Machine Civilization

= The remarkable oeuvre of Chor Pharn is about the emerging machine civilisation and the human settlement around it.

URL = https://thecuttingfloor.substack.com [1]

Discussion

"By machine civilisation, I do not mean that machines are taking over in some cartoonish sense. I mean something more concrete and already visible. Intelligence is becoming cheap. Coordination is becoming faster. Systems are becoming more automated. More of life is being routed through models, platforms, registries, payment rails, dashboards, protocols, and machine-readable institutions.

This changes what societies need from people.

It changes firms. It changes states. It changes work. It changes prestige. It changes education. It changes what counts as competence. It changes who is useful, who is merely maintained, and who is quietly pushed to the edge.

My recurring claim is simple:

machine surplus is not human surplus.

A society can become more capable while making many people feel less necessary. It can become more efficient while becoming less inhabitable. It can generate more intelligence while losing judgment. It can build the machine economy faster than the human economy around it.

So I write about both.

The machine economy: chips, energy, capital, AI, logistics, payment systems, firms, states, infrastructure, and the new forms of power they create.

And the human economy: work, dignity, care, love, meaning, family, trust, public goods, rituals, small rooms, local competence, and the forms of life that allow people to remain more than inputs to a system.."

(https://thecuttingfloor.substack.com/p/the-cutting-floor-updated-23-may)