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Presentation for the Miami Book Fair – Mindless

Summary:
23 November 2024 This book tells three stories about the impact of machines on the human condition: on the way  we work, on our freedom, and on our physical survival. Each story contains within it a vision of heaven and hell: the promise of relief from work, freedom to think our own thoughts, and almost indefinite improvement of health and extension of life   confronts  their  opposites  in the spectre of human uselessness, of Orwelliam thought control, and of  man made disaster. Let me tell the positives and downsides of each story as quickly as I can. The first is about technology’s promise   to free us from work. In a short essay Economic  Possibilities for  our Grandchildren, dating from 1930, the economist  John Maynard Keynes predicted that by now most of us would only

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23 November 2024

This book tells three stories about the impact of machines on the human condition: on the way  we work, on our freedom, and on our physical survival. Each story contains within it a vision of heaven and hell: the promise of relief from work, freedom to think our own thoughts, and almost indefinite improvement of health and extension of life   confronts  their  opposites  in the spectre of human uselessness, of Orwelliam thought control, and of  man made disaster.

Let me tell the positives and downsides of each story as quickly as I can.

The first is about technology’s promise   to free us from work. In a short essay Economic  Possibilities for  our Grandchildren, dating from 1930, the economist  John Maynard Keynes predicted that by now most of us would only need to  work three hours a day  ‘to satisfy the old Adam in us’. The theological reference is clear:   machines would do  most of our work for us, making possible a return to Paradise, where ‘neither Adam delved nor  Eve span’. Keynes’s prediction was rooted in the very old idea that, once the material needs of  humanity had been met, a space would be opened up for the ‘good life’. Keynes did not say that people , freed from work, would necessarily choose to lead  a good life; rather that this choice would be open to them. Machines were simply a means to  an end. 

It turned out that Keynes’s prediction  was only partly right. Since 1930 technological  progress has lifted average real income per head in rich countries roughly five times from  $5,000 to $25,000 (in 1990 dollars), much in line with Keynes’s expectation, but average  weekly hours of full-time work in these countries have fallen by only about 20 per cent, from  about 50 to 40 hours, far less than Keynes envisaged. In other words we work almost as hard as we used to despite being five times more efficient.What did he get wrong?

Well, he attached two caveats or conditions to his prophecy: no population growth and no war.

Population growth and wars are classic ways of keeping goods scarce, and since 1930 we have had a global population explosion, plus a world war and a long period of  Cold War, which is restarting. Keynes you might say should have foreseen both obstacle s to his prophec  of abundance.

But there are three  other things he missed. The first is human insatiability. He thought human needs might be quite quickly satisfied, but he ignored the phenomenon of relative wants-I want  something because  you’ve  got it -creating a desire  for more and more, fuelled by relentless 24 hours advertising .

Secondly, Keynes ignored jobs as a source of identity and joblessness  therefore, even if compensated,  as  a curse to be resisted rather than a blessing to be embraced.

Thirdly, Keynes ignored the question of distribution, and therefore  of power. He assumed that the gains from efficiency would  go to everyone, not just to the few. But there is no automatic mechanism to ensure this, and  since the ascendancy of neoliberal economics in the last forty years, the social mechanisms for  securing real wage growth have weakened or gone into reverse. While some people have  reduced their hours of work because they can afford to, many others are compelled to work  longer than they want to in a desperate effort to hold on to what they have already got. 

So what  story can  we tell our grandchildren today? For remember,since 1930, machines have been destroying  not only blue collar jobs but white collar jobs as well. Predictions are that 50 or 60 per cent of all jobs are at risk  in the next twenty years. If we get to the point at which robots can do everything that humans can do but cheaper, what will there be left for humans to do? Redundancy will be universal. 

That’s the first story. The second concerns information technology and starts with the invention of printing in the 15th century. Printed books have always carried  a huge liberating message- its what our Miami  book festival is all about -and this carries over to the social media. It can be summed up in the slogans:  ‘Knowledge is Power’. To put it more formally: every decline in the cost of obtaining information  adds to human freedom. That was and remains  the promise

But the   reality is that information technology has both enlarged the possibilities of human freedom and the power of big business and governments to limit it.

