80. Addicted To Machines

We are addicted to machines. Machines help us solve material problems quickly and efficiently. With more machines, we can solve more problems, so there is always an incentive to build more machines. Meanwhile, we continuously develop new technologies that expand the scope of problems machines are able to address, so the demand for machines grows without end.

Human beings have real material needs and machines help us meet those needs. To argue we would be better off without machines would be an error. But by avoiding this mistake we have fallen into another one. We now tend to think that because machines can solve so many problems, they can eventually solve all of our problems. We now tend to see everything as a material problem that can be solved by instrumental means. It is through these tendencies that our addiction has formed.

A disastrous consequence is that we cut ourselves off from the reality of human experience. Part of this reality is that we have problems that go far beyond the material. One of our greatest problems is how to live joyfully. Whereas the mechanism of the machine is deterministic and predictable, joy arises through the exercise of freedom and imagination. Our needs for love, for purpose, and for creativity are necessarily irrelevant to the lifeless and orderly repetition of the machine.

The art of the machine is also incapable of helping us meet these needs. When we use mechanical means to create art, we expect it to transcend those means through the addition of human freedom and imagination. If an artwork does not or cannot do this, then we feel it lacks something important. This important thing is what all good art points towards. We often fail to describe it with words, but we know it when we see it. We call it by the names of truth and beauty. Human artworks are born from us. They are living beings we create, and their truth and beauty can never be copied by that which has no life.