Men vs. Machines Through Time

When textile mills put traditional artisans out of work in Britain, some of them protested industrial progress by sabotaging the machines. That's why we refer to opponents of technological change as "Luddites."

In Aldous Huxley's novel, technology like test-tube baby factories and sensory-saturating movies create a perfect social order—but at the expense of love, literature, and the pursuit of truth. Unlike the agents of other tech dystopias, Brave New World's machines dehumanize us through leisure and pleasure instead of slavery and pain.

The film opens with Charlie Chaplin's "Little Tramp" being pulled into a machine's gears because of his obsessive adjusting of widgets on an assembly line. With that scene, Chaplin brought the anxiety of the assembly line—dull, repetitive work makes men like machines—to the silver screen.

Frank Walsh becomes the first person in recorded history to silence his television by shooting it—reportedly because the TV was "murdering his sleep." (The New York Times headlined the story: "Obviously Self-Defense.") Walsh's act soon got him on a TV quiz show where he won...a brand new television.

"I'm afraid, Dave," says HAL 9000, a spaceship computer so worried of being shut off by humans that he kills an astronaut. When Dave disconnects HAL, the computer sings "Daisy Bell" as it dies. (In 1961, the first speaking computer sang "Daisy Bell.")
HAL's meltdown posed a frightening question: What if a computer we depend on to be smarter and more rational than ourselves develops destructive emotions?

Loosely based on the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the movie centers on the hunt for "replicants." These humanoids are physically superior to humans, but they're not supposed to be conscious or have real emotions. One replicant, Rachel, knows she's a machine and falls in love with a detective who's supposed to "retire" her.
If a machine is human in all but name—including feelings—then is it one of us? Could a future machine be so human it doesn't know it's a machine?

Grandmaster and world champion Garry Kasparov went 4-2 against IBM's chess-playing supercomputer, Deep Blue. In a 1997 rematch, Deep Blue made history by taking two victories to Kasparov's one; the other three games ended in draws. Kasparov's request for a rematch went unmet, and IBM dismantled Deep Blue after its historic victory.

For decades, computer only recognized the last two digits of a year. Would they see "00" on January 1, 2000 as "1900" and malfunction? That question sent the world scrambling to upgrade code out of fear that vital systems, like utilities and banks, would fail when the new millennium arrived.
Despite visions of the apocalypse, Y2K passed largely without incident, helped by the $308 billion spent worldwide ($134 billion in the U.S.) to upgrade code.

Unmanned reconnaissance planes with missiles allow the U.S. military to patrol and bomb areas in Afghanistan and Iraq while pilots safely sit at Air Force bases in the U.S. The planes has been hailed for their ability to stalk targets and let soldiers fight without bodily risk. But the Predator also raises a moral issue by letting soldiers kill without putting themselves at risk.

Also see:
Mind vs. Machine by Brian Christian
The Atlantic, March 2011

We once thought humans were unique for using language, but this seems less certain each year; we once thought humans were unique for using tools, but this claim also erodes with ongoing animal-behavior research; we once thought humans were unique for being able to do mathematics, and now we can barely imagine being able to do what our calculators can.

THE ATLANTIC