The original title of this blog was "Dragon Theory", which referred to my idea that humans create organizations that are alive in some sense and, in another sense, are machines like other human creations. There is a "flip side" to this theory. It's about how humans are assimilated into this machine. It turns out that assimilation is an easier thing for most of us to understand, since intelligent machines are (for most of us) a subject of Science Fiction ("AI"). In fiction, "AI" is presented for dramatic purposes as something super-human and implacably opposed to human life. "Real" AI is something else entirely. It presents a real and present threat precisely because it is so poorly understood. The concept of assimilation is quite familiar to most of us. We take it for granted that "social" animals form entities (herds, swarms, flocks, schools) that have a behavior all their own - behavour that cannot be described solely...

A wider and more optimistic picture of assimilation can be found here . The progress of human thought, including technology, depends on the individual being "assimilated" into the way society "thinks".

This is a series of Massey Lectures , available on-line through the Ideas archive or as a book . The lectures are well-worth reading. Franklin is a deep and original thinker. For the purposes of this blog, her most significant idea is the way that technology turns society into a collection of compliant robots - a specific reference to the "Dragon Theory" idea. How does this work? Technology demands "work" to be parcelled out into steps or specialized components. Each piece of work needs to "fit" with all the others, so "good" work is basically work that tightly complies with specifications. Human qualities of judgment are ruled out. Any identification with the end product is removed. This in what Marx called "alienation". But Marx traced alienation to the fact that the worker no longer owned the means of production or the product of his labour. Perhaps the deeper reality was the switch to mass production, centralized because the power s...