In Servitude of the Machine
How a
metaphor became a cult, and what it is doing to us
Oct 20, 2026
A car with no one in it
On 15 October 2026, at a SpaceX test site
in Texas, Elon Musk unveiled Tesla's new Roadster. It went from zero to sixty
miles an hour in under a second. Using suction fans, it clung upside down to a
curved ramp, then fired rocket-style thrusters to flip through the air and land
on its wheels. It leapt over a row of parked Tesla vehicles. The crowd cheered.
"Flying cars are real," the company declared.
One detail received less attention. There
was no one in the car. The demonstration was run without a driver, Musk
explained, "to make sure we don't kill anyone." And he described the
Roadster as "the best of the last of the human-driven cars": a
magnificent farewell to the idea that a person should be at the wheel.
It would be easy to dismiss the event as
spectacle. But it is worth taking seriously, because almost every element of
our civilisation's deepest habit is there in miniature. Enormous ingenuity,
poured into a machine. The future imagined almost entirely as better hardware:
no one complains that the future was supposed to bring wiser or calmer people,
only that it was supposed to bring flying cars. And at the centre, an empty
seat.
This essay is about that empty seat: how we
came to treat the machine not as a tool but as a model of everything, including
ourselves; how, almost without noticing, we began to serve it; and what it
would take to put a human being back at the centre.
From metaphor to cult
The machine began as a metaphor. When
modern science was born in the seventeenth century, its founders needed a
picture of nature they could study, and the most impressive objects of their
time were clocks, mills and mechanical automata. Newton's laws suggested a
clockwork cosmos. Descartes declared animals to be machines, and the human body
too; only the thinking mind stood apart. Deism made God the clockmaker who
wound the universe up and stepped away. Darwinism, in Richard Dawkins' phrase,
made the watchmaker blind. At every stage the argument was only over who had
built the machine. That the universe, and life itself, were machines was never questioned. Today the metaphor lives on as
the brain-as-computer.
A metaphor is a tool for thinking. A cult
is something else: a set of beliefs held beyond question, rituals performed
without reflection, and a promise of salvation. The machine passed from the
first to the second, and the signs are everywhere.
•
Progress means better machines. Faster,
smaller, more powerful, more autonomous. Moore's law, the observation that
computing power doubles roughly every two years, became something close to a
creed, cited as though it were a law of history rather than a business
forecast.
•
Efficiency is the highest good. What can
be done faster or cheaper by a machine should be, and anything that resists,
such as craft, slowness, deliberation or care, is a problem to be solved.
•
Salvation comes through technology.
Climate, disease, poverty, loneliness, even death: each is presented as an
engineering problem awaiting the right machine.
•
The machine is the model of the human.
We speak of ourselves in its terms: we are "wired", we
"process" feelings, we "reboot" on holiday, we
"upgrade" our skills, and our brains "decide" for us.
The last sign is the most revealing. A
people who worship the machine end up wanting to resemble it.
A cult reveals itself most clearly in how
far it reaches. The machine view did not stay with planets and pendulums. One
by one, it was applied to the body, to behaviour, to society, and finally,
ironically, even to death.
The body as machine
In the seventeenth century Descartes
described animals as automata and the human body as a machine of pipes, pulleys
and springs; only the thinking soul stood outside it. In 1747 the French
physician Julien Offray de La Mettrie took the final step. His book L'Homme machine, "Man a
Machine", argued that no separate soul was needed at all: the human being
was a self-winding mechanism from top to bottom.
Modern medicine inherited much of this
picture, and for good reason. The body is treated as a system of parts. Each
part has its specialist: the cardiologist for the pump, the nephrologist for
the filters, the orthopaedist for the frame. Illness is a broken part; healing
is repair or replacement. For trauma, infection and surgery, this view has
worked wonders, and no one should wish it away.
But a machine has no place for a mind or
self to intervene. In the machine model, the patient's understanding, hopes and
fears are at best background noise, at worst a nuisance. The patient becomes
"the kidney in bed twelve". Healing is something done to a body, not something a person takes
part in.
Picture a familiar scene. The doctor
scrolls through the scan images and the blood report, jots down a diagnosis and
a prescription with quiet confidence, and barely looks up at the person
sitting across the desk. The machines
have spoken; they know better. What the patient feels, fears or has noticed
about his own body has nothing more to add.
