'Man' vs. 'Machine'—Programming Election Day and Beyond

Members of the Baby Boom generation (1946-1964)—like Donald Trump (b. 1946), Kamala Harris (b. 1964), and me—grew up with easy access to science fiction movies and TV, as well as comic books, conjuring adventures of human heroism.

Guys might have had a higher affinity for plots with humans battling a huge, menacing monster. Ideally, a robot or other machine would be trying to enslave people or conquer Earth. Such plots keep reappearing, although they evolve.

I recently made a request to my new chatbot friend, Microsoft Bing’s AI Co-Pilot: “Name five movies where a human being battles a big machine and is successful.” Bing immediately churned out:

1.     The Terminator (1984) - Sarah Connor battles the relentless Terminator, a cyborg assassin.

2.     The Matrix (1999) - Neo fights against the machines controlling the simulated reality.

3.     Iron Man (2008) - Tony Stark faces off against the Iron Monger, a massive armored suit.

4.     Pacific Rim (2013) - Pilots in Jaegers, giant robots, battle monstrous Kaiju.

5.     Real Steel (2011) - Charlie Kenton and his robot, Atom, take on larger, more powerful robots in the ring.

Impressed by Bing’s speed, I asked it to produce five more, then ten more after that. Its answers tended to veer off-course, and it preferred 21^st-century search results, but the list clearly could be infinite if one reached back to programs like Star Trek and films like Forbidden Planet (1956).

Election Day 2024 is a good opportunity for a critical mass of Boomer boys to ponder and report one fact of artificial life: We have internalized “lessons” from decades of consuming the impressive media imaginations of those times.

Pollsters have found newsworthy gender gaps and generational differences among the electorate this year, and aging Trekkies can posit a few theories to analyze the trend.

First, a request: Readers, please briefly set aside your suspicions of male toxicity (valid, but more likely among horror movie fans!). Let’s also drop any assumptions that young men are “low-propensity” voters because they just don’t care.

Our basic thesis is this: People do respond, consciously or unconsciously, to the messages in their media. We act based on memories that gave us meaning, taking them seriously but not literally.

Human beings naturally want to save somebody from something. We crave a sense of our own dignity and intuit the dignity of others. Faith in a loving Creator bolsters this intuition. But our secularized, politicized culture increasingly has divided us into camps of “victims vs. victimizers” and “oppressed vs. oppressors.”

Thought-leaders and media have whittled down our comfort level with truths, values, and institutions which can bring us together. Emotions, superficialities, and expressive individualism too frequently take the captain’s chair.

This won’t stop anyone from voting, but a lack of purpose amplifies life’s distractions. Without clear goals, there can be no sense of progress. Without a hopeful pursuit of greatness, we get lost in talk of “a new way forward.” Regardless of political party, such talk tends more toward attractive details of the proposed “way” than the meaning of moving “forward.” We need a compelling plot to hold our attention.

Humans have always found inspiration in “the hero’s journey”—a form of initiation rite, a milepost in a person’s growth within the social order. A popular 1988 PBS series, Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth, spoke vividly about this and made many references to the original Star Wars film.

Heather Marie Burrow brings us up to date in a 2023 journal article archived by Springer Nature: “At the heart of much of our cultural behaviors are rituals that are powerful, unifying, and communicative meaning-makers. Rituals are some of the most visible manifestations of values, beliefs, and identity that connect people. Yet, youth-focused rituals, specifically rites of passage, are difficult to find in America today.”

Some young men and women currently feel conflicted when imagining a chivalrous (knightly) adventure, such as fighting off a fiend or force which oppresses another person.

They fear this could be seen as patronizing or as a hypocritical virtue signal. There are still “old souls” who want to be Spiderman saving Gwen or Mary Jane. “With great power comes great responsibility!” Was Peter Parker sexist?

The 2024 presidential race initially saw fewer exchanges of “battle of the sexes” rhetoric than observers might have expected. The candidates seemed less likely to charge sexism than to charge racism, nationalism, religious extremism, fascism, and communism.

But political partisans have made the debate more visceral with statements on bodily autonomy, cat-lady slurs, and related gender concerns. We have muddied the waters around heroic acts, protecting, fighting, adopting hardball policies, and pursuing “greatness.” It’s better to be a “joyful warrior,” even though Spiderman and Han Solo reflect a different approach to joy, which they find more fulfilling.

One other explanation for the perplexity in voter trends points us back to a theme found in plenty of traditional American entertainment. As reported in my Bing search, our culture has done a lot of thinking (or at least a lot of emoting) over the face-off of “man vs. machine.”

When these two forces confront each other, “man” is generally the hero and the “machine” plays the villain, even though a machine can mean many things. The dividing line between friend and foe has become especially clouded in the booming field of artificial intelligence.

Pope Francis has been the most noteworthy world figure in praising AI’s potential for good while also urging substantial global regulation to protect a preferential option for the human as the technology advances.

