#machine labor

We added the artisans first. Then came the drudges working the assembly lines. The farmers, or their laborers, at least, were also mixed in. No one really wants to know how the sausage is made. The computers were integrated. Their astronaut wards processed beside them.

And now we've found a way To dig up the artists, writers, musicians, and dancers, the builders and thinkers And feed them to the corpse machine

We asked ChatGPT to write a poem called "Dead Labor" And called it a "corpse machine." It returned an awful poem: Too declarative. No pulse. Generic and clichéd. No tension. Flatly moralistic. Perhaps, if we feed it enough corpses, it will get better.

I have spoken of the actuality and the imminence of this new possibility.  What can we expect of its economic and social consequences? In the first place, we can expect an abrupt and final cessation of the demand for the type of factory labor performing purely repetitive tasks.  In the long run, the deadly uninteresting nature of the repetitive task may make this a good thing and the source of leisure necessary for a man’s full cultural development.  It may also produce cultural results as trivial and wasteful as the greater part of those so far obtained from the radio and the movies.

Be that as it may, the intermediate period of the introduction of the new means, especially if it comes in the fulminating manner to be expected from a new war, will lead to an immediate transitional period of disastrous confusion.  We have a good deal of experience as to how the industrialists regard a new industrial potential.  Their whole propaganda is to the effect that it must not be considered as the business of the government but must be left open to whatever entrepreneurs wish to invest money in it.  We also know that they have very few inhibitions when it comes to taking all the profit out of an industry that there is to be taken, and then letting the public pick up the pieces.  This is the history of the lumber and mining industries, and is part of what we have called in another chapter the traditional American philosophy of progress.

Under these circumstances, industry will be flooded with the new tools to the extent that they appear to yield immediate profits, irrespective of what long-time damage they can do.  We shall see a process parallel to the way in which the use of atomic energy for bombs has been allowed to compromise the very necessary potentialities of the long-time use of atomic power to replace our oil and coal supplies, which are within centuries, if not decades, of utter exhaustion.  Note well that atomic bombs do not compete with power companies.

Let us remember that the automatic machine, whatever we think of any feelings it may have or may not have, is the precise economic equivalent of slave labor.  Any labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic conditions of slave labor.  It is perfectly clear that this will produce an unemployment situation, in comparison with which the present recession and even the depression of the thirties will seem a pleasant joke.  This depression will ruin many industries – possibly even the industries which have taken advantage of the new potentialities.  However, there is nothing in the industrial tradition which forbids an industrialist to make a sure and quick profit, and to get out before the crash touches him personally.

Thus the beginning of Psalm 23:2 was achieved through greed (It just feels more official quoting an ancient source, not that I adhere to it or anything)