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Comment by swyx | Hacker News Reader

brutal story. for those who were equally confused this post seems to have the same title as but is unrelated to Dario Amodei's recent https://darioamodei.com/machines-of-loving-grace - is perhaps a nice/bittersweet reality check on how our designs often fall short of our ambitions.

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Which in turn references the 1967 poem by Richard Brautigan:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Watched_Over_by_Machines...

I had wondered where this saying came from, thank you for the reference.

here is the direct link to the poem.

https://brautiganarchives.xyz/machines.html#28

Also the name of a documentary series by Adam Curtis: https://topdocumentaryfilms.com/all-watched-over-by-machines...

The full poem is also in the article.

(sorry to be That Person, but I'm really hoping Hacker News doesn't eventually become like Reddit where the comments are almost completely divorced from the content of the article).

It sometimes happens, but I'd say it's for the best. Often the greatest value (sometimes the only value) a submitted link has is as a discussion prompt.

I don't know, the Matt Stoller Substack post from yesterday had a whole line of discussion that was already covered in the article.

There’s also John Markoff’s history of the relationship of human and intelligent machines, artificial intelligence vs intelligence augmentation, etc. (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23460922-machines-of-lov...).

The post here and Amodei’s are both in reference to this poem: https://allpoetry.com/All-Watched-Over-By-Machines-Of-Loving...

And I think the poem is satire, although some have read it as being serious.

I think that the benign portrayal of machines seems tongue-in-cheek, particularly considering Brautigan’s own ambivalence toward technological advancement.

Let's then make sure we build those Machines of Loving Grace right, for we might have only one shot at that.

I like that poem, and I hope we eventually get there, with our artificial descendants as our partners.

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