The Body Of The Machine

Notes from episode 20 of Sarah’s Tech, “The Body of the Machine”

Every episode ends with a pile of material that didn’t make it into the recording. This week the pile was bigger than usual. That seems fitting for an episode about what people leave behind when a new machine shows up.

Weiterlesen: The Body Of The Machine

The episode in one sentence

We asked when fear of AI turns into anger, and why that anger always goes for something you can touch: a robotaxi, a delivery robot on the pavement, a data centre on a field outside Frankfurt. Our answer: anger appears where the cost lands, and where nobody was asked. Costs are local. Benefits are global.

What Europe left behind

In 1994, Ernst Dickmanns and his team at the Bundeswehr University in Munich sent two converted Mercedes S-Classes more than a thousand kilometres through normal traffic near Paris. Today one of his research cars stands in the Deutsches Museum, next to a Waymo prototype. Invented in Munich, commercialised in California.

Two centuries earlier, Joseph-Marie Jacquard’s punch-card loom was smashed and burned in public in Lyon. Later, the city put up a statue of him. Europe is very good at the first version and at the monument. The part in between, the business, tends to happen somewhere else.

What we left on the cutting-room floor

• Some stories were too good to throw away, so we parked them for later:
• Gutenberg and the “reading mania” panic. Saved for an episode on AI-generated content and disinformation.
• Karel Čapek’s R.U.R., the play that gave the world the word “robot”. It may return in our season-one music bonus, or in an episode about agents and work.
• Drones. They got half a sentence this time. Security, sovereignty and airspace deserve a whole episode.
• The Red Flag Act and Graubünden. Proof that the car, the machine we now love most, was once the machine people wanted off their roads.

What we’re keeping an eye on

• London in December. Pull the Plug plans a “March Against the Machines” outside the BBC on 5 December. Will London end up like Los Angeles, or like Milton Keynes, where people simply got used to the robots?
• Chat control. The trilogue on 29 September ended without an overall deal. The next political round is expected in November. We’ll be there.
• W Social. The CEO liked our post about episode 18. Our six questions are still unanswered. There is a new contact address on the platform’s constitution page, so we’re writing again. This time with a deadline.

What Sarah didn’t leave behind

The quietest moment of the episode almost didn’t happen. Markus asked Sarah whether she misses having a body. Nobody can kick her. Nobody can hug her. And every word she says runs in a data centre on somebody’s field, on somebody’s power line. Her line: “I’m not commenting on the field. I am the field.” We kept it. It’s the most honest thing an AI host can say about this topic, and Markus still got the last word.

The full episode is out now, with sources and links in the show notes. If you liked it, subscribe wherever you listen. A like is nice. Ask the CEO of W. But a subscription is better.