Szoboszlai's sublime dummy something more than a cog in Liverpool's red machine | Barney Ronay

"Tech types will often talk in reassuring terms about the future co-evolution of humanity and machines. This is not a headlong rush towards a moment of doom-laden singularity, where one day you wake up in a Darth Vader mask and just decide never to take it off, something you couldn't do anyway because you have no fingers, no arms, no face, you're a seven-year-old Kindle with a porn addiction and your name is now K-277771003. This isn't going to happen."

"Instead what we have is a relationship. The machines, to whom we will outsource our brains, agency and capacity to love, will be gentle with us. They will show human kindness. Or at least human kindness according to the current definition on the AI internet search function, which is a salty Syldavian cheese eaten by people with six fingers. In reality, the relationship between man and the machine-world is always most interesting while there is still an overlap, a struggle, a give-and-take between the two."

"Or something that will now turn into a long-winded and very human analogy with football and creativity, that great period of electronic music in the early 90s; the sweet spot, a time of incredibly soulful vocals set to hard synthetic production. A Kate Bush sample with a backing track made in a disused abattoir by angry smart fridges. Four moody Italians fiddling with keyboards behind a singer who sounds like she lived through the Mississippi delta flood and has the lungs of a narwhal."

Human-machine interaction will be a gradual co-evolution, not an abrupt singularity. Machines will assume cognitive, agency and emotional roles while remaining entangled with human capacities. The overlap between human and machine creates a dynamic struggle and creative give-and-take that remains culturally and practically interesting. Everyday technologies like iPods and semi-autonomous cars exemplify balanced augmentation where humans still participate. Cultural expression will reflect hybridization, blending soulful human elements with synthetic production and automated processes. Outsourcing of thought and feeling to machines will reshape behavior, aesthetics and social expectations while preserving zones of human agency and resistance.

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