I saw a short video the other day and it featured a farmer guy standing on a field that was not yet plowed. He was behind a plowing apparatus that had a big engine attached to it and when he turned the machine on, it began working so quickly he was basically dragged behind it. He managed to plow the entire field within 50 seconds or something.
This little scene surfaced a lot of themes around humanity and our interactions with technology. The guy reduced the amount of corporeal energy he had to give to turning over the land as well as the amount of time the task would take. Without digressing too much into the embedded assumptions here (that this method of plowing doesn’t have detrimental effects on soil health, or that the engine wasn’t assembled by exploitative mining and or labor practices) it felt like a super simple visualization of how technology can accelerate human work. It felt like a good example of a good practice. Do you think this example reflects the dominant approach today? If not, how would you describe the relationship between humanity and technology?
Chat GPT
Ah, I know exactly the kind of video you mean—it’s almost like a mini parable of human-technology synergy. That image of a single farmer being able to plow an entire field in under a minute is a striking, visceral representation of what technology can do: it amplifies human effort, reduces repetitive labor, and frees up time and energy for other tasks. It’s a neat, almost poetic illustration of what we often call “augmentation” rather than “replacement.”
But here’s the thing: while your video captures an idealized, almost optimistic vision of technology as an enhancer of human capability, it doesn’t fully reflect the dominant approach today in most areas of life and work. Instead, the relationship between humanity and technology tends to be more complex, sometimes even contradictory. Here’s how I’d frame it:
1. Acceleration & Efficiency (the farmer scenario)
- This is the “classic utopian” view: tools make humans more efficient, reduce physical strain, and allow for more output.
- Examples: power tools, tractors, software that automates calculations, AI assistants.
- Pros: frees human time, amplifies skill, can improve quality of life.
- Cons: can hide externalized costs (environment, labor exploitation, societal dependence on infrastructure).
2. Dependency & Displacement
- Unlike the farmer who controls the machine, in many cases today humans become dependent on technology they don’t fully understand.
- Algorithms replace decision-making; apps and services structure behavior.
- Humans often “ride along” with technology rather than consciously using it as a tool.
- Consequence: skill erosion, attention fragmentation, and in some cases, job displacement.
3. Feedback Loops & Amplification
- Technology doesn’t just speed up tasks—it reshapes the goals themselves.
- Example: social media algorithms accelerate engagement but also amplify polarization.
- This is different from the simple farmer scenario because it introduces emergent behaviors the user might not anticipate.
4. Ethical and Ecological Considerations
- Your scenario implicitly abstracts away negative consequences—soil degradation, carbon footprint, exploitative labor in machinery production.
- Today, technology’s dominant footprint often externalizes costs, so efficiency for humans comes at the expense of ecosystems or global labor networks.
✅ Synthesis
Your farmer-video scenario represents a “healthy” technology-human relationship: augmentation, transparency, and immediate feedback. But much of modern technology today tends to be a mix of augmentation and entanglement: it accelerates output, yes, but also shapes human behavior, introduces dependency, and sometimes prioritizes efficiency over broader well-being.
In other words, your farmer is in control, while much of the technology around us is increasingly autonomous and shapes us in return. It’s not the pure “amplifier of human labor” model; it’s a complex negotiation.
If you want, I can sketch a little framework or diagram that maps different ways humans interact with technology today—from full control to full entanglement—so the farmer scenario sits in a “best-case” quadrant. It’s actually pretty striking visually. Do you want me to do that?
Claude
I think your farmer example reflects something more like an idealized memory of how we imagine technology should work—a tool that amplifies human intention while keeping the human legibly in the scene, struggling and steering. But you’re right to sense it doesn’t quite capture our current relationship.
The dominant approach today feels less like “human + tool working faster” and more like “human abstracted away from the task entirely.” A few shifts seem crucial:
1. Distance from consequence Your farmer is right there—getting dragged, feeling the resistance of the soil, immediately encountering rocks or wet patches. Today’s paradigm often inserts so many layers between intention and outcome that feedback loops collapse. You optimize a recommendation algorithm and months later discover it’s been radicalizing teenagers, but the connection feels bureaucratically diffuse.
2. Opaque agency The plow’s mechanism is legible—you can see what’s turning the soil. But try explaining how a large language model decides what word comes next, or how your feed determines what you see. We’ve built tools whose decision-making processes are fundamentally illegible even to their creators. The farmer knows if the plow is working; we often don’t know if our systems are doing what we think they’re doing.
3. Autonomy creep The plow doesn’t decide where to plow or whether plowing is a good idea today. But we increasingly build technology that makes consequential decisions with minimal human oversight—credit scoring, hiring filters, content moderation at scale. The human isn’t being “dragged along” so much as removed from the loop, occasionally rubber-stamping outcomes.