 Governments have always spied on their subjects.  The   possibility  of using technology as an instrument of social  control were dramatically visualised in Jeremy Bentham’s  famous design for a Panopticon in 1786. This was an ideal prison system, in which the prison  governor could shine a light on the surrounding prison cells from a central watchtower, while  himself remaining unseen. This would in principle abolish the need for actual prison guards,  since the prisoners, aware of being continually surveilled, would voluntarily obey the prison  rules. Bentham’s ambitions for his invention stretched beyond the prison walls.  His was a vision of society as an ideal prison.  His key methodology was asymmetric information: the governor would know all about the prisoners but would himself be invisible. 

Bentham’s world is coming to pass. Today’s digital control systems operate not through  watchtowers but through computers with electronic tracking devices, and voice and facial  recognition systems. We enter Bentham’s prison voluntarily, because it promises us freedom from  external coercion.   But once  inside,   it is increasingly difficult to escape. Commercial platforms and governments can hope to control our habits, thoughts,  and tastes by ‘mining’ the information about ourselves which we unwittingly provide  them with by using electronic devices for our convenience.  The realm of privacy recedes as the technical possibility of surveillance  expands. The world of George  Orwell”s  1984 was the product of texchnology.

My third story is about the impact of machines  on the physical survival of the human species. Again, we are offered a story of both heaven and hell.

The heavenly story is overwhelmingly concentrated health and longevity. Freedom from disease and  the promise of immortality are two  of the profoundest  aspirations  of humanity . Technology will help us realise them. 

To put it brutally, the  more robotic or computer like we become the nearer we approach perfect health and immortal life, though in what sense we will remain human is surely open to question. But long before this heavenly  point is reached machines threaten to extinguish human  life in a much more direct way.

Our planet has always been threatened by natural disasters – the dinosaurs were probably  extinguished 60 million years ago by an asteroid hitting the earth. However, for the first time,  life on earth is being threatened with anthropogenic disasters – disasters caused, directly or  indirectly, by us.  The Fourc Horsemen of the Apocalypse -nuclear war, global warming, biologically engineered  pandemics, and network dependence now hasten to end not just hopes of a better life but life itself. Men, wrote H. G.  Wells, must either become like gods or perish. Some scientists and philosophers conceive of  the new God as a super-intelligent machine able to rescue humanity from the flaws of purely  human intelligence. But how can we be sure that our new God will be benevolent? It is a sign  of the times that no one pays much attention to what the old God might have advised in these  circumstances. 

The consensus view today is that the march of the machines is unstoppable: they will only  get more and more powerful and could well spin out of control. Hence the demand, which has  migrated from science fiction to science and philosophy, to equip them with moral rules before  they go ‘rogue’. The problem is to find agreement on moral rules adequate to the task in face  of the moral  nihilism of western societies, and the resurgence of geopolitical conflict  between the democracies and despotisms.

So what should we advise our grandchildren? There are basically two alternatives. We can  either urge them to seek technical solutions for the variety of life- threatening risks which  present technology will bequeath them or we can urge them to reduce their dependence on  machines. In writing this book I have come to believe that the first endeavour, while it might  salvage fragments of human life, will destroy everything that gives value to it. The second  alternative is the only one that makes human sense, but it requires the recovery of a framework  of thought , in which religion and science both play their part in directing human life. Einstein  put the case with exemplary lucidity: ‘science without religion is lame; religion without science  is blind’. Such a recovery of religion on a sufficient scale to affect the course of events in time seems to  me inconceivable. The arguments of the book, therefore, lead to a sombre conclusion. In  biblical terms, a plague of locusts is a necessary prelude to the Second Coming.

Introduction 

For most of their history humans used tools and machines. But they did not live in a machine  age. That is to say, machines did not determine their conditions of life. Today, we live in a  machine age. We humans are ‘wired up’ parts of a complex technological system. We depend  on this system for the way we fight, the way we work, the way we live, the way we think.  

The arrival of the ‘age of machinery’ was announced in 1829 by Thomas Carlyle. As he saw  it, humanity had, for the first time, crossed over into a machine civilization composed of four  elements: a mechanical philosophy, new practical or industrial arts, the systematic division of  labour, and impersonal bureaucracy. Carlyle’s elements would come to be united in what Lewis  Mumford, a century later, called the ‘technological complex’. In the age of machinery, it is the  interaction between humans and machines, not between humans and nature, which sets the  terms of human existence.  

