August 20, 2026

THE DAILY McLUHAN DIALOGUES™ • McDialogues