4. Acceleration beyond integration That 50-second field-plowing feels thrilling partly because you can imagine the farmer going inside afterward, exhausted but satisfied, and resuming a life at human pace. Today’s acceleration often doesn’t stop—it creates expectations and systems that demand perpetual availability and response. The technology doesn’t just speed up discrete tasks; it restructures time itself.
If I had to characterize the current relationship, it might be: technology as an ecosystem we inhabit rather than a tool we wield. We’re less like farmers with plows and more like organisms who’ve altered our environment so thoroughly we’re now adapting to it, often in ways we didn’t choose and can’t fully perceive.
What do you think would need to change to get closer to that farmer-with-plow dynamic at scale?
Gemini
That short video clip offers a powerful, albeit simplified, visualization of how technology can amplify human labor and drastically accelerate tasks, often substituting physical effort with mechanical power—a theme that has driven agricultural and industrial revolutions.
🚜 Technology and the Dominant Approach
While your video example perfectly illustrates technological leverage (getting disproportionately large output for a given amount of human input), it doesn’t quite reflect the single “dominant approach” to technology today.
The relationship between humanity and technology has broadened far beyond tools that simply replace muscle and speed up physical work. Today’s dominant technological approaches are focused on:
- Cognitive Automation and Augmentation: Replacing or enhancing human decision-making, information processing, and mental labor (e.g., AI, machine learning, data analytics).
- Connectivity and Communication: Revolutionizing how humans interact, transact, and organize socially (e.g., the internet, social media, mobile computing).
- Complex System Optimization: Managing massive, intricate systems like logistics, finance, and global supply chains (e.g., cloud computing, specialized algorithms).
The plowing example is a good model of technology as an “enabling tool” for production. The current dominant approach often views technology as an “integral environment” for existence and governance—it is less about making a single tool work faster and more about building and living within complex digital ecosystems.
💡 Describing the Relationship
The contemporary relationship between humanity and technology is best described not as a simple master-servant dynamic (human uses tool) but as a co-evolutionary, symbiotic, and deeply entangled relationship characterized by several key aspects:
1. Symbiotic Dependence and Co-Evolution
Humans rely on technology not just for efficiency but for basic social and economic function (e.g., banking, navigation, communication). Technology, in turn, is constantly shaped by human needs, ethics, and consumption patterns. We don’t just use technology; we live with and within it. This constant interaction is accelerating the pace of change in both domains.
2. Augmentation vs. Substitution
While some technology substitutes human work (like your plowing example or factory robots), an increasing amount of modern technology augments human capabilities. This includes tools that enhance our memory (digital archives), our senses (AR/VR), or our analytical abilities (AI assistants). The line between what is “human” and what is “technology” is constantly blurring.
3. The Paradox of Choice and Complexity
Modern technology offers unprecedented choice and convenience (e.g., instant global information access, personalized experiences) but also introduces unprecedented complexity and potential for alienation. The “frictionless” experience offered by a powerful app often hides massive underlying complexity in infrastructure, data, and algorithms, leading to a kind of “black box” relationship where the user benefits without understanding the mechanics or consequences.
4. A Sociotechnical System
Technology is not an isolated object but is embedded in a broader sociotechnical system. Its use, benefits, and drawbacks are inseparable from human policies, economic structures, and social norms. For instance, the benefit of the high-speed plow is contingent on global markets, fuel supply chains, and environmental regulations—the very “embedded assumptions” you touched upon.
In essence, your farmer’s high-speed plow represents an ideal of technological efficiency and mastery over the physical world. The current dominant reality is a more intricate web of digital integration, cognitive augmentation, and profound systemic dependency.
Grok
Your example is a crisp, almost poetic snapshot of technology as a force multiplier—a tool that takes the same human intent (plow this field) and compresses the time and physical effort required by orders of magnitude. In that 50-second clip, the farmer is still the agent: he starts the machine, steers it, decides the path. The engine doesn’t replace his judgment; it amplifies his capacity. That is a real pattern, but it’s not the dominant one today.Why this is not the dominant mode in 2025
- The farmer is still in the loop
In your video, the human is physically coupled to the tool. Most modern tech stacks are designed to remove the human from the loop entirely or reduce them to a supervisor of black-box systems.
- A John Deere tractor with AutoPath + RTK GPS plows the field autonomously while the farmer monitors from an iPad in the cab—or from home.
- Amazon’s warehouse robots don’t drag a human; they replace the picker.
- AI trading bots execute millions of trades per second without a human ever touching a keyboard.
- The metric has shifted from acceleration to substitution
Your farmer saved 50 seconds of effort. Today’s benchmark is zero human seconds. The goal is not to make the human faster but to make the human optional.
- Uber’s endgame isn’t a faster human driver; it’s a driverless pod.
