If you look at it in a certain way, they already have.

Ms. Howe: Yeah, beautiful, beautiful, such a relief. You can just rest in it. But there’s a way that the machines — I love Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke, and all of those old-school science fiction writers. And remember all those books we read — maybe you read when you were a kid too?

Ms. Tippett: I did too. I loved all that stuff.

Ms. Howe: I adored it. And about the robots were going to take over and the machines were going to take over. And just last week it occurred to me, “Well, they have. It’s just different from what we expected.” Joseph Brodsky…

Ms. Tippett: [laughs] That’s right.

Ms. Howe. It’s just different. And one of my teachers at Columbia was Joseph Brodsky, who’s a Russian poet, wonderful, amazing poet, who was exiled from the Soviet Union for being a poet. And he said look, he said, “You Americans, you are so naïve. You think evil is going to come into your houses wearing big black boots. It doesn’t come like that. Look at the language. It begins in the language.” And I was thinking the machines — what face do you look into more than any other face in your life? The face of my iPhone.

Ms. Tippett: Your screen. Yeah.

Ms. Howe: My screen. I gaze into that face. I do what it tells me to do. If aliens came down and saw us all walking around, what would we do? All of us are walking around…

Ms. Tippett: [laughs] Who do they obey?

Ms. Howe: …looking into the — “Oh, they serve these machines.” I mean, the machines rule us. I have no will when it comes to my machines, to the computer, hours doing emails. I never applied for that job. What happened? It happened in 10 years, 15 years. They rule. It’s different from what we expected.

From
On Being with Krista Tippet, interview with Marie Howe, "The Power of Words to Save Us" first aired April 25, 2013