Carlyle’s framework offers a helpful way of thinking about how humans have reached this  point. He put first ‘mechanical philosophy’ – the view of the world as a machine (or, as it was  then thought, a clock wound up by God). In this view humans were to be understood as  machines  for the production of value; the scientific method would enable laws of human  behaviour to be established, just like the laws of physics. Knowledge of these laws could be  used to build a better society. In this book I use the word ‘technology’ to describe the  application of the mechanical philosophy, first to the organization of work and then to the  organization of life.  

Second came the ‘new practical or industrial arts’. This was technology in its narrow sense  of applying scientific knowledge to the production of useful things, thus obliterating the  classical distinction between episteme (knowledge) and techne (know-how). The history of  machinery had hitherto been one of ‘tinkering with tools’, based on experience and local  knowledge. With the Industrial Revolution came, for the first time, the application of scientific  knowledge to production, which, by the nineteenth century, was making possible an  unprecedented increase in material wealth that would only accelerate in the twentieth century.  

Third was the division of labour. The age of machinery marked a fundamental shift from the  practice of a single person making the whole (or the major part of an) object (like the potter at  his wheel) to breaking up the different tasks involved in its manufacture into discrete bits, as  in Adam Smith’s pin factory. This greatly increased the efficiency of production. Specialization  of tasks was not just for individuals but for nations: a ‘world economy’ was born, with nations  trading in goods and services for which they were thought to be specially advantaged by  climate or aptitude. More and more human tasks have been ‘optimized’ in this way, leading to  the conception of humans as interchangeable ‘bits’ in national and global supply chains.  Specialization in the production of ideas was an important aspect of the division of labour.  Fields of study became ‘disciplines’ with their own hierarchies. Scholars and academics  became specialists in small bits of thought, with no idea how these bits linked up with other  bits to give shape and meaning to the whole product.  

Carlyle’s fourth element, ‘impersonal bureaucracy’, denotes obedience to rules without  regard for persons. It is what Weber would call ‘rationalization’ – the process by which  conduct based on custom or emotion is transformed into conduct based on the rational 

adaptation of means to ends. Weber saw it as the inevitable outcome of the ‘death of God’. It  is particularly important for understanding modern techniques of control. Today we are  governed by digital bureaucrats, whose directions are justified by their scientific rationality  and are therefore beyond the affections, compromises and animosities of religion, politics, or  personal relationships. With the spread of computer networks the limited possibilities of  intrusion by traditional bureaucracies into everyday life are overcome, and their vice of  unaccountability is magnified.  

Whereas champions of the mechanical philosophy emphasized the benefits of machines in  making economic and social processes more rational and therefore efficient, Carlyle offered  the key distinction between the inhuman and the inhumane. He contrasted the often inhumane  conditions of pre-industrial life with the inhuman sovereignty of impersonal rules. I try to show  how this disharmony between being human and humanity explains the ‘torment of modernity’.  I also claim that this is a uniquely western disharmony, exported to the non-European world  by western science and western guns.  

The book is structured round the application of the mechanical philosophy first to work and  then to society. The modern age is dominated by machine-builders of both types, engineers of  the body and engineers of the soul, and by the persistent opposition to both by poets, writers,  artists.  

The first half of this book is principally about the effect of machines on work. The Prologue  on robotic hype, ancient and modern, introduces the important mythological idea of the  automaton, inanimate matter brought to life by hidden powers, from which today’s hype  around artificial intelligence ultimately derives. The persistence of such archetypes as  humankind moves forward from myth to science is a key feature of our relationship with  machines.  

Successive chapters discuss the rise of machine civilization, its material and cultural context,  its material promises, the emergence of Britain as the ‘first industrial nation’ and the resistance  to forced industrialization. The protest and fate of the Luddites, the doomed handloom weavers  of early industrial Britain, sets the scene for the current debates about the ‘future of work’ and  the meaning of ‘upskilling’. A crucial discussion point is about whether our future is  determined by the technology we use.  

