This is the last episode in a series of documentaries by Adam Curtis. It focus on the idea of humans being machines.
Adam Curtis – All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace 3/3 – The Monkey in the Machine and the Machine in the Monkey – Subs from avefenix1954 on Vimeo.
Notes:
- Humans are self-replicating machines
- War in Africa over minerals used to manufacture Play Station 2 (copper)
- What are humans, from a gene’s point of view? (Bill Hamilton & George Price)
- bodies are carriers for genes
- genes are machines
- genes would destroy themselves if it let more related copies of the gene live (this explains altruism)
- Price’s suicide as an act of free will
- Concept of humans as machines demolishes the enlightenment idea of people being more important than things
- death of subjectivity
- Is technological evolution analogous to animal evolution?
- new objects studying old objects (living-with-gorillas-style)
- “Humans as machines” idea just an excuse to explain away our failure to change the world for the better