Automation, a curse or a blessing?

Technical automation covers a broad field, ranging from production automation to product automation. ‘Embedded software’, intelligence that is added to machines such as washing machines, televisions, cameras, video cameras and microwave ovens, seems to make human life more comfortable, although in my opinion the user friendliness of many of those machines is of a very low level. Their operation is hardly self-evident and the instructions that accompany the machines seem to have been written by technicians, people who love machines more than they love people.

Another interesting phenomenon in technical automation are robots. What attracts us so much in robots24)? Is it owning ones own little slave, the ‘personal robot’ (our PR)? A thinking piece of machinery that at least does what it is told, as opposed to all those self-willed fellow creatures, without suffering any psychological problems, mental blockades or own opinions. Or does it follow naturally from the above-mentioned phenomenon of ‘embedded software’? Are we busy training the physical world just like we used to attempt to train the animal world? The great danger lurking behind that training process is that we have to keep sufficient distance, lest we become so obsessed by training, that the quality of our thinking and the so-called intelligence of the machine in question eventually end up on the same level. And then the time will arrive when a robot will create the first human being. Who will be the slave then?

In the preface to his masterly biography of Aurobindo[35], Satprem states that it might seem that the only hope for man lies in an ever greater proliferation of his machines. Machines that will be able to see better than man, hear better than man, count better than man and cure better than man, and that will perhaps eventually live better than man.