeming with truthsayers, human computers, and space travel, and just needed a convenient excuse to explain away the total lack of computing devices.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 6mo agoIt was a convenient choice because its so obviously a foreseeable problem with thinking machines. see 'torment nexus'