Machines of Loving Grace, and Machines That Stop

What happens when the machine stops?

Article by: Rio Longacre

One of the most talked-about essays in AI over the past year was Dario Amodei’s Machines of Loving Grace. Named after Richard Brautigan’s famous poem, the essay paints a compelling utopian vision of the future in which AI cures disease, scientific discovery accelerates, and poverty declines. Human beings are freed from drudgery and routine labor, while machines become partners in human flourishing rather than instruments of human control.

I want this future to be true. I use AI every day. It has already made me more productive, more creative, and in many cases more capable. I am simultaneously happier at my job and for more productive than I have been in years. Looking at the technology, the pace of progress is astonishing. Every month seems to bring new breakthroughs that would have felt impossible only a few years ago.

Yet as I read Amodei’s essay, I found myself thinking about another work of speculative fiction written more than a century earlier: E.M. Forster’s The Machine Stops. Like Amodei, Forster imagined a world in which technology had solved nearly every practical problem. Humanity lived in absolute comfort, knowledge was instantly accessible, and physical labor had largely disappeared. The machine provided everything people needed. Sound familiar?

The tragedy—dare I say dystopian— aspect of Forster’s story wasn't necessarily that the machine became evil. The tragedy was that people became dependent on the machine, and over time, lost skills they no longer needed. They stopped exploring, creating, or experiencing the world directly. Eventually, they forgot how to live without the machine. The machine did not fail humanity. Rather, humanity failed itself by becoming dependent on the machine.

This story has lingered in my mind because it highlights a question that receives surprisingly little attention in today’s conversations about AI. What if the most important question is not what machines become capable of doing? What if the more important question is what humans stop doing in response?

The Long History of Outsourcing Ourselves

This would not be the first time technology changed what it means to be human. In fact, for most of human history, memory was one of civilization’s most valuable skills. Long before books, search engines, or cloud storage, knowledge lived inside people. Entire histories, genealogies, religious traditions, and epic poems were passed from generation to generation through memory alone. The bards of ancient Greece could recite works like The Iliad and The Odyssey—stories spanning thousands of lines—from memory. What seems almost superhuman today was once a practical necessity.

Then writing emerged. The ability to record knowledge outside the human mind fundamentally changed civilization. But it also changed us. With the advent of writing, we no longer needed to remember everything because we could write it down. Knowledge became more durable, scalable, and accessible. We gained something extraordinary, but surrendered something vital.

Pic via @ProgRockGrandad

The same pattern has repeated throughout history. I still remember the phone number of the house I grew up in. I remember my best friend’s phone number from elementary school. I can still picture dialing those numbers by hand. Today, I barely know anyone’s phone number. Not because I couldn’t memorize them if I tried, but because I no longer need to.

GPS has done something similar for navigation. Search engines have done it for recall. And calculators have done it for arithmetic. Every technology extends human capability while simultaneously reducing the need to exercise certain skills ourselves.

To be honest, this is not necessarily a bad trade. Few people would willingly give up modern medicine, books, calculators, maps, or smartphones. I wouldn't. But every technological advance presents us with the same bargain: We gain convenience, but surrender capability. The question is not whether this happens, but rather how much we can surrender before something important is lost.

The Outsourcing of Humanity

The difference between AI and previous technologies is not simply that it is more powerful. My main concern is that AI is beginning to touch capabilities we have not only considered uniquely human, but in many ways make us distinctly human.

Calculators helped us outsource arithmetic, GPS helped us outsource navigation, and search engines helped us outsource recall. But AI is beginning to help us outsource thinking itself. Not all thinking, of course. Not yet. But increasingly, AI can research, summarize, write, analyze, brainstorm, translate, code, recommend, and advise. For many knowledge workers, AI is rapidly becoming a cognitive partner that helps perform tasks that previously required human effort.

Again, I do not view this as inherently a bad thing. In many cases, I think it is downright remarkable. The question that interests me is not whether AI makes us more capable. It clearly does—no way this can be debated. The question is whether increasing dependence on AI changes us in ways we do not yet understand.

