Crusader Rabbit reference sheet for Myth of the Machine :]
#motmfanart #MythOfTheMachine #motmcrusaderrabbit #fanart #digitalArt #artistsonmastodon

.> As an instrument for organizing large quantities of information, or performing extremely complex symbolic operations beyond human capabilities within a normal lifespan, the computer is an invaluable adjunct to the brain, though not a substitute for it. Since the computer is limited to handling only so much experience as can be abstracted in symbolic or numerical form, it is incapable of dealing directly, as organisms must, with the steady influx of concrete, unprogrammable experience. With respect to such experience, the computer is necessarily always out of date. The computer's lack of other human dimensions is of course no handicap to it as a labor-saving device, whether in astronomy or bookkeeping: but such creativity as the computer may simulate is always in the first place a contribution of the minds that formulate the program..> The utter absence of innate subjective potentialities in the computer makes the contemporary art exhibition shown here (top), in all its pervasive blankness and artful nullity, and ideal representation of its missing dimensions. Those who are so fascinated by the computer’s lifelike feats---it plays chess! it writes ‘poetry’!---that they would turn it[AISalami] into the voice of omniscience, betray how little understanding they have of either themselves, their mechanical-electronic agents, or the potentialities of life. A city of even three hundred thousand people, ten per cent of whom have access to regional or national libraries with as few as a million volumes, would actually have a total capacity for storing, transforming, integrating, and not least applying both symbolic information and concrete experience that no computer will ever rival. If we had all been exposed to #LewisMumford in #MythOfTheMachine #PentagonOfPower on #Computerdom since 1970 we would have been iummunized against #AIHype for #AISalami. Maybe we can blame it on Jimmy Carter and the Trilateral Commission for debasing school education in the 70's.

> ... [If] we now overvalue the machine, is it not because the mechanistic doctrine which has made us competent to design machines and control them also promises to give the scientist an equal hold over the living organisms he unfeelingly identifies with machines? In a world of machines, or of creatures that can be reduced to machines, technocrats would indeed be gods.
#LewisMumford in #MythOfTheMachine: #PentagonOfPower on #AI #ChatBot #ChatGPT #OverClaims and hype, but in 1970: same pattern
> ... [If after] four centuries.. we now overvalue the machine, is it not because the mechanistic doctrine which has made us competent to design machines and control them also promises to give the scientist an equal hold over the living organisms he unfeelingly identifies with machines? In a world of machines, or of creatures that can be reduced to machines, #technocrats would.. be gods. --- #LewisMumford, #MythOfTheMachine: #PentagonOfPower. p 72
1970 #Mumford on #Tech #RichGuy #AIHype
Since finding the _Towards Liberal Education_ (1948-1962) collection I've been trying to read some of the writers of the most memorable essays. #LewisMumford is mentioned by Neil Postman and Nicolas Carr so I binged his work, some of the smaller books. I haven't really read the big #MythOfTheMachine books but reading that captions of the photos has been rewarding. It feels like he's talking about AI and Satellites: recent #TechExhibitionism. Compare #CharlesBlondin with #vonWeizsacker

Winona LaDuke's tone, chiding a little boy, in her open letter to Shopping-Car-Space-Guy (SNS-buyer) seems appropriate. An illustration and it's description, an astronaut as capsule-man, came to mind from Lewis Mumford's #MythOfTheMachine #PentagonOfPower(1971)

#Mumford #LewisMumford #MythOfTheMachine #PentagonOfPower #SpaceGuy #Astrounauts #ElonMusk

Maybe intelligence requires some sort of personality, something computers will only be able to mimic.. #LewisMumford writes more about computers in the book but the image of #blankness here is interesting. Funny we're supposed to take chess-playing as a measure of intelligence. Why not something chickens can do? Like laying and hatching eggs, caring for a helpless little baby? #MythOfTheMachine
#LewisMumford In #MythOfTheMachine applying the ideas he introduced from #Comte, of a 170 years ago, to the #Pentagon . Even #Specialists need a more Holistic or #SynopticView . The #Shelly #PercyShelley quote is from #QueenMab.
'Power, like a desolating pestilence,
Pollutes whate'er it touches; and obedience,
Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth,
Makes slaves of men, and of the human frame
A mechanized automaton. '
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Percy_Bysshe_Shelley#Queen_Mab_(1813)
Percy Bysshe Shelley - Wikiquote

> "The beleaguered– even 'obsolete'–individual would be entirely de-skilled, reduced to a passive, inert, 'trivial accessory to the machine.' Technical surveillance and limitless data-collection—'an all-seeing eye' (Panopticon)—would monitor every 'individual... the totalitarian technocracy, centralizing... ignoring the real needs... values of human life, might produce a world 'fit only for machines to live in'"
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_the_Machine#cite_note-CounterPunch-2014-03-21-11
#LewisMumford in #MythOfTheMachine , #attentioneconomy ?
The Myth of the Machine - Wikipedia