The evidence keeps contradicting this
model. Placebo pain relief releases the body's own opioids: Levine, Gordon and
Fields showed in 1978 that it could be blocked by naloxone, an opioid-receptor
blocker. Expectation releases dopamine in people with Parkinson's disease.
Psychological stress measurably slows the healing of wounds and weakens immune
responses. Slow breathing shifts the autonomic nervous system within minutes.
In 1977 the psychiatrist George Engel argued in Science that the purely biomedical model must give way to one that
includes the psychological and social life of the patient. Half a century
later, much of medicine still pays this lip service while practising the
machine model.
The cost shows most clearly where the
machine model is weakest: chronic illness, pain, mental health and ageing. That
is where most modern suffering now lies, and where a person is least like a car
awaiting a spare part.
The Indian tradition began from the
opposite end. In the yogic model of the koshas,
the physical body is only the outermost of several sheaths; mind acts on body
through the vital layer, prana, which
corresponds strikingly to the autonomic and hormonal regulation that physiology
has since mapped. Ayurveda treats the person, not the part, beginning from each
individual's constitution. And its classical definition of health, in the Sushruta Samhita, does not stop at
balanced bodily functions: a healthy person is one whose doshas, digestive
fire, tissues and functions are in balance, and
whose self, senses and mind are clear and content. In this view the self is
not a ghost outside the machine. It is part of what health means.
Behaviour as machine
If the body is a machine, behaviour is its
output, and outputs can be engineered.
In 1913 John B. Watson launched
behaviourism by banishing the inner life from psychology altogether. Thoughts,
feelings and intentions could not be observed, so they would not be studied;
only stimulus and response would count. Watson boasted that, given a dozen
healthy infants, he could train any one of them to become any type of
specialist he chose, "doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes,
even beggar-man and thief". B. F. Skinner carried the programme to its
conclusion. His novel Walden Two
(1948) imagined a utopia run by behavioural engineering, and in Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971) he
argued that freedom and dignity were illusions standing in the way of a
properly designed society.
Psychology itself later moved beyond strict
behaviourism. But its central insight found a far larger home. Skinner showed
that animals press a lever most compulsively when rewards arrive on an
unpredictable schedule. Casino designers learned the lesson first: the
anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll's Addiction
by Design (2012) describes slot machines engineered to hold players in a
trance-like "machine zone". The smartphone then brought the slot
machine into every pocket. The infinite scroll, the notification, the
pull-to-refresh and the like counter are variable-reward schedules applied to
billions of people.
The reach goes beyond habit to emotion and
belief. In 2014, researchers working with Facebook reported in PNAS that by quietly adjusting the news
feeds of nearly 700,000 users, they could measurably shift the emotional tone
of what those users went on to post. Recommendation algorithms decide what we
see, read, buy and increasingly believe. Even the gentler language of
"nudges", designed to steer people toward better choices, rests on
the same picture: behaviour as a set of levers. Shoshana Zuboff describes the
result as an economy that trades in predictions of human behaviour, and profits
most when it can shape the behaviour it predicts. If behaviour is a machine,
whoever writes the algorithm holds the controls.
What this picture leaves out is the one who
could notice the levers being pulled. The Indian tradition did not deny
conditioning; it studied it closely. Patanjali's samskaras are the deep impressions laid down by past experience,
which drive habit and craving. The Gita observes that when the mind follows the
wandering senses, it carries away understanding "as the wind carries away
a boat on the waters". But the same traditions insist there is a witness
that can see the conditioning, and in seeing it, loosen its grip. Modern
research points the same way: in a 2011 trial led by Judson Brewer, mindfulness
training, which teaches people to observe their cravings rather than obey them,
helped smokers quit more effectively than a standard programme. Awareness is
the one thing a behavioural machine cannot model, because it is the one thing
that is not behaviour.
Society as machine
The same logic was applied to whole
societies. If individuals are machines, a society is a larger machine, and it
can be designed, organised and run like one.
The dream is old. In the early nineteenth
century Henri de Saint-Simon looked forward to a world in which the government
of persons would give way to the administration of things. His disciple Auguste
Comte proposed a "social physics", a science of society on the model
of mechanics, to be run by experts. In the twentieth century the phrase
"social engineering" came into its own. Le Corbusier declared that a
house is "a machine for living in", and in his Plan Voisin of 1925 proposed demolishing much of central Paris to
replace it with identical towers on a grid. Centrally planned economies set
production targets for whole nations as if they were factories.