After all, human capabilities develop through use. Memory improves when exercised. Judgment improves through experience. Creativity emerges through struggle, experimentation, and failure. And resilience develops by confronting obstacles. What happens when those obstacles begin to disappear?

Psychologists have long observed that human beings tend to perform best under moderate levels of challenge and pressure. Too much stress can be debilitating, while too little can be equally damaging. Growth often occurs in the space between comfort and adversity.

This principle extends beyond productivity—it may even apply to civilization itself. Many of the qualities we admire most in people—discipline, perseverance, ingenuity, courage, and creativity—are forged through necessity. They emerge in response to constraints, and are developed through effort. Yet much of the conversation around AI focuses on eliminating effort altogether, and the implicit assumption is that if machines can perform a task better than humans, humans should stop performing it.

Perhaps. But it is worth asking whether the value of certain activities lies only in the outcome, or whether part of their value comes from what they develop within us while we struggle to achieve them. Maybe the effort is the value?

If a machine can write better than you, does this mean you should stop writing? By extension, if a machine can think faster (or more clearly) than you, should you stop thinking? What if a machine can make decisions on your behalf. Does this mean you should stop exercising judgment? Sure, these questions may sound absurd today. But so would the idea of memorizing dozens of phone numbers.

The Machine Stops

What makes The Machine Stops so remarkable is how eerily modern it feels. Written in 1909, decades before the computer, the internet, or artificial intelligence, Forster imagined a society in which people lived almost entirely dependent on technology. They communicated remotely, information was instantly available, and physical travel was rare. Direct experience was increasingly replaced by mediated experience.

Most importantly, the machine provided everything. Over time, humanity adapted to this arrangement. Why wouldn’t it? Life became easier. The machine was efficient, reliable, and convenient. It removed friction from everyday life, and freed people from tasks they no longer needed to perform themselves.

And then something subtle happened. People stopped developing the capabilities the machine had replaced. They lost their connection to the natural world. They lost their curiosity and their self-reliance. Eventually, they lost the ability to imagine life beyond the system that sustained them. The machine became civilization.

When it finally failed, the ultimate tragedy was not that people had become dependent on technology. As shattered people emerged from their curated underground civilization to confront the real world in the end of the book, it became evident the tragedy was they had forgotten how to live without the machine.

Ultimately, Forster’s warning was never really about machines. Rather, it was about human beings, and what happens when convenience becomes dependence, and capability is gradually exchanged for comfort. It was also about what happens when a society becomes so optimized that it forgets why it was optimizing in the first place.

More than a century later, this question feels less like science fiction and more like a thought experiment we are actively conducting on ourselves in real time. Perhaps AI will usher in an age of abundance unlike anything humanity has ever experienced. I sincerely hope it does.

But as we build our own machines of loving grace, it seems worth asking whether we are paying enough attention to the capabilities we are be leaving behind.

What Remains?

I am not arguing against AI. Nor am I suggesting we reject progress or retreat from the extraordinary possibilities that lie ahead. I am certainly not a Luddite. Like many people, I am fascinated by what these new tools can do and optimistic about much of what they enable.

But as AI advances with breakneck speed, I do wonder if we are spending too much time asking what machines will become and too little time asking what humans will become in response. If AI removes struggle, what happens to resilience? If AI removes uncertainty, what happens to creativity? If AI removes labor, what happens to purpose? And If AI removes thinking, what happens to wisdom?

For centuries, technology has expanded human capability by allowing us to outsource certain tasks to tools and machines. AI may simply be the next chapter in that story, or it may represent something fundamentally different. Only time will tell.

As we build our machines of loving grace, perhaps the most important question is not what they will do for us. It is what they will do to us, and what, in that process, will remain uniquely human.

Rio Longacre

Rio is an executive with 20+ years at the intersection of strategy consulting, AdTech, data, and media. He's a trusted advisor on customer experience, digital strategy, and marketing transformation. He's a partner at Credera, Omnicom's consulting arm. He's also a podcast host, writer, and public speaker focused on the future of advertising and AI-driven infrastructure.