Man-Machine Relationship

Henry David Thoreau spent over two years in a cabin he had built in the woodlands of Massachusetts owned by his friend and contemporary Ralph Waldo Emerson. He used this alone time to write his most known work – Walden, a transcendentalist piece discussing how to live simply in nature. And then one day, Thoreau heard a steam locomotive and it disrupted his meditation and piece. The machine in the garden appeared. Over a century later, Leo Marx built on this remark in his work The Machine in the Garden, a literary criticism of industrialization of America, where he discussed the disturbance in the pastoral scenery by technological advancements.

Nobody likes to be disturbed, yet today we have all these devices around us that are built precisely for that purpose – to distract us from whatever we are doing and engage us in something else. We have somehow learnt to accept that this is the reality of the modern technology and we are trying to mute the disturbances as much as we can, while at the same time we’re welcoming what these technologies are bringing us and how they’re shaping or even bettering our lives.

A change can be difficult, especially if it is abrupt and we have little time to unlearn the old ways and turn towards understanding, practicing, and applying the novelties, dive into the new challenges (and benefits) that they are bringing. New can be scary because we don’t know it well enough and we are worried what it might do to us, especially when new technologies and machines are being introduced on a large scale. This fear has fed the minds of many writers, artists, and film directors where we have seen the catastrophic consequences of human advancement in technology, such as The Matrix, The Terminator or The Minority Report to name a few. All these movies paint a dark picture what might happen if we either abuse the technology or it turns on us. The history of human relationship with machines is very contradictory in nature – we celebrate solutions that are making humankind go father – to space, deep in the Earth’s core, magnifying even the smallest particles on this planet that show us our significance (or insignificance) in the greater scheme of things, and then we pull back and scrutinise it. People built the machines and made technological advancements, it is the people who use them, so in essence it would mean that people are actually afraid of themselves and what they might do with it if it’s not handled properly. But what is a proper way of using the technology? Each device will come with a user’s manual how to optimise its features, yet we find a way to abuse them and turn the technology against each other, blaming the device itself instead of human tendency to use the technology to fit their own narratives.

We will continue seeing new technologies and more machines in our gardens. Humans are driven by new discoveries that demonstrate the application of our innate abilities to think, compute, conclude, and produce. What we need to understand is that as long as the introduction of new solutions is indeed put in place to advance this race and doesn’t detriment or put anyone in harm’s way, we can build good relationships with things that are pretty much dead and useless until brought to life by humans.