cheeful robot, ghost in the machine, or imprisoned soul?
We know that men can be turned into robots—by chemical means, by physical coercion, as in concentration camps, and so on, but we are now confronting a situation more serious than that—a situation in which there are developed human beings who are cheerfully and willingly turning themselves into robots.
— C. Wright Mills
For anyone who spends inordinate amounts of time in front of a computer, “HI, A Real Human Interface,” a video by Multi-Touch Barcelona, will resonate. The short film imagines the personal computer as, quite literally, a person, the proverbial little man inside the machine.
The video is at once playful and distopian, cute and dark, fluffy and profound. Transforming complex computer codes into summer-camp art projects of cardboard, construction paper, and glue, HI seems warm and fuzzy at first. But the more you watch the man inside the machine, the more uneasy you grow with his labors, his containment, his monotony. He seems more and more a slave trapped in a cubicle, at the whim of buttons and buzzers, not running the machine but run by it.
His last glances seem restless, as if he longs to bust out of his cell.
The video is not particularly didactic, but it does raise the question: if machines are increasingly becoming like people, and people, if Mills was right, are more and more like machines, then where do they meet? What will the human-machine interface be like?
If Touch-Barcelona are onto something, this future will be simultaneously—and ambiguously—friendly and ominous.
There is a book, Devices of the Soul:
Battling for Our Selves in an Age of Machines, that you may find interesting. It explores a similar mental space.
Thanks Blake. Will check it out. And hope all’s well.