The following questions dominate today’s discussion. Will human job holders be entirely  replaced by machines or only partly replaced? Will humans want to reduce their hours of work  or consume more? What social arrangements best ensure that the fruits of productivity gains are fairly distributed? What account should the drive to optimize production take of the moral  value of work? We will encounter in this discussion the crucial issue of the costs of learning  to ‘race with the machines’, and whether these involve the sacrifice of what it is to be human.  

As Carlyle already noticed in 1829, machinery was not just affecting particular industries  ‘but altering the very fabric of society through the internalisation of mechanical axioms’. The  effect of the mechanical axioms was to internalize (make as if our own) a set of norms of  behaviour externally prescribed by the engineers of the soul. We would obey Big Brother not  because he wielded a big stick, not even because we loved him, but because he talked to us in  an irresistibly rational way. 

The second half of the book takes on the implications of attempts to ‘optimize our lives’.  One does not, of course, need any special hypothesis to explain the quest of rulers for optimal  obedience from their subjects.OMIT However, the  purposes of control have expanded in line with the promise of science to improve the human  condition. Systems of control based on the incorrigibility of human behaviour have yielded to  those based on the idea of perfecting it. Since the doctrine of progress took hold in eighteenth 

century Europe, social reformers have attempted to correct not specific faults or causes of  discontent, but to build societies in which such imperfections are impossible. The social and  psychological sciences treat humans as works in progress. The chief example of the radical  social engineering project in our time was Soviet communism. It is information technology  which has made such ‘scaling-up’ of control feasible. This was the message of the three great  twentieth-century dystopian novels by Yevgeny Zamyatin, Aldous Huxley and George Orwell.  

Successive chapters follow the utopian trail from Plato to the Enlightenment, with  Christianity offering a contrapuntal theme, in which the Platonic dream of the ideal republic  came up against the implacable Augustinian doctrine of original sin. We meet the thinkers of  the Enlightenment who impatiently swept aside the Christian obstacle to building an earthly  paradise, and attend to the much-debated subject of the relationship between science and  religion. Are they opposing principles, as many of the protagonists of both sides thought (and  still think), or are they complementary forms of knowledge, and, if so, what might be the terms  of their co-existence? The chapter ‘The Devil in the Machine’ identifies the moment at the end  of the eighteenth century when philosophers and writers first started to take account of the  disruptive power of technology in their visions of the future. I then go on to describe the  political revolt against the ‘mechanical philosophy’, centred, in my reading, on the German  version of Romanticism, and culminating in the barbarism of the Nazis; take stock of the  important interwar debate on the ‘question of technics’; and survey the passage from utopia to  dystopia in the imaginative writing of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Dominating  the discussions of Part II is the question of whether the constructivist approach to building  society is compatible with what Bertrand Russell called ‘the pursuit of truth, with love, with  art, with spontaneous delight, with every ideal that men have hitherto cherished.’ 

Finally, we come to the question of the future to which our technology has led us. At the end  of his life, in 1945, H. G. Wells thought that humanity could go either up or down, a thought  echoed by contemporary transhumanists. Part III of this book tells of the rise of the computer  from its humble beginnings in counting and calculating to the project of creating an artificial  intelligence, which I interpret as a deliberate attempt to rescue the quest for perfectibility from  the destructive blows inflicted on it by purely human intelligence. Natural science, social  science and military science have all been heavily invested in this transformative project,  mostly funded by governments and visionary entrepreneurs. The question overshadowing this  part of the book is whether AI will free us finally from the tragic cycles which have marked  human history or whether it is the royal road to immortality or  extinction.  

Today it is possible to imagine five pathways to the future. The first is bullish. Arnold  Toynbee extolled the benefits of machines taking over the mundane tasks of life: ‘the transfer  of energy . . . from some lower sphere of being or of action to a higher’. He is in a long line of  technological optimists which includes Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill, Lewis Mumford and John  Maynard Keynes. These and many others have looked to science and technology to free the  mind from mundane clutter, investing it with higher and ampler possibilities, a hope which is  still alive and well, despite the blows inflicted on it by the events of the twentieth century. 

