9k:RD/ Islands of people are machines (Q29,65)

Main entry

2965. Q2965/Q29,65

      Islands of people are machines

      / Islands of people are automatons / Inasmuch as a machine (automation; automaton; robot; bot; autopilot) is an arbitrary, consistent process created by human society which is not directly supervised by a human intelligence — as would apply to a television set playing videos on a playlist randomly, a traffic light, a factory conveyor belt, a shovel or hoe which is sitting in a shed and not being used by humans but possibly being blown around by the wind, an optical character recognition program reading multiple-choice tests, or a large language model doing unsupervised learning — groups of people acting wholly autonomously and unaffiliated with groups of other people are also machines, in that they are created by human society (collections of human individuals likely belonging to a human population) obeying an arbitrary, conistent process (social linking, social bonding for arbitrary local reasons) and their behavior is approximately predictable to them but not predictable to other individuals or groups outside them; every single act of two separate groups of people forming which are unaccountable to each other is technically an act of automation; this is to imply that the act of two separate groups of people forming has the power to bring evasions of accountability and harm in at least one of the same senses that putting a large language model in charge of something is an act of automation