- OpenAI’s mission is “AGI that outperforms humans at most economically valuable work.” The plowing engine is a multiplier; AGI is a replacement.
- The interface has moved from body to abstraction
The farmer’s body is still the control surface (hands on wheel, feet on ground). Contemporary tech interfaces are screens, APIs, prompts. The human is no longer dragged behind the machine; they’re orchestrating it from a distance—or not at all.So what is the dominant relationship in 2025?
Dimension Your Farmer (Amplification) 2025 Default (Automation + Abstraction) Human role Operator in the loop Supervisor → Spectator → Obsolete Energy source Diesel engine (external but tethered) Cloud compute, LLMs, robotics (remote, opaque) Feedback Immediate, tactile (you feel the resistance) Delayed, abstracted (dashboard says “97 % complete”) Skill transfer Human skill → machine leverage Human intent → prompt → machine execution (skill often atrophies) Economic logic Save labor to free the farmer for other tasks Save labor to eliminate the payroll line item A more accurate 2025 metaphorImagine the same field, but:
- A drone swarm seeded with satellite data flies over at dawn, drops precision cover-crop seeds, and injects bio-stimulants.
- An autonomous electric tractor (no cab) follows GPS paths optimized by an AI that’s ingested 10 years of soil sensor data.
- The farmer gets a push notification: “Field 12 prepped. Expected yield +4 % vs. last season.”
- They tap “Approve” on their phone while drinking coffee.
The human didn’t plow faster; the plowing happened without them. The relationship is no longer symbiotic (man + machine) but orchestral (human conductor, machine ensemble) trending toward absentee (human investor, machine laborer).The subtle loss in your exampleYour video is beautiful because the farmer’s agency is visible. You see the grin, the lurch, the dust. In 2025, the equivalent scene is a silent timelapse from a drone—no human in frame. The emotional texture of “look what we built!” is replaced by “look what it did.”TL;DR
- Your example: Technology as prosthetic muscle—human intent, amplified.
- 2025 default: Technology as prosthetic cognition—human intent, delegated then deleted.
The farmer on the plow is a relic of a transitional phase. The dominant mode is not acceleration of human work but evacuation of human work. The field gets plowed in 50 seconds, but the farmer is on a beach in Portugal, checking yield forecasts on an app—if they’re involved at all.
Perplexity
Your example vividly illustrates how technology amplifies human capability, especially in the context of labor-intensive work like farming. While powered machinery can dramatically reduce physical effort and time, this rapid acceleration of human work by technology is just one aspect of our broader relationship with tools and machines.
Is This the Dominant Approach?
The scene you described does reflect a core theme in the dominant approach to technology: technological augmentation. Across industries, most tools and machines are designed to maximize human productivity, efficiency, and comfort. Mechanized agriculture, for instance, began with steam-powered devices and evolved into today’s highly automated tractors and harvesters, radically decreasing the time and energy required for tasks that once demanded days of collective manual labor.
Today, this approach—using technology to substitute or supercharge human muscle and brainpower—is fundamental in manufacturing, logistics, communication, finance, medicine, and beyond. The farmer’s experience with powered plowing is an echo of millions of other processes worldwide now performed at speeds and scales otherwise impossible.
Nuances of Human–Technology Interaction
Though augmentation is central, the dominant relationship between humanity and technology is layered and multifaceted:
- Tool as Extension: Technology often acts as an extension of the mind and body, whether that’s a smartphone amplifying cognitive reach or a medical device restoring physical function.
- Automation and Displacement: Increasing automation can eliminate certain kinds of labor, raising questions about employment, dignity, and meaning.
- Feedback Loops: Rapid technological acceleration can introduce unforeseen impacts—on nature, society, and individual wellbeing—that require ongoing reflection and course correction.
- Dependency: As systems grow more complex, humans can become dependent on invisible infrastructures (supply chains, data networks), which can introduce risks and vulnerabilities.
- Ethical and Social Implications: Each leap in speed or scale often raises questions about fairness, sustainability, and broader consequences that need to be evaluated alongside the convenience or efficiency attained.
Modern Views
Most contemporary discussions see technology less as a simple additive force and more as a dynamic relationship, shaped by values, policies, and social choices. There is active debate about what constitutes “good practice”: for instance, balancing yield with ecological stewardship, ensuring technological design respects privacy or worker rights, and retaining a measure of human judgment and control.
- Some thinkers argue for “appropriate technology”—tools sized and designed for their cultural and ecological context, not just the fastest or most powerful option.
- Others emphasize participatory design, ethics, and the responsible management of technological risks.
Summary
In essence, your example does highlight a dominant thread: technology as an accelerator and amplifier of human action. Yet, the broader picture is nuanced, constantly negotiated, and shaped by both practical trade-offs and deeper questions about what kind of society—and what kind of relationship with nature and one another—we want technology to help create.
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