He addressed this year’s June meeting of “G7” leaders in Italy. The 87-year-old pontiff echoed sentiments which popular culture promulgated more clearly in previous decades. That’s when Judeo-Christian values encouraged bolder celebration of individual dignity and humanity’s prospects for excellence.

Persons are created to be “radically open to the beyond” and to the future, Francis said. “Our openness to others and to God originates from this reality, as does the creative potential of our intelligence with regard to culture and beauty.”

He went on to warn, “We would condemn humanity to a future without hope if we took away people’s ability to make decisions about themselves and their lives, by dooming them to depend on the choices of machines.”

As reported in this Substack series, the Vatican’s champion for “person-centered AI” summed up the difference between man and machine. In general, he said, we must not surrender control over humanity to a technology that searches for more data—not for more truth—to modify itself.

Do younger generations feel more gung-ho than Boomers about unfettered development of AI as humankind’s ally? And if they do, which presidential candidate could we expect them to support?

It’s true that the Democratic Party is supported by an impressive line-up of tech execs, with the notable exception of Elon Musk. He’s backing the flawed old-timer who keeps saying, Fight!

Of course, we don’t know how fears and hopes about AI will sort out among various segments of the population. Neither our leaders nor our media have encouraged fully informed debate on the subject.

One more meaning of “machine,” far less scientific but still symbolic of Goliath’s combat against the “little guy” (and against Catholic social teaching on subsidiarity), recalls factual and fictional stories of machine politics.

The principle of subsidiarity, which defends the rights and responsibilities of individuals, families, and neighborly self-governance, says “a community of a higher [larger] order should not interfere in the internal life of a community of a lower [smaller, more fundamental] order,” except when it can assist appropriately. (Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 1883).

Loosely speaking, the notion—and size—of political machines in America have grown immensely from Tammany Hall days to include the Washington administrative state, or the “deep state.”

Many people now associate this collective of government careerists and political appointees with Democratic Party dealings, although by definition this “swamp” is actually a comfortable place for many elites who engineer whole segments of the economy, including academia. It is not going away under either party’s rule.

The machine concept is also alleged to extend to an influential, international infrastructure of avatars populating the United Nations, multiple nonprofits, agencies of intergovernmental security and finance, and organizations all-in on such causes as climate change and migration flows.

Who can grok the “man vs. machine” motif fully at this level? News media in the U.S. offer tragically incomplete coverage of the world—either country by country, or as an increasingly interconnected entity.

Journalists and voters, accustomed to emphasizing personalities, polls, and emotions more than issues and initiatives in American news generate even less hope for real understanding and public engagement when they cover the growing impact of globalism.

Pope Francis seems inclined toward global approaches to various problems, and he has maintained connections within some necessary elite networks. Perhaps we should ask for more coverage of the international scene from Catholic and other religious media, given their boots-on-the-ground insights nearly everywhere on the planet. But Francis has few partners who see the world as a spiritual story.

This takes us far from our initial discussion about popular culture and politics, but two truisms help us to refocus: All politics is local. And politics is downstream from culture.

At the very roots of human ecology, a hyper-interdisciplinary subject Pope Francis sees as rich in practical and transcendent meaning, we ultimately must encounter, inform, and inspire individuals in light of their inherent dignity and purposeful destiny.

Given the fact that people now come connected to screens as their portals to entertainment and enlightenment, the pontiff’s call for humans to think big and think small simultaneously is complicated by an even tougher challenge—how to grab the attention of distracted thinkers at all.

Entertainment itself is increasingly globalized, embodying values and viewpoints far beyond those of individuals, families, local communities, cultures, and countries. We saw this on display during TV’s 2024 Olympics programming. Plans to employ today’s creative geniuses for imagination-stirring content now envision audiences of billions—and finely tuned marketplace “preferences”—with precious little interest in motivating or clarifying the “hero journeys” of Boomer boys.

If the 2024 elections are indeed a crucial deadline to hear voices from this critical mass of nostalgic adventurers and aspiring romantics, perhaps their history of integrating moral compasses into their modest screens can at least yield stories and memes that will continue to resonate.

It’s far too simplistic to suggest this election offers any epiphany about the “man vs. machine” dichotomy. We have seen too many persons and machines of all sorts conducting, in various flawed ways, machinations which weaken reflexes of reason and faith across the political spectrum.

The biggest gift to be offered by Boomers, or younger counterparts wrongly labeled “low-propensity,” is their everyday struggle with memories, hopes—and confusions—in their “lower-order” experiences of higher goods in genuinely exciting scripts.

In a worst-case scenario, a future plot where machines—and people playing the part of machines—build an ecology made solely of algorithms, quaint memes of vanquished robots and super-villains might surface. The old cultural call to save somebody from something will help us navigate toward human heroism.

Image from ClipSafari.com, a collection of Creative Commons designs.

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