The Man and the Machine

Dominion, Volume 22, Issue 175, 20 April 1929, Page 17

The Man and the Machine

( £ _ —. ACHINERY does not suppress man’s creative faculty, # because < /I ifc originates from it. Between man and machine there is 'u / | no conflict, assuming that you have a good machine and y ft handle it properly, and that it does not knock you down and run over you,” says Karel Capek, Ph.D., the distinguished young Czeeho-Slovakian author and dramatist, who became world-famous with his play “R.U.R.,” in which he created the Robots, machine-made men, who turned on their masters, writing in the "Daily Express.” “But it is quite a different matter,” he adds, “when we ask ourselves if the organisation and perfection of humanity are advancing as surely as the organisation and perfection of machinery, or if we are dbvoting to the settlement of human affairs as much imagination and judgment as we do to mechanical achievements; I would even say, if we devote as much interest to human affairs.

•'During the last hundred years we have enormously multiplied mans speed and efficiency, but we cannot boast that we have multiplied to the same extent either his culture or his vital security, or any of the things th.it give life its value. No doubt machinery is gaining on man, but only because we give it more care and attention. “Our machines are works of genius, but our social and humanitarian attempts are more or less bungling. If we want to speak of progress, do not let .us boast of the numbers of our motor-cars and telephone lines, but of the value which we and our civilisation place on human life. “I am not afi‘aid of machines becoming the masters of man; it is worse if we men are bad masters of humait affairs. “The relationship of machinery to man depends chiefly on the relationship of men to each other; and that we should have in otu own hands, at least to the same exent as we have in our hands the power of machinery.