Svesne mašine, veštačka inteligencija, Kurcvajl, Serl, Drajfus...

The function of the machine is to save work. In a fully mechanized 
world all the dull drudgery will be done by machinery, leaving us free for 
more interesting pursuits. So expressed, this sounds splendid. It makes one 
sick to see half a dozen men sweating their guts out to dig a trench for a 
water-pipe, when some easily devised machine would scoop the earth out in a 
couple of minutes. Why not let the machine do the work and the men go and 
do something else. But presently the question arises, what else are they to 
do? Supposedly they are set free from 'work' in order that they may do 
something which is not 'work'. But what is work and what is not work? Is it 
work to dig, to carpenter, to plant trees, to fell trees, to ride, to fish, 
to hunt, to feed chickens, to play the piano, to take photographs, to build 
a house, to cook, to sew, to trim hats, to mend motor bicycles? All of 
these things are work to somebody, and all of them are play to somebody. 
There are in fact very few activities which cannot be classed either as 
work or play according as you choose to regard them. The labourer set free 
from digging may want to spend his leisure, or part of it, in playing the 
piano, while the professional pianist may be only too glad to get out and 
dig at the potato patch. Hence the antithesis between work, as something 
intolerably tedious, and not-work, as something desirable, is false. The 
truth is that when a human being is riot eating, drinking, sleeping, making 
love, talking, playing games, or merely lounging about--and these things 
will not fill up a lifetime--he needs work and usually looks for it, 
though he may not call it work. Above the level of a third- or fourth-grade 
moron, life has got to be lived largely in terms of effort. For man is not, 
as the vulgarer hedonists seem to suppose, a kind of walking stomach; he 
has also got a hand, an eye, and a brain. Cease to use your hands, and you 
have lopped off a huge chunk of your conscious-ness. And now consider again 
those half-dozen men who were digging the trench for the water-pipe. A 
machine has set them free from digging, and they are going to amuse 
themselves with something else--carpentering, for instance. But whatever 
they want to do, they will find that another machine has set them free from 
that. For in a fully mechanized world there would be no more need to 
carpenter, to cook, to mend motor bicycles, etc., than there would be to 
dig. There is scarcely anything, from catching a whale to carving a cherry 
stone, that could not conceivably be done by machinery. The machine would 
even encroach upon the activities we now class as 'art'; it is doing so 
already, via the camera and the radio. Mechanize the world as fully as it 
might be mechanized, and whichever way you turn there will be some machine 
cutting you off from the chance of working--that is, of living. 

At a first glance this might not seem to matter. Why should you not 
get on with your 'creative work' and disregard the machines that would do 
it for you? But it is not so simple as it sounds. Here am I, working eight 
hours a day in an insurance office; in my spare time I want to do something 
'creative', so I choose to do a bit of carpentering--to make myself a 
table, for instance. Notice that from the very start there is a touch of 
artificiality about the whole business, for the factories can turn me out a 
far better table than I can make for myself. But even when I get to work on 
my table, it is not possible for me to feel towards it as the cabinet-maker 
of a hundred years ago felt towards his table, still less as Robinson 
Crusoe felt towards his. For before I start, most of the work has already 
been done for me by machinery. The tools I use demand the minimum of skill. 
I can get, for instance, planes which will cut out any moulding; the 
cabinet-maker of a hundred years ago would have had to do the work with 
chisel and gouge, which demanded real skill of eye and hand. The boards I 
buy are ready planed and the legs are ready turned by the lathe. I can even 
go to the wood-shop and buy all the parts of the table ready-made and only 
needing to be fitted together; my work being reduced to driving in a few 
pegs and using a piece of sandpaper. And if this is so at present, in the 
mechanized future it will be enormously more so. With the tools and 
materials available then, there will be no possibility of mistake, hence no 
room for skill. Making a table will be easier and duller than peeling a 
potato. In such circumstances it is nonsense to talk of 'creative work'. In 
any case the arts of the hand (which have got to be transmitted by 
apprenticeship) would long since have disappeared. Some of them have 
disappeared already, under the competition of the machine. Look round any 
country churchyard and see whether you can find a decently-cut tombstone 
later than 1820. The art, or rather the craft, of stonework has died out so 
completely that it would take centuries to revive it. 

