Sociological Aspects 
MacKay: ‘This is a very helpful clarification. It shows how 
the process of human evaluation must go into the design of the 
machine. In principle, of course, all the machine’s work could 
be done by a human being, with paper and pencil mechanized 
for rapidity. 
Bronowski: In my introduction I avoided the subject of 
machines because I was afraid that we would get involved in 
this kind of detail. The only really interesting machines are 
the great self-correcting machines of nature, such as the atomic 
processes in the stars. A star is a much better self-regulating 
machine than anything we have built. Dr. Comfort asked what 
protection we have against a police state. Surely our protection 
against any uniform state is that we know from natural pro- 
cesses that you cannot organize vast numbers of identical units 
in any other way than by a hierarchy of groups. Even a star 
that fails to do this blows up into a supernova, and then has to 
rearrange itself afresh. 
I want to make a second point about machines. We have 
been discussing Professor MacKay’s model; but this hardly 
deserves to be called a machine, for it is only a thermostat! It 
really is a trivial piece of machinery, even by comparison with 
a man-made computer. Yet MacKay warns us that, by its 
use, we may be faced with a frightening situation in which, 
every time he publicly predicts that I am going to vote Con- 
servative, I will react by voting Labour. He fears that whatever 
his forecast is, the public will react mechanically, for example 
by doing the opposite. This is to suppose that the human 
population will be a passive subject, and even when it knows 
that ten times in succession it has reacted mechanically again 
it still goes on doing so next time. In that case, man would be 
the only such machine that does not correct itself! But this is 
quite unrealistic. All the evolutionary processes of life are 
self-correcting. Whatever predictive machines come to 
be used, men will adjust themselves to them and learn to 
make them part of their daily lives, just as they learned to 
live with the radio, the machine-gun, and the speeches of 
Hitler. 
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