The Myth of the Machine

All right? This quote comes from his book that was published in two volumes between 1967 and 1970, so that's been a while ago.

This quote comes from his book called The Myth of the Machine.

You guys think about this.

The last...

He's already seeing it in the '60s, late '60s, early '70s.

He's writing about it.

He writes a two-volume book, The Myth of the Machine, and he's saying that the, this, this machine is, uh, the thing that is, uh, causing this massive shift, a radical transformation in the entire human environment.

And if it doesn't stop, if we don't say at some point, "Okay, we, we need to stop making progress for the sake of progress," we don't know...

One of the authors I've used quite a lot in the book is...

It's Lewis Mumford, because Lewis Mumford, the great philosopher and critic of technology, wrote an enormous pair of books about the machine called The Myth of the Machine in the 1960s.

And he talks about the machine as being, and I find this quite convincing, a tendency within humanity.

So he traces the machine back to, for example, ancient Egypt, which he identifies as the first machine culture.

Burdick died in 1965, but his concerns about an automated state were bubbling up all over the place.

In 1966, in The Myth of the Machine, the American critic Lewis Mumford lamented the rise of cybernetic intelligence, warning that under its automatic operation, man will become a passive, purposeless, machine-conditioned animal whose proper functions, as technicians now interpret man's role, will either be fed into the machine or strictly limited and controlled for the benefit of depersonalized collective organizations.

Mumford described technological determinism, the idea that machines determine the course of history and represent a march of progress as a radical misinterpretation of the whole course of human development.

This mistaken belief, he wrote in The New Yorker the next year, had to be abandoned if we are to get an adequate grip on our mechanized culture before we lose both our consciousness of human purpose and our confidence in being able to control our own creations.