Who’s Adapting to Whom? Lewis Mumford’s Warning for Technics

Lewis Mumford spent decades warning that modern civilisation had inverted the relationship between humans and their tools. Instead of technology serving human purposes, humans were increasingly reorganising their lives, institutions, and values to serve technological systems.

In this episode of Machines & Meaning, we ask whether Mumford’s critique of the “megamachine” — his term for vast, centralised systems that reduce people to interchangeable parts — applies to the AI systems reshaping work, education, and social life today.

Are we adapting AI to our needs, or are we adapting ourselves to AI’s requirements? Mumford would say the answer matters more than we think.