Editor:
I read your coverage of the science and literature conference with growing dismay. From your coverage?as well as what I’ve heard elsewhere?the symposium seemed to have been totally dominated by the type of person who broke into wild cheering when IBM’s “Deep Blue” beat Gary Kasparov a few years back.
For instance, you breezily report how roboteer Rodney Brooks says that soon “humans will become their machines,” but offer no counterviews that criticize the many problems with such a statement.
First of all, what about the vast number of poor folk on the planet who have never even made a phone call, let alone used a computer? And what about us few remaining dissidents that haven’t been totally swept up by megamachine-mania, and would prefer to remain flesh-and blood, thank you very much? Neither Brooks nor The Chronicle seem to be even aware that we exist. Behind the glib optimism of Brooks, et cetera, one can audibly hear the subtext: “Resistance is futile… you will be assimilated.”
For those who are fascinated that such neo-luddite dinosaurs as myself can still exist, I would suggest you read just about any prominent social scientist of the last century?Lewis Mumford, Jacques Ellul, Rachel Carson, even Martin Luther King Jr., who all warned explicitly of the coming of the machine takeover of society and its baleful consequences.
Sherwood Anderson seemed to speak for a generation when he wrote: “I look far into the future beyond the noise and clatter. I will not be crushed by the iron machine.”
It is only in the last decade or so?the Internet Age?that this collective wisdom seems to have been lost?in fact, some people under 30 express shock that it ever existed at all (I’m in my mid-40s), which says a lot about the vastly pro-machine bias fostered by academia.
Bill McCormick, Salt Lake City, UT