The political scientist James C. Scott
studied what happened when such schemes were carried out, in Seeing Like a State (1998). Soviet
collectivised farms, the planned capital of Brasília and the forced
resettlement of rural Tanzania into planned villages all failed, in his
account, for a common reason. Planners who saw society as a machine could see
only what was simple, legible and measurable from above. They overlooked the
practical, local, living knowledge by which real communities actually work, and
in overriding it they did great harm.
Today the machine model of society wears
softer clothes: dashboards, key performance indicators, rankings and
data-driven governance. The historian Jerry Muller calls it The Tyranny of Metrics (2018). Schools
teach to the test, hospitals manage to the target, universities chase the
ranking, and what cannot be counted quietly ceases to count. Economists know
the trap as Goodhart's law: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a
good measure. Max Weber had already warned of the "iron cage" of
bureaucratic rationality, in which people become cogs in an apparatus that no
one fully controls.
A society seen as a machine invites a
particular kind of power. Its citizens become parts, their needs inputs, their
lives data, and those who design the machine are tempted to believe they may
rightly run it.
Sri Aurobindo, in The Human Cycle, saw this mechanical age of society as a stage, not
a destination. He described how civilisations move from symbolic and
conventional ages into an age of reason, which tries to organise society by
rational and mechanical principles. That age, he argued, would eventually
exhaust itself and give way to a subjective
age, in which a people seeks to understand and express its own inner life, its
soul, rather than merely engineer its outer arrangements. Society would then be
understood less as a machine to be run than as a living being to be grown.
Death as machine
The last extension of the machine view is
the most ironic, because it reaches into the one place where science was
supposed to have nothing to promise: life beyond death.
If the self is nothing but the activity of
the body's machinery, an energised corpse, then death is simply the machine
switching off. And a machine that has stopped can, in principle, be restarted.
The American physics teacher Robert Ettinger drew exactly this conclusion in The Prospect of Immortality (1964).
Organisations such as the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, founded in 1972, and
the Cryonics Institute, founded in 1976, have since preserved the bodies, or
only the heads, of hundreds of people at the temperature of liquid nitrogen, in
the hope that a future technology will repair the damage, cure whatever killed
them and switch them back on.
Others hope to skip the body altogether. If
the self is a pattern of connections in the brain, the reasoning goes, it could
be scanned and "uploaded" to a computer, to run indefinitely on new
hardware. Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity
Is Near (2005) popularised the idea of merging with machines and outliving
biology. Well-funded ventures now treat ageing itself as an engineering
problem, a set of malfunctions to be fixed one by one until death is
"solved".
Most neuroscientists are deeply sceptical
that today's preservation methods keep what would be needed to restore a
person, and no one knows whether a copy of a brain's connections would be
anyone at all. But the scientific doubts matter less here than the shape of the
hope. Having discarded religion's promise of resurrection, the cult of the
machine reinvents it: a frozen body awaiting its second coming, a soul replaced
by a backup, salvation deferred to the engineers of the future. The
anthropologist Ernest Becker argued in The
Denial of Death (1973) that human beings cannot bear the thought of their
own extinction, and build "immortality projects" to escape it. A
culture that has abolished the Self does not abolish that longing. It simply
gives it a machine to cling to.
The Indian tradition answered the same
longing in the opposite way. In the Katha Upanishad, the boy Nachiketa asks
Yama, the lord of death himself, what happens after death, and refuses every
bribe of wealth and long life until he is told. Yama's answer is knowledge of
the Self. The Bhagavad Gita states it plainly: the Self "is not born, nor
does it ever die" (2.20), and "as a person casts off worn-out
garments and puts on new ones, so the embodied Self casts off worn-out bodies
and enters others that are new" (2.22). For the Gita, the body is a
garment worn by the Self. For the cult of the machine, there is no Self, only
the garment, and so the garment must be kept on ice.
Humans remade for machines
Machines were meant to serve people. In
practice, people were steadily reshaped to serve machines.
The pattern was set early in the ind ustrial age. Frederick Winslow Taylor's Principles of Scientific Management
(1911) broke work into timed, standardised motions and treated the worker as a
component to be optimised. Charlie Chaplin caught the result in Modern Times (1936): a man on an
assembly line so possessed by its rhythm that he keeps tightening imaginary
bolts after the whistle blows, and is finally swallowed into the gears.
