machines

When the Dow Jones Average melted down this past Thursday and dropped nearly a thousand points in half an hour, what we were seeing is something that's been predicted by science fiction writers and some general literature authors for decades, namely a facet of the war between humans and machines.

We have become enslaved by our own machines, especially computers and certain kinds of computer programs such as the ones that set off Thursday's Dow Jones meltdown. The so-called "Defense" Department is also running lots computer programs, some of which endanger the entire world.

The fall of stock prices on Thursday didn't play out as the kind of diagonal line we usually see on graphs. It was a vertical drop. This could only have been accomplished by computer automation.

In his 1927 novel Steppenwolf, Herman Hesse's protagonist Harry Haller dreams of the coming war of people vs. machines: "Cars, some of them armored, were run through the streets chasing the pedestrians. They ran them down and either left them mangled on the ground or crushed them to death against the walls of the houses. I saw at once that it was the long-prepared, long-awaited and long-feared war between men and machines, now at last broken out."

Now what Hesse and many others predicted has come to pass, and it's scary as hell.

In the 1963 movie "Dr. Strangelove," a nuclear war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union is set off by a lunatic American Air Force general named Jack D. Ripper. But Kubrick and his screenwriters got it wrong. It's not crazy people we need to be afraid of, but the fact that crazy people now have crazy machines they've built and programmed to function in insane ways, and have become enslaved to them.

Government, commerce, and war are all now the functions of machines rather than human agency, and the machines are out of control.