Anybody that competes with slaves becomes a slave. Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano
There’s a point near the beginning of Andrew Niccol’s Good Kill where the captain, welcoming fresh new recruits to the arena of operations in Las Vegas, expounds the news behind the operation of RPAs (remotely piloted aircraft) or as we have come to know them, drones.
Ladies and gentleman, the aircraft that you are looking at is not the future of war, it is the here and fucking now. Anytime day or night there are dozens of these things in the sky above our theatres of operations, and most are currently working in the garden of Eden they call Afghanistan where they’re starting to think it’s their new national bird… the United States Airforce is ordering more drones than jets, excuse me Remotely Piloted Aircraft, you can call ‘em whatever you want, drones aren’t going anywhere, in fact they’re going everywhere. But don’t think I believe my own shit either, cause we like to dress it up in fancy language: prosecuting a target, surgical strike, neutralizing a threat. Make no fucking mistake about it, we are killing people. So I’m gonna drill this into your heads every goddamm day: this ain’t fucking Playstation, even though, and the brass don’t like to admit it, our operation was modelled on X-Box, and half of you were recruited in malls precisely because you are a bunch of fucking gamers, and war is now a first person shooter. You pull the trigger here, it’s for fucking real. It ain’t a bunch of pixels that you’re blowing up. It’s flesh… and fucking blood.
60 years ago Robert Hugh MacMillan, in Automation: Friend or Foe?, confronted the the increasing and, at times, worrying role ‘that automatic devices are playing in the peace-time industrial life of all civilized countries’. He goes on to muse that ‘just as earlier machines had replaced man’s muscles’, these new devices looked likely to ‘replace his brains’….
That was 60 years ago.
Nowadays, everyone seems to think that automation is a good thing. 'It's convenient'... is the usual trite and painfully impoverished response. Beyond that, the articulacy as to why it might be a good thing is pitifully limited to a single answer: reduction of workload.
But then, has man succeeded in working less? Was John Maynard Keynes right when he wrote (in Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren in 1928) that by now we should’ve solved the work problem and learned to work less and develop our selves more?
The paradox of automation is such that in its promising to reduce the amount of work we do, it actually increases it, for it simply frees up time that we fill with more work. The problem here is not automation per se but man’s inability to deal with his own free time, and be free without having to feel the need to work (or recover from work)….
‘All too often automation frees us from that which makes us feel free’ writes Nicholas Carr in The Glass Cage: Where Automation is Talking Us.
‘The trouble with automation is that it often gives us what we don’t need at the cost of what we do.’
The logical conclusion of this scenario will, presumably, be a work-free society populated by 'techno-slaves', and a sybaritic leisure class who do not know even how to wipe their own asses.
The dangers of automation should be clear: anybody that competes with slaves becomes a slave.
Life is not a first person shooter, and humans are not gamers. Those who use their own steam have no demons.
Here is a lazy ball surrounded by turbulence: Planet Earth as satellites photograph her.
Whole…
We have all become astronauts, completely deterritorialised as in the past a foreigner could be when abroad, but with respect to Earth of all humankind […]
… all humanity is flying like spacewalking astronauts: outside their capsule, but tethered to it by every available network…
Astronaut humanity is floating in space like a foetus in amniotic fluid, tied to the placenta of Mother Earth, by all the nutritive passages.
Michel Serres, The Natural Contract
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