The Butler and The Servant
(repost from Substack: originally posted June 26th, 2025)
“Where does consciousness begin and where end? Who can draw any line? Is not everything interwoven with everything? Is not machinery linked with animal life in an infinite variety of ways?…Its author said that machines were to be regarded as a part of man’s own physical nature, being really nothing but extra-corporeal limbs…His memory goes in his pocket-book”
-Samuel Butler, "The Book of the Machines" Erewhon (1872)
Is the notebook you carry around and jot your thoughts down in - your partner or your servant? Does the answer change if it’s your laptop in question? And what is the difference, really? A partner can increase your creativity - challenging and expanding your mind. A servant serves. It does not increase the ability to do the tasks the servant does, but is designed to assume inferior tasks so that time may be spent working on important matters.
But…what if the muscle that atrophies, from relinquishing these tasks to the servant, is your ability to think?
In the psychology journal: Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, a study by Ihara, Nakajima, Kake, Ishimaru, Osugi, and Naruse (2021), concluded that “results suggest that the movements involved in handwriting allow a greater memorization of new words. The advantage of handwriting over typing might also be caused by a more positive mood during learning.”
There is a proven scientific benefit to writing over typing when taking notes. You remember words better when they are written down, rather than typed first. How much you rely on the machine determines how much of this is a partnership vs how much of it is a transference of the self to the machine.
There are some words which I know the meaning of quite well. “Atrophy”, “transference”, “relinquish” - so well I use them without any thought. The more I speak them aloud and write these words down to convey my meaning, the more their meaning is conveyed to me. The word and I are working together to capture the truth.
Then there are the words whose meaning alludes me. Take the word “fecund.” I did not know the meaning of the word fecund for quite some time (it did not come up much at Denny’s). Over the course of months “fecund” kept coming up in different books and articles I was reading. Every time “fecund” would appear, baffling me, I would do what most do: type “fecund” in the search bar. You don’t even need to type in “definition” afterwards - Google knows the only reason people are searching “fecund” is because they don’t have any idea what it means. I would read the definition: “Fertile, able to produce new growth.” Then, I triumphantly returned to the original sentence - which once filled me with consternation - confident and capable. I was equipped with new knowledge and an alliteration to boot. What a time to be alive!
Still, there was the problem. I never started using the word myself. In my thoughts the word “fertile” would spring but never “fecund” - frankly it’s “fec” and overall inharmonious sound, made the definition feel distant. In a month, when someone used fecund in another article, I would look it up again: “able to produce growth”.
And in another 2 months: “fertile”.
And in another month after that: “are you kidding?”.
Finally, the word appeared on yet one more page, and my left eye started twitching. How the fuck did I still not know what “fecund” meant? (I never had such challenges with “fuck”.)
I realized something in that moment. I never knew what fecund meant. Even when I knew for the purpose of reading the sentence it wasn’t me that knew - it was the dictionary, the machine. I had a false knowledge. It was GPS directions. If you take the GPS away - I have no skill. I may know how to drive - but I have no skill for navigation.
This time, I did something different, I pulled out my notebook and made myself write three different sentences with the word “fecund” in it - like I was in 2nd grade. Something changed. I knew what the word fecund meant…sort of.
I will admit to you now: in writing this article I had to look up “fecund” once more to confirm I had indeed learned the meaning of the word. Then I had to look it up again two seconds later because I forgot what it said.
But, it wasn’t quite the same this time. It was fact checking, not fact finding.
Before, with the repeated searches, I was relying on a crutch. When I pressed the return key on “fecund”, all I needed to do was remember it for 5 seconds and then my brain knew it could let the meaning go. “Make a left on West 4th Street.” Now let it go. Siri whispers: “Don’t worry. You don’t need to remember how you got here: because I’ll always find the way home.”
This time I had to design a creation entirely from my own faculties. Even though my crutch was now a page, it was a conversation between me and my mind. The new words brimmed with fecundity.
In this sense, the notebook - it’s pages, it’s lines - was my partner, not my servant. I thought.
As much as it did to answer this question, it only crafted bigger conundrums. What was the line between partner and servant? Between human and machine?
When someone uses a pan to cook cod, the pan is their partner. If I take away that pan, they can use a different one. The skill remains. But is the cooking the crucial skill, or is the pan the greater hand in creation?
The human in question cannot forge metal. But he the blacksmith of ages past can. Are we all less human because of the rudimentary skills we’ve lost? Were kings and queens machines because they never had them? The cod cannot cook without fire, but I need a match. Have we loss the ability to make for ourselves the gift of Prometheus?
It’s not all so clear cut.
When I use my notebook to jot down a thought that is consuming me, I ask the pages to take this truth from me so my brain can be free. Are the notebook and I still partners?
It may only become my partner if I return to the ink in the parchment and plant the idea in free time, allowing it to grow. I wonder if the question is really: Do you let the words seep into you and create meaning? Generate something? Or are they for entertainment and diversion? Is diversion partner or servant?
The issue with servants is that they are not, by default, destined to always be loyal.
When the state machine send soldiers to war, the dying men are not partners. They are servants. However, this servant has a gun. The state may have much that keeps the soldier in line, yet if the soldiers collectively turn against the state - with their servants: their weapons - can they destroy the state?
In this revelation I discover a weakness of the soldier, even should they turn their barrels on the king. The soldier’s servant is not only her gun, but her means of communication. When Israel blew up the Hezbollah pagers in 2024, in the midst of the Israel-Gaza war, Israel turned the servants against the owners at the will of a stronger sovereign.
Every servant and every technology we become dependent upon for productivity and welfare has the potential to harm us. If we are dependent on social media to entertain us, it can also indoctrinate us with falsehoods. If we are dependent on laptops and internet to write and learn, it can also force a complete dependence on the machine to create anything at all. It can force our lives to be inextricable from it and thus vulnerable if it no longer needs our contributions to access the fruits of that productivity - ie AI.
If AI is fecund without human contribution: are machines the servants of humans? Or are we the machine?
When we awake and pick up our smart phones, only to press snooze on the offline engagement button, we are not staying vigilant and aware of our rights. If we do not exert our will on democracy and law-fare, the state and the corporations which “serve” our dopamine receptors, will have free reign to shape us in their image.
By signing over our data and societal functions to a few silicon valley CEO’s, we signed over our most human and fecund self to the state. In return we asked not to be bothered. As we scrolled, we didn’t notice that the state received a compelling offer from Sam Altman: sign over democracy to a sovereign AI. In return, the Leviathan asks not to be bothered.