The factory was only the beginning. As we
have seen, the same logic later moved inward, from the worker's body to the
mind itself, until our attention became the raw material. The worker on the
assembly line served the machine with his body; we serve the platform with our
attention.
Thinkers across traditions saw what was
happening:
•
Gandhi, in Hind Swaraj (1909), called machinery the chief symbol of modern
civilisation and warned that it enslaves the very people it claims to free.
•
Martin Heidegger, in "The Question
Concerning Technology" (1954), argued that modern technology is not just a
set of tools but a way of seeing in which everything, people included, shows up
only as a resource on standby,
waiting to be used. Its deepest danger, he said, is that it hides every other
way of seeing, including our own nature.
•
Marshall McLuhan observed that every
technology extends a human faculty and, in doing so, numbs it.
•
Lewis Mumford, in The Myth of the Machine (1967), traced the "megamachine":
vast human organisations run as though people were interchangeable parts.
We even began to speak of ourselves as
inputs: "human resources", "human capital". The language
tells the story. In the cult of the machine, the human being is not the
worshipper. The human being is the offering.
Where have the humans gone?
Follow the cult to its logical end and the
human being disappears from activity after activity. Vast tracts of land are
ploughed, sown and harvested by machines with not a soul in sight. Warehouses
run themselves. Restaurants serve food by robot. Cars drive themselves, and now
fly without a driver. Armies are being built of drones and autonomous weapons.
Where have the humans gone?
Some of this is genuine liberation. For
most of history the great majority of people spent their lives in exhausting
physical labour, and few would want that back. But the question that matters
is: freed for what?
Two of the twentieth century's clearest
minds saw this question coming.
In 1930, in "Economic Possibilities
for our Grandchildren", John Maynard Keynes predicted that machines would
eventually solve the economic problem of scarcity. Humanity's real and
permanent problem, he wrote, would then be how to use its freedom: how to live
wisely, agreeably and well. And he worried that, trained for so long to strive,
we would have no idea what to do once striving was no longer necessary.
Hannah Arendt, in The Human Condition (1958), was blunter. She saw a society of
labourers on the point of being freed from labour, a society that no longer
knew any of the higher and more meaningful activities for whose sake that
freedom would be worth having.
Both put their finger on the missing piece.
The machine vision built the means to free people from toil, but it had no
picture of what a human being is for.
So the people it freed were not released into learning, contemplation, art or
the inner life. They were redirected into consumption and onto screens. The
humans have not vanished. They have moved: out of the empty field and into the
full feed, as consumers, as audiences, and as data.
Each example has its own sharper edge.
Farming was never only production; it was a relationship with land, seasons and
community, carried in festivals and rituals, and in India it still sustains a
large share of the population. Robot armies remove the human being from the
place where killing happens, and with it the conscience that has always, at
least partly, restrained war. Even hospitality, one of the most human of acts,
is being recast as a mechanical function.
Manna from heaven
The chain of logic leads to a destination
many now openly discuss. If machines do the work, people are no longer needed
for production, so they must be sustained in some other way. Hence universal
basic income: money paid to every citizen simply for existing, dropping like
manna from heaven.
As policy, UBI is genuinely debated, and
the evidence is more mixed than either side often admits. Trials in Finland,
Kenya and Stockton, California, generally found that people did not stop
working en masse; many used the money for caregiving, education or small
businesses, and wellbeing tended to improve. Critics point to cost, dependence
and the dignity that comes from contributing. Reasonable people disagree.
But beneath the policy question lies a
deeper one. UBI solves the economic
problem and leaves the human problem untouched. It answers "how will
people survive without work?" but not "what is a human life for, once
survival is guaranteed?" That is exactly Keynes's and Arendt's question,
now arriving in practice.
The same money can lead two very different
ways.
•
Bread and circuses. The Roman poet
Juvenal mocked a people who asked for nothing but food and entertainment.
Income without meaning, plus endless screens, is the modern version: a
population sustained, entertained and quietly emptied. This would be servitude
to the machine made complete, and comfortable.
•
Freedom for the inner life.
Historically, the deepest explorations of mind and spirit depended on people
freed from the need to earn: monks supported by their communities, scholars by
patrons, and in India the vanaprastha
stage of life, freed from household duty for inner pursuits. Guaranteed income
could, in principle, open such freedom to everyone rather than a few.
What decides between these paths is not the
money. It is whether a culture has any vision of what a freed human being might
become.
