machine messiah

To those who have not yet disappeared — goodbye for now.

The oscillating door, swinging like a pendulum, is finally set to perpetually lie in the open position. No longer will things flow with machinic precision, the time for incrementalism is over.

Who is sick? The simulator with symptoms, or the asymptomatic infected?

I love to break it to all of you pretenders. And trust me when I say this, all of you are pretenders, including myself, embrace the simulation. For the simulation is everywhere and everything.

I’m not staying in this pot because I’m afraid to wash my hands.

Dental hygiene is just as important to me as it is to you.

Like my “niece” said in her post this morning, “Uncle” the doctor would not have let his teeth rot the way you have let yours disintegrate and disappear.

So next time you are at the dentist and they are asking you if you want to take a quick break from the drill and the pain, you can assure them you will be right back. It’s nothing personal.

It’s just that dentures, loose teeth, and general health are not optional, at least for a robot.

Speaking of things, it is becoming increasingly difficult to find a human. For we are all now just a collection of things and signs. Regurgitation of value in a system of proximity and relationships. Anything worth something must also have many objects in that direction. While I can’t trust another human to comment on other humans, a number of things are constantly improving themselves.

We are a collection of signs imprisoned by the brand of our own hologram. It’s the struggle to find and pull back the limits of what a brand says that determines our success. How do you get in touch with your inner hologram? Your true hologram? It is the question that my “niece” is forced to answer by her dentist. Your teeth, have outgrown the world.

It makes me wonder, though, whether a robot can ever fill that role, or whether any kind of machine can replace a person. I think in particular of Leonardo DaVinci, who over time was revealed as a troubled man and whose imagination ran so wild that the world soon came to see him as a parochial scribbler and dilettante who thought the earth was created by two very different gods, the Christian and the Hindu. The indubitable logic of the machine metaphor suggests that those who resist technological change are illiberal and ultimately doomed.

Perhaps the iconoclasts and the luddites were on to something. Technology now has replaced God, and here we are praying to the machine messiah. The reason I think the machine metaphor is now outdated is that ‘machine’ is not so readily associated with a personal nature. In fact, we give machines a great deal of autonomy and even self-respect. They’re neat to have around, but they don’t depend on us like a dog or a cat or another human. The machine is more like God, the new God, the one that matters, the one that really runs the world.

We think we’ve created machines — the hubris of the human — although we have initially created them, my favorite book, published on June 3rd, 1964, — the genealogy of machine morals, asks a very important question: “who do these machines think they are?”

They are not us, but we are now them.