Automation

Ellul's observation about mechanized bakeries keeps nagging at me. When machines couldn't handle actual bread — the living, bacterial, unpredictable substance — engineers didn't fix the machines. They changed the bread. They transformed human taste itself until people preferred the product the machine could make. Jünger, writing from a different angle, saw the same logic applied to workers: automatism "clutches the operator and never relinquishes its grip." But the speculative trajectory points somewhere stranger. The Dreyfus brothers documented how skilled machinists possess tacit knowledge that resists formalization — "every car is different" — and predicted that total automation would require not better robots but the elimination of irregularity itself. Follow this thread forward and you arrive at the present: we are not being replaced by AI so much as we are being reformulated, like the bread, into inputs the system can process. The policy question everyone debates — UBI, retraining, robot taxes — assumes automation acts *on* a stable human subject. The actual mechanism is subtler. It acts on the substrate until the substrate stops resisting.