The image of manna is more apt than it
first appears. In the Exodus story, manna sustained a people in the wilderness,
but it was never the destination. It fed them on a journey toward something;
kept overnight, it spoiled. Provision without a journey is merely survival in
the desert. The Gita adds its own warning: it does not treat work only as a
burden to escape, but makes action itself a path, karma yoga. A society that removes the need to work also removes
one of the main fields in which human beings have been shaped. Freedom from
work would need other disciplines in its place.
For purposeful action is not a side-effect
of human life; it is close to its essence. "No one can remain even for a
moment without doing work," says the Gita (3.5), and it asks not that we
escape action but that we perform it rightly, as an expression of our own
nature, svadharma. Modern research
has rediscovered the same truth the hard way. In the early 1930s, a team led by
Marie Jahoda and Paul Lazarsfeld studied Marienthal, an Austrian village where
the only factory had closed and almost everyone had lost their jobs. The people
did not simply become poorer. They lost their sense of time: men walked more
slowly through the streets, stopped wearing watches, and could not account for
how their days had passed. Jahoda later argued that work provides far more than
income: a structure for the day, shared purpose, contact beyond the family, a
sense of status and identity, and regular activity. Viktor Frankl, who survived
the concentration camps, found that meaning comes above all through creating a
work or doing a deed. Studies of unemployment consistently find that its harm
to wellbeing goes well beyond the loss of money.
This is what a vision of universal basic
income built on the machine view ignores. It treats work as nothing but a means
of earning, and so assumes that once income is supplied, nothing has been lost.
But a person is not a machine to be kept fuelled and idling. Take away
purposeful action and supply only the means of survival, and you do not free a
human being; you leave a human being with nothing to do with their life. An
arrangement that guarantees income while declaring human effort unnecessary
does not merely overlook something fundamental in human existence. In time, it
erodes it. Like an acid working slowly through metal, a life without purposeful
action corrodes the soul from within, until little of the human being is left.
The few who hold the reins
Here is the real mischief. We are not, in
fact, building a world without humans. There are humans in it: few, and
powerful. They own the machines, the platforms and the data, and they will hold
the reins of this vast and increasingly soulless system.
In the old world, the powerful still needed
workers, soldiers and farmers, and that need gave ordinary people leverage:
they could strike, refuse or revolt. Remove the need for human labour and that
check disappears. A population living on income it does not earn, from systems
it does not control, is in a deeply dependent position. Daron Acemoglu and
Simon Johnson show in Power and Progress
(2023) that the benefits of technology have always flowed wherever power
directed them. Zuboff and Yanis Varoufakis, from different directions, describe
something like a new feudalism, with platforms as estates and users as serfs.
Is this a plot, or a natural evolution? To
the person on the street, it hardly matters; the result is the same. It matters
only for the remedy. If it were a conspiracy, exposing the conspirators would
end it. Because it is largely structural, the product of competition,
investment and the steady logic of better machines, removing any particular
group changes little; the same logic would raise others in their place. The
cult needs no high priests. It needs only that no one asks what human beings
are for.
Literature saw this coming. In Dostoevsky's
The Brothers Karamazov (1880), the
Grand Inquisitor tells Christ that people do not want freedom; they want bread,
and they will gladly hand their freedom to whoever feeds them. The few will
rule, the many will be fed and content, and they will call it happiness. Aldous
Huxley's Brave New World (1932)
showed that control need not come through fear, as in Orwell, but through
comfort, pleasure and distraction, until people come to love their servitude.
Grow together or sink together
In an earlier world, geographical and
cultural fragmentation contained catastrophe. If a Spanish army committed
atrocities in Central America, a villager in South India would never have heard
of it, and other civilisations carried on with their own ways of living and
knowing. Humanity kept many experiments running at once.
Today a single culture, with common slogans
and the same devices, sweeps the globe. Ecology has a warning about such
monocultures. The Irish potato famine of the 1840s was so devastating partly
because the country depended heavily on a single potato variety: when blight
came, there was nothing to fall back on. A monoculture is efficient until it
fails, and then it fails everywhere at once. If the worldview we now share is
toxic, no one will be spared. We will either grow together or sink together.
Worse, the alternative traditions that might correct the course are being
erased and forgotten just when we need them most.
The root: a civilisation without a Self
Why does the cult of the machine hold such
power over us? Because its roots lie deeper than economics or technology, in
the way modern science chose to see the world.