But it may be said, why not retain the machine and retain 'creative 
work'? Why not cultivate anachronisms as a spare-time hobby? Many people 
have played with this idea; it seems to solve with such beautiful ease the 
problems set by the machine. The citizen of Utopia, we are told, coming 
home from his daily two hours of turning a handle in the tomato-canning 
factory, will deliberately revert to a more primitive way of life and 
solace his creative instincts with a bit of fretwork, pottery-glazing, or 
handloom-weaving. And why is this picture an absurdity--as it is, of 
course? Because of a principle that is not always recognized, though always 
acted upon: that so long as the machine is there, one is under an 
obligation to use it. No one draws water from the well when he can turn on 
the tap. One sees a good illustration of this in the matter of travel. 
Everyone who has travelled by primitive methods in an undeveloped country 
knows that the difference between that kind of travel and modern travel in 
trains, cars, etc., is the difference between life and death. The nomad who 
walks or rides, with his baggage stowed on a camel or an ox-cart, may 
suffer every kind of discomfort, but at least he is living while he is 
travelling; whereas for the passenger in an express train or a luxury liner 
his journey is an interregnum, a kind of temporary death. And yet so long 
as the railways exist, one has got to travel by train--or by car or 
aeroplane. Here am I, forty miles from London. When I want to go up to 
London why do I not pack my luggage on to a mule and set out on foot, 
making a two days of it? Because, with the Green Line buses whizzing past 
me every ten minutes, such a journey would be intolerably irksome. In order 
that one may enjoy primitive methods of travel, it is necessary that no 
other method should be available. No human being ever wants to do anything 
in a more cumbrous way than is necessary. Hence the absurdity of that 
picture of Utopians saving their souls with fretwork. In a world where 
every-thing could be done by machinery, everything would be done by 
machinery. Deliberately to revert to primitive methods to use archaic took, 
to put silly little difficulties in your own way, would be a piece of 
dilettantism, of pretty-pretty arty and craftiness. It would be like 
solemnly sitting down to eat your dinner with stone implements. Revert to 
handwork in a machine age, and you are back in Ye Olde Tea Shoppe or the 
Tudor villa with the sham beams tacked to the wall. 

The tendency of mechanical progress, then, is to frustrate the human 
need for effort and creation. It makes unnecessary and even impossible the 
activities of the eye and the hand. The apostle of 'progress' will 
sometimes declare that this does not matter, but you can usually drive him 
into a comer by pointing out the horrible lengths to which the process can 
be carried. Why, for instance, use your hands at all--why use them even 
for blowing your nose or sharpening a pencil? Surely you could fix some 
kind of steel and rubber contraption to your shoulders and let your arms 
wither into stumps of skin and bone? And so with every organ and every 
faculty. There is really no reason why a human being should do more than 
eat, drink, sleep, breathe, and procreate; everything else could be done 
for him by machinery. Therefore the logical end of mechanical progress is 
to reduce the human being to something resembling a brain in a bottle. That 
is the goal towards which we are already moving, though, of course, we have 
no intention of getting there; just as a man who drinks a bottle of whisky 
a day does not actually intend to get cirrhosis of the liver. The implied 
objective of 'progress' is--not exactly, perhaps, the brain in the 
bottle, but at any rate some frightful subhuman depth of softness and 
helplessness. And the unfortunate thing is that at present the word 
'progress' and the word 'Socialism' are linked in-separably in almost 
everyone's mind. The kind of person who hates machinery also takes it for 
granted to hate Socialism; the Socialist is always in favour of 
mechanization, rationalization, modernization--or at least thinks that he 
ought to be in favour of them. Quite recently, for instance, a prominent 
I.L.P.'er confessed to me with a sort of wistful shame--as though it were 
something faintly improper--that he was 'fond of horses'. Horses, you 
see, belong to the vanished agricultural past, and all sentiment for the 
past carries with it a vague smell of heresy. I do not believe that this 
need necessarily be so, but undoubtedly it is so. And in itself it is quite 
enough to explain the alienation of decent minds from Socialism.