concerns about an automated state were bubbling up all over the place. In 1966, in The Myth of the Machine, the American critic Lewis Mumford lamented the rise of “cybernetic intelligence”, warning that under its “automatic operation … man will become a passive, purposeless, machine-conditioned animal whose proper functions, as technicians now interpret man’s role, will either be fed into the machine or strictly limited and controlled for the benefit of depersonalised, collective organisations”.
Mumford described technological determinism – the idea that machines determine the course of history and represent a march of progress – as “a radical misinterpretation of the whole course of human development”. This mistaken belief, he wrote in The New Yorker the next year, had to be abandoned “if we are to get an adequate grip on our mechanised culture before we lose both our consciousness of human purpose and our confidence in being able to control our own creations”.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2026/aug/18/the-long-read-democracy-v-the-machine-digital-age-warnings-computer-history-technology
Now assuming techdet is an unstoppable force our immovable object could be a Mumfordian sized polity limited to 512 sentient entities.
How else can democracy steer science?
That is a purely rhetorical question btw. No reply rules. You knew that.
Look, if its any consolation the Tang dynasty may be disappeared.
Those who control the present!
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