A second prognosis is optimistic but conditional. One version is that a better future crucially  depends on the replacement of capitalism by socialism. This is the Marxist utopia. Unlike  Keynes, who believed that capitalism would end automatically once it had ‘done its job’ of  supplying the world with capital goods, Marxists have argued that the end of capitalism has to  be brought about by class struggle, otherwise it would continue to put utopia  beyond reach. The other school of conditional optimists are the technological utopians who  believe that the realization of humanity’s ‘best self ’ depends on developing  super-intelligent machines invested with superior morality.   

A third possible future is spiritual extinction. This is the grand theme of dystopian thinking  as it emerged at the start of the twentieth century. Science and technology have rendered  humans not superhuman, but subhuman. In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) human  freedom is removed by chemical and psychological treatment. Huxley said in a 1961 lecture  that: 

There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people  love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a  kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have  their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be  distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing  enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.  

A fourth future is apocalyptic. Almost daily, tech experts warn that technology could lead to  the extinction of humanity. Technology is the modern Beast of the Apocalypse. Either it  precipitates a disaster – a nuclear or ecological holocaust – or it stops working, leaving humans  without the means of livelihood. Both these versions of dystopian prophecy imply the  destruction of a large part of the human population and the reversion of the ‘saved’ to a simpler  form of life. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) is a  prefigurement of technology run amok; E. M. Forster’s short story ‘The Machine Stops’(1909)  imagines what happens when the system of machinery on which we have come to depend  seizes up. Films like The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961) picture nuclear explosions  precipitating extreme climatic events. At the heart of apocalyptic prophecy is the ancient idea  of hubris, of man seeking to usurp the place of the gods, and the gods taking their revenge.  

Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground (1864) opens up a fifth way of casting the net. To  the claims of the technician, his narrator responds:  

You . . . want to cure men of their old habits and reform their will in accordance with  science and good sense. But how do you know, not only that it is possible, but also that it  is desirable to reform man in that way? And what leads you to the conclusion that man’s  inclinations need reforming? In short, how do you know that such a reformation will be a  benefit to man . . . It may be the law of logic, but not the law of humanity. 

Dostoevsky raises the fundamental question of what it is to be a person. His is a lament for  the world of choice we have lost – and the world which we might yet regain through religion  and simple things. It also points the way to a non-western future for humanity.

Is a non-western humanism possible? The questions unfolded above are questions which have tormented western thinkers since the big technological acceleration in the eighteenth  century. My justification for the neglect of eastern thought on these matters is that Carlyle’s  ‘mechanical philosophy’ is a western invention, which has been spread round the world by  western example, success and conquest. But if this version no longer offers an assured pathway  to human liberation, but rather carries a strong risk of destruction, one needs a parallel history  of non- western civilizations to get a proper sense of the possible futures facing our planet. In  Chapter 17 I offer the briefest sketch of such a history, with a few salient reference points for  contrast. It remains to be seen whether a technology infused with Chinese or Indian values is possible or desirable. 

The purpose of this book will have been accomplished if it dents the hubris of the engineers  of the soul. As St Augustine wrote of the neoplatonist philosophers of his day: ‘They think of  themselves as exalted and brilliant with the stars’ but end up ‘lost in their own ideas’. The  book’s message is that these ideas will destroy the world we know.

Finale 

Since the start of settled agriculture humans have dreamed of a recovery of Eden, a land of  milk and honey from which toil has been banished. Only western civilization managed to  develop the technology to make such a prospect feasible. Today the accelerating advance of  technology promises finally to abolish the poverty which makes burdensome work necessary.  However, with the promise of leisure came the threat of redundancy. There is no automatic  mechanism which ensures that the consumer surplus generated by technology is spread to  everyone. The continuing threat of technological innovation is to rob ever-larger fractions of  people of their employment, livelihood, status, skills, usefulness and identity, and finally make  them redundant. Hence the strength, since the Industrial Revolution, of workers’ suspicions of  machines.  

