In an interview for Playboy in 1969, media scientist Marshall McLuhan, known for, among other things, the expression that the medium is the message, claimed that computers will be able to orchestrate the lives of many people in the near future. Machines, the Canadian thinker said, will be able to take over the main media channels, write messages themselves, and distribute them to the population. Meanwhile, we know that McLuhan’s prediction was not complete nonsense—think of Microsoft’s chatbot TAY (the acronym stands for Thinking About You) that sent sexist and racist messages into the world via Twitter in March 2006. At the time, however, interviewer Eric Norden was somewhat impressed by what McLuhan was claiming. He asked if we as humanity will still have control over technology. Or, Norden queried, will technology control humanity? McLuhan replied as follows: “I see no possibility of a worldwide Luddite rebellion that will smash all machinery to bits, so we might as well sit back and see what is happening and what will happen to us in a cybernetic world. Resenting a new technology will not halt its progress.” (Norden, 1969).

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Technological Determinism

  • Lode Lauwaert,
  • Bartek Chomanski

摘要

In an interview for Playboy in 1969, media scientist Marshall McLuhan, known for, among other things, the expression that the medium is the message, claimed that computers will be able to orchestrate the lives of many people in the near future. Machines, the Canadian thinker said, will be able to take over the main media channels, write messages themselves, and distribute them to the population. Meanwhile, we know that McLuhan’s prediction was not complete nonsense—think of Microsoft’s chatbot TAY (the acronym stands for Thinking About You) that sent sexist and racist messages into the world via Twitter in March 2006. At the time, however, interviewer Eric Norden was somewhat impressed by what McLuhan was claiming. He asked if we as humanity will still have control over technology. Or, Norden queried, will technology control humanity? McLuhan replied as follows: “I see no possibility of a worldwide Luddite rebellion that will smash all machinery to bits, so we might as well sit back and see what is happening and what will happen to us in a cybernetic world. Resenting a new technology will not halt its progress.” (Norden, 1969).