About Machine Society
Hi. My name is Mike Elgan. And I’ve been writing about technology for a few decades. I’m an opinion columnist and futurist. And I’ve noticed over the years that our tools, which are designed to help us, are also changing who and what we are.
What is the overall nature of this change? Where is it leading us? And how should we understand and respond to this change?
An 1829 essay by Scottish essayist, historian and philosopher Thomas Carlyle, titled “Signs of the Times,” asserted that he was living not in a “Heroical, Devotional, Philosophical or Moral Age, but, above all others, the Mechanical Age.”
The “artisan is driven from his workshop, to make room for a speedier, inanimate one,” he lamented.
Machines, he believed, were affecting society: “Philosophy, Science, Art, Literature, all depend on machinery,” he wrote. Even literature is affected: “books are not only printed, but, in a great measure written and sold, by machinery…. Men are grown mechanical in head and in heart, as well as in hand.”
And while he acknowledged how machines have made people “much better fed, clothed [and] lodged,” he pointed out that mechanization has transformed the notion of collective humanity into a “Machine of Society.”
Fast forward to 2024, and it’s clear that we’re entering a new Machine Society, where human interaction is almost always and increasingly mediated by machines — especially by AI and the various realities (virtual, augmented, mixed and extended) as well as spatial computing.
Since the PC revolution of the 1990s, of course, machines have theoretically mediated our communications — the internet, email, text messages and so on. Then, in the 2000s, people started communicating through social media, podcasts, blogs and feature rich communications platforms like Slack and Whatsapp.
But all those media functioned as simulacra of non-mechanical communication — email and video calls were psychological stand-ins for letters and in-person conversations.
But now we’re mechanizing human discourse in ways that will deeply impact us.
Through spatial computing and holoportation platforms, we’ll interact with holographic avatar versions of people. And AI will, to a huge and growing extent, choose our words for us — choose our thoughts for us — and also read and capture those words, both displacing and simultaneously enhancing cognition and memory.
LLMs, as Jaron Lanier persuasively pointed out, automate human collaboration on a massive scale.
We’re entering a new age, one in which human society is totally dependent upon and radically altered by microprocessor-based machines. We are becoming a new kind of Machine Society.
Where is all this headed? As Carlyle observed, we entered into a co-dependent partnership with machines centuries ago. Since that time humanity’s senior partnership in this relationship has declined and the machines’ importance has risen.
The movie, The Matrix, considers a future where machines are the dominant partner, and humanity is codependent with machines only to provide electrical power. Emulating human society, the machines in that universe are not controlled centrally, but each has independent agency within a hierarchical structure. Morpheus calls the world of the machines a “Machine Society.”
It’s unlikely that AI-based machines will end up using people as batteries. But it’s a nearly certain that the role of AI-based machines in human civilization will never stop growing.
We’re currently living in an era where technology impacts literally everything. As one obvious example, our politics is characterized by divisiveness, disinformation and radicalization. Nearly every aspect of this new politics was brought about by the existence of the global internet, social media and the ability of anyone to create any kind of content and instantly reach a global audience by gaming algorithms. Russian disinformation, Chinese censorship, the decline of traditional media, the small-donation fundraising of radicals in Congress — all of it is the direct result of digital technology.
Similarly impacted: Education, religion, science — even dating and marriage. Every aspect of human society is mediated and affected by machines.
It’s clear that we live in a new Machine Society. And machines are accelerating the rate of change. The aspiration of this newsletter is to start conversations about how new technologies affect us, change us and, ultimately, become part of us.
Did the futurists predict the world we now live in? As I’ve tracked technology trends in the past few years, I’ve noticed that garden-variety 20th Century science fiction largely missed the mark.
It’s become clear to me in the past few years that we can best understand our fast-changing world by tracking the emergence of trends that used to be the stuff of cyberpunk sci-fi.
These themes now are my focus, my obsession, and the subjects of this newsletter: artificial intelligence, augmented reality, virtual reality, artificial reality, spatial computing, holograms, holoportation, lifelogging, surveillance, megacities, robots, cyborgs, lab-grown food, post-nationalism, corporations with nation-state power, oligarchs with nation-state power, late-stage capitalism, privatization of formerly government services, transhumanism, posthumanism, genetic engineering, brain-computer interfaces, cybernetics, digital immortality, artificial consciousness, biohacking, nanomachines, nanobots, nanotechnology, synthetic biology, autonomous weapons, cybernetic implants for sensory enhancement, memory manipulation, artificial ecosystems, techno-organic hybrids, man-made body parts, prosthetic brain power, prosthetic memory, computerized prosthetic limbs, nootropics, mind simulation, artificial wombs, cryptocurrencies, hacking, remote work, digital nomad living, and cyber-religion.
Welcome to the sprawl. Let’s understand this new and changing world together.
