Creatures and Machines

Over the Christmas break a single quote has rung in my ears. It was written by Wendell Berry, the great American poet-farmer and environmentalist, in an essay called Life is a Miracle. In that essay Berry can be found — as he so often could — railing against the all-consuming nature of techno-modernity. Its imperatives, he says, have seeped into every aspect of our lives, leaving us culturally and spiritually bereft. But Berry is aware that not everyone shares his perspective. Some people, he says, are so bound up in The Machine that they take its imperatives — speed, efficiency, and relentless expansion into new frontiers — for their own.

In some deep sense, says Berry, those people want to become machines.

'It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.'Berry wrote those words in 2000. Almost a quarter of century later, it should be clear to everyone that he was on to something.

Over the last year, I’ve become convinced that we’re starting on a period of epoch-making change. Via machine intelligence we’re amid an acute acceleration of the techno-social process that begun with Newcomen’s steam engine and the first Industrial Revolution.

That process has always chewed up the old and spat out the new. Across the coming years, though, it will do so with increasing and eventually violent speed. The challenge, as far as many will be concerned, will be to conserve recognisably human modes of living and being in the midst of this destabilising change. But not everyone will share that view. Some will want to embrace every part of this transformation, and to live on its new frontiers.

Some will want to be creatures, and some machines.