8/23/20

This was a GPT-3 generation using Understanding Media text. Bold = copied from the book, eveything after = generated

With the arrival of electric technology, man extended, or set outside himself, a live model of the central nervous system itself. To the degree that this is so, it is a development that suggests a desperate and suicidal autoamputation, as if the central nervous system could no longer depend on the physical organs to be protective buffers against the slings and arrows of outrageous mechanism. I t could well be that the successive mechanizations of the various physical organs since the invention of printing have made too violent and superstimulated a social experience for the central nervous system to endure.

Physiologically, man in the normal use of technology (or his variously extended body) is perpetually modified by it and in turn finds ever new ways of modifying his technology. Man be- comes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms. The machine world reciprocates man’s love by expediting his wishes and desires, namely, in providing him with wealth. One of the merits of motivation research has been the revelation of man’s sex relation to the motorcar.

Generative technologies, such as the machine, the printing press, and the computer, tend to become self-reproductive and self-augmenting. They do not remain dependent on man for their continued existence. They are, in fact, parasitic on man. They have an independent existence and can be expected to develop their own specific life cycles, which may not coincide with the life cycle of man. It is, indeed, possible that they will survive man and that the human race will in the end become extinct because of the proliferation of machines which it itself created.

The machine, as the symbol of the second extension of man, is the most obvious expression of the suicidal nature of the sexual metaphor. It is the most effective means of making the species self-destructive and self-defeating. The machine is the most efficient instrument of the suicide of the species. It is the most effective means of converting the earth into a gigantic dust heap, and the human race into a mass of protoplasmic slime.