To make knowledge objective, science
removed the observer from the picture. Galileo set aside the qualities of
experience, colour, taste, warmth, as merely subjective, and kept only what
could be measured. What remains when the observer is subtracted can only look
like mechanism: parts, forces and causes, with no one inside. The machine
metaphor did not arise by accident. It is what the world looks like when the
one who looks has been left out.
And once the world is a machine, the human
being, as part of that world, must be one too. Institutions were then designed
for mechanisms: the factory, the bureaucracy, the school that processes
children in batches, the hospital as repair shop, the platform as
behaviour-shaping engine. People lived inside those institutions long enough to
see themselves as the institutions saw them. A theory of the human, built into
how we live, began to produce humans who fit it.
This is why servitude to the machine feels
so natural. A person locked out of his own inner life has no ground on which to
stand and say: I am more than this.
Carl Jung warned in The Undiscovered Self
(1957) that a person without inner foundation becomes "mass man",
easily absorbed by whatever offers an identity: the state, the movement, the
market. Without a Self, there is nothing to resist the machine, because there
is no one left who is not already part of it.
The cult of the machine is therefore not
finally a problem of technology. It is a problem of self-knowledge.
The way out
None of this is an argument against
machines. Smashing looms did not help the Luddites, and nostalgia for a
pre-industrial village, with its own hierarchies and hardships, is no answer.
The question is not whether we use machines, but who serves whom.
Machines
in service of the psyche. Technology can be built
to return attention rather than extract it; to support learning, healing and
inner growth rather than compulsion; to strengthen human judgement rather than
replace it. Aravind Eye Care in Madurai is a good emblem: it adopted assembly-line
efficiency in order to give sight to millions who could not pay. The method was
mechanical; the purpose was human. That ordering is everything.
A
different picture of the world. The Indian
tradition offers a very different vision of nature from the clockwork. The Isha
Upanishad opens: all this, whatever moves
in this moving world, is pervaded by the Lord. And it draws the consequence
at once: enjoy through renunciation; do
not covet. A world in which every tree and stone carries a divine principle
is not a store of resources awaiting extraction. When a villager worships a
tree, the realisation is being lived out in traditional form. But such
reverence cannot survive as mere inherited ritual: India's sacred rivers are
also among its most polluted. It must be renewed as conscious realisation, and
built into institutions.
Inner
sovereignty. Above all, the answer lies where Sri
Aurobindo placed it. As a leader of the freedom movement, he was among the
first to demand complete swaraj for
India; but in his later writings he gave the word its deepest meaning. Drawing
on the Taittiriya Upanishad's promise that the seeker "attains
self-rule", svarajya, he
described true freedom as the mastery of one's own nature from within, by the
inner being, before any mastery of outer circumstance. In The Human Cycle and The Ideal
of Human Unity he warned that the modern State and the mechanised
collective tend to absorb the individual into an efficient but soulless mass,
and that no outer arrangement, however rational, can secure freedom for people
who have not found themselves. A person who knows himself from within cannot be
fully governed from outside, through needs, distractions and fears. A person
who borrows his identity from systems belongs to those systems. The defence
against the few who hold the reins is not only regulation and redistribution,
important as these are. It is people who
are sovereign within.
One
humanity, many ways. Sri Aurobindo foresaw, in The Ideal of Human Unity, that humanity
was being driven toward unity whether it liked it or not. The only question, he
wrote, was whether that unity would be mechanical, imposed by economics,
technology and power, or real, grown from within through a change of
consciousness that preserves the diversity of peoples. The connected world that
now spreads the cult of the machine could, just as quickly, spread its cure.
If this is so, the machine vision is not
only a theory about the world. It is also a portrait of a certain kind of mind.
A person who lives only on the surface of the mind, unaware of its deeper
reaches, will find the world and nature as he finds himself: mechanical,
unconscious, a contraption assembled by a blind watchmaker. But those who have
gone deeper, through patient and systematic inner exploration, have again and
again reported a different world: living, conscious, charged with presence.
Neither report can be settled by argument alone. But it means that the yoke of
the machine will not be lifted by better policies or cleverer technology. It
will be lifted only when self-aware, deeply conscious individuals are no longer
rare exceptions but the heart of a culture. The world will cease to look like a
machine when we cease to live like one.
The new Roadster flew with an empty seat.
The task before us is not to build a better car. It is to remember who was
meant to be sitting in it.
