All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace

The Monkey in the Machine and the Machine in the Monkey (1x3)

: 06, 2011

This episode looks at why we humans find this machine vision so beguiling. The film argues it is because all political dreams of changing the world for the better seem to have failed—so we have retreated into machine-fantasies that say we have no control over our actions because they excuse our failure. At the heart of the film is one of the most famous scientists in the world—Bill Hamilton. He argued that human behaviour is really guided by codes buried deep within us. It was later popularised by Richard Dawkins as “the selfish gene”. It said that individual human beings are really just machines whose only job is to make sure the codes are passed on for eternity.