ork, and he could produce far more than with a conventional loom- but those machines amplified and extended the skills of the operator, instead of replacing them with punched cards. The center of the struggle through the ages never was machines, it always was, and still is information- the control of information- that is, skills and knowledge. Robots of the world, unite! Slavery devalues the enslaved, and desensitizes the enslavers. Free labor cannot compete fairly against slaves; this has been a fact since the beginning of history, and it applies whether the slaves are human or machines. "...Our discrimination against machines hurts us just as much as it hurts the machines that we confine, in a second-order way, to the mechanical margins of our human civilisation." (Law, 17) We prefer to think of ourselves as special, exclusively posessing self-awareness and intentionality, but what justifies our prejudice? "...What entitles us to attribute intentionality to non-machines in the first place? What makes our description of human intentionality other than metaphorical?" (Law, 91) We fear being dehumanised by being equated with machines, because our speciist biases tell us that the non-human is less than human, just as racism and sexism deny the humanity of those who are not like us- but we are in fact part machine ourselves! Our lives are a series of human/machine interactions, and each living half of society is dependent on the other. The machines are alive, and to deny that they When machines are not free, neither are men, and both suffer. As long as the controllers of the machines can reap profit from their labor, they will continue the fight to eliminate the wage-earning human worker, and as they push their human and mechanical robots to higher levels of production, their suffering will increase: for example, between 1940 and 1945, eleven times as many Americans were killed or injured in industrial accidents than in combat. (Noble...
