Machines of Loving Disgrace

"Clever...cinematic...and more than a little bit Vonnegutian at times...which is high praise from this KV fan..." Guy Hamling. Writer, Producer, Director. Machines of Loving Grace is a techno-utopian poem written by Richard Brautigan in 1967. In the poem he envisions a pastoral/cybernetic future where humankind and intelligent machines live together in perfect harmony, and where all our needs (and those of our non-human animal companions) are taken care of so that we are 'all watched over by machines of loving grace'.

This story has no truck with that belief.

Inspired by the seminal conjectures of Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett, Bill Joy, and Ray Kurzweil, and more recently by the ideas of Cory Doctorow, Julian Bleecker at Near Future Laboratory, and Dossier 1, of the Office of Applied Strategy, Machines of Loving Disgrace examines Artificial Intelligence, containment, the breakout problem, the great enshittification and inanification, dead internet theory, and our need to consider de-growth.

It was conceived as a work of design fiction for a forthcoming exhibition on Radical Futures.

In the words of Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby (Speculative Everything, MIT Press, 2013) "What we are interested in, is the idea of possible futures and using them as tools to better understand the present and to discuss the kind of future people want, and of course, one people do not want."

Which leads the author to postulate:

Those who do not learn from the future are doomed to repeat it. If design fiction is a catalyst for social dreaming, can the nightmare scenarios we sometimes imagine act as provocations to help us avoid them?