Machines with a Purpose

There is at present a widespread unease about the direction in which our technology is taking us, apparently against our will. We are damaging our environment, polluting the sea and the land and the air. And in the production of goods we are reducing human work to the trivial mechanical repetition of actions which have no human meaning. Even if there is much in life that has not reached this state, there is noting to suggest that progress towards it will be reversed. Any attempt to design a better technology, one which does not seek to reject human abilities and skills but rather to complement them, discloses a fundamental difficulty. There are technical problems, but these can be overcome. What cannot be overcome within present modes of scientific thought is the belief that "man is a machine", and that he can therefore contribute nothing which cannot be contributed just as well by a machine. This belief arises from four centuries of science based on strictly causal explanations. This book shows how nature could equally well be interpreted in terms of purpose. Then humans, and indeed the whole of nature would become "machines with a purpose", and our attitudes to them would change profoundly.Table of ContentAn outline of the argument; Control theory: Incorporating human purpose in machines; Hamilton's principle: purpose in natural systems; Equivalence: the undetermination of theory; Extensions of the argument: relativity, quantum mechanics, and subordinate purposes; The purposive myth: how it would seem if we believed it; The causal myth: how it is now; Scientific management: a case in point; An alternative technology; Postscript; Appendix 1 Technical development; Appendix 2 Brief development of the stochastic variational treatment of quantum mechanics; Index.