Vonnegut On "OFF" Buttons

some wisdom from "The Sirens of Titan"

Author

Matt Zeigler
October 21, 2024

In the wake of all the AI chatter and Musk-babysitting-bots, I keep coming back to this Kurt Vonnegut quote from The Sirens of Titan.

“The only controls available to those on board were two push-buttons on the center post of the cabin—one labeled on and one labeled off. The on button simply started a flight from Mars. The off button connected to nothing. It was installed at the insistence of the Martian mental-health experts, who said that human beings were always happier with machinery they thought they could turn off.”

- Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan

Forget all the technology.

It’s small things that make us happy.

Including small beliefs, held close for sake of great comfort.

People will use these ideas in presenting technology to us, for prices as they appear on the tags, and for costs we can never understand.

I’m not anti-AI in any way, but, I don’t ever want to forget Vonneget’s Martian mental-health experts either.

We are still human, after all.

h/t Just Press Record guest Christina Garnett for inspiring this one!