Men and machines

What Hacker News says

1. hgaJun 2014
   Decades. The first pervasive surveillance state story I can remember reading, of the sort that's nominally free, we're not talking Nineteen Eighty Four, was "The Hunting Lodge", a 1954 short story by Randall Garrett (collected in the great 1968 Men and Machines, edited by Robert Silverberg).
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2. dalyJan 2023
   This discussion is not new. Quoting from Byte Magazine (Feb 1976 p77):

   The first man to use a machine was the first of our primitive ancestors who picked up a rock to hurl at some passing animal or to crack open some edible nut. In the million-plus years since then, our machines have grown much more complex, but even in our modern era of computers, ... their basic purpose remains the same: to serve man.

   Whether our machines truly serve us is a question much debated by science-fiction writers and other professional speculative philosophers. Does some essential quality go out of human life when it becomes too easy? Have our automobiles, telephones, typewriters and elevators sapped our vigor? Are we speeding into flabby decay because we have made things too easy for ourselves?

   And as our machines grow more able, when do they cross the boundary that separates the living from the unliving? Is it possible that we are building machines that will make humanity obsolete? Perhaps the day is coming when we ourselves will be rendered unnecessary, and our sleek successors, creatures of metal and plastic, will inherit the earth.

   ... Many a bitter attack on the encroachments of the machine age has been produced by a writer using an electric typewriter in an air-conditioned room, innocently unaware of the inner contradictions involved. We need our machines, but we fear them...

   -- Robert Silverberg, Introduction to Men and Machines.

   In contrast I'd comment that this is a case of linear thinking. You don't own a machine, the machine owns you. Ask any home owner how wonderful the plumbing works... until it doesn't. Or ask a car owner, etc. We are already owned by machines. Is your phone beeping? Are you ignoring it? If it fails do you learn to live without a phone? Machines inherited the earth years ago. We just don't realize it.

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3. hgaAug 2013
   The Monica Lewinsky based impeachment that wasn't followed by a real trial in the Senate was about perjury, not catching someone in bed (if the latter it was the worst kept secret in US history, do a search on bimbo eruptions). We (used to) expect better from our Presidents.

   "licensable" firearms? I don't know what benighted jurisdiction you live in, but in mine we don't need no stinking licenses to buy or own them. We do need one to carry concealed (only a handful of states don't), but that's in part a different thing, but it still makes certain acts of terror more difficult and expensive. Please read the discussion I linked to which touches on that, and don't doubt for a second that the more forward thinking/paranoid or whatever members of the RKBA community aren't working through how to operate in an era of pervasive surveillance.

   As SF authors and readers have for decades and decades, I'm checking now and the first story I read on this theme was "The Hunting Lodge" by Randall Garret, first published in 1954 in Astounding, I read it in the early '70s in a superb 1968 Robert Silverberg collection Men and Machines.

   And pay attention to the maxim "Professionals discuss logistics".

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4. monsterixAug 2013
   > "licensable" firearms

   By that I meant arms that are available for sale on the market. Sorry, it didn't come off as accurately as I intended. Will definitely read up Men and Machines, next.

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5. tokenadultJul 2011
   The submitted article reminds me of a science fiction story I read as a child, "Hunting Lodge" by Randall Garrett, in the anthology Men and Machines edited by Robert Silverberg.

   http://books.google.com/books?id=3PSTqQrrzjEC&pg=PA141&#...

   The premise of the story is that an effective life extension treatment has been found, and it is so expensive that only the politically powerful can have access to it. The protagonist (and first-person narrator) of the story is an assassin whose job is to murder the immortal oligarchs who rule a future United States--it is pretty apparent that the target of his assassination plot is J. Edgar Hoover in a far-off future. That has always caused me to pause and think about whether I would really like society to discover an effective longevity treatment. Are you sure that people who are as high on the social power and influence scale as HN readers will have access to the treatment?

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