I have identified capitalism as the chief of the bundle of historic developments that caused  science-based technology to become self-propelling. Capitalism uniquely started in north-west  Europe and then became a world system. I follow Max Weber in grounding its dynamic and  legitimacy in new ideas about human nature and the ends of human existence. Modern  technology resulted from marrying the ‘spirit of capitalism’ with the natural-scientific  hypotheses and action-guiding norms which made innovation and economic growth seem a  matter of course. Unless we understand technology as a system of ideas rather than as a  necessity, we will be powerless to choose which technology is best suited to our needs and  purposes.  

The role of capitalism in unleashing technology has led Marxists to believe that the  humanization of technology requires the abolition of capitalism. However, this ignores the  extent to which technology is itself inhuman. The opposition is not between capitalism and  socialism but between humans and humanity.  

Economic redundancy is just one aspect of the broader problem of human redundancy. The  bigger problem arises from a mechanical philosophy which neutralizes culture and history and justifies control not just of nature but of society. Nature, including human nature, came to be  seen as a machine, to be optimized. What started as a metaphor became, in the eighteenth  century, a project.  

There is a direct link between technological utopianism and the degradation of culture. It is  human imperfection which creates culture. Humans turn their imperfections into interior  aesthetic and moral values. Fallibility is a necessary feature of human nature, therefore success  in ‘straightening the crooked timber’ would lead to the extinction of humanness as we know  it. A culture of robots is a contradiction in terms.  

The founders of modernity thought that the progress of reason would free humans from their  infantilism. However, they soon interpreted Bacon’s motto ‘knowledge is power’ to mean that  power should lie with those capable of knowledge (the theory of the gatekeeper). With the  advent of the internet, the question of who owns or controls the information flow through this  gateway has become crucial to the human future. The Machine threatens to make infants of all  those who do not control it. 

The founders of modernity sought to replace religious authority by scientific authority. The  restrictive scientific view of man as a cognitive machine provoked the Romantic revolt in the  name of authenticity. The ‘crisis of modernity’ resulted from the inability to replace religious  belief by a self-sufficient humanism. A gulf had opened up between science and experience.  The conflict between the ‘civilization’ of scientific universalism and the ‘culture’ of Romantic  nationalism (chiefly represented by the German Ideology) provoked the disasters of the two  world wars. This specifically western torment set the course for twentieth-century history.  Imperialism sucked the non-European world into the destruction it unleashed.  

Weber thought of bureaucratic rationalization as the final form of western civilization: an  endlessly dark, frozen landscape. The only hope was the emergence of a charismatic leader  capable of disrupting the otherwise inevitable process of spiritual extinction. He did not foresee  the continuing dynamism, and therefore continuous disruptiveness, of technology itself, and  with this, its threat to physical survival.  

As early as 1820, Mary Shelley had glimpsed the possibility that technology might go  ‘rogue’. After the First World War, what Spengler called ‘the question of technics’ came to be  linked to the physical survival of the human species, as the result of a quantum leap in  technology’s destructive power. Promethean powers were being exercised on a species too  thoughtless to take heed of its humanness. Some believe – and continue to believe – that the  answer lies in the development of ‘super-intelligent’ machines which would prevent humans  (or for that matter machines) from misusing technology. But the programme of developing  super-machines to prevent extant ones from misusing technology is itself a form of  technological madness. Behind it is the simple inability of the ‘adversary culture’ to ‘define  and sustain an effective anti-technocratic program of political action’. The blockage of action  is caused by the blockage of thought. We cannot imagine a different paradigm because we can  no longer imagine a God who cares for us.  

The economist Albert Hirschman transformed the biblical idea of the ‘little apocalypse’ into  one of the ‘optimal crisis’ – a crisis deep enough to provoke a radical change of awareness,  but not so deep that it wipes out the human species. And this has been the story of historical  progress, at least of those civilizations that survived their Toynbean ‘ordeals’. It is through  bringing about extreme events that the Devil has done God’s work. Two world wars, in which  millions died, were necessary before Europe could be pacified. Thus disaster need not  extinguish the great human adventure. But we cannot arrange ‘optimal’ disasters, nor should  we try. In Christian theodicy, Apocalypse means ‘revelation’, and is a prelude to the Second  Coming. ‘For such things must come to pass, but the end shall not be yet.’

Robert Skidelsky
Keynesian economist, crossbench peer in the House of Lords, author of Keynes: the Return of the Master and co-author of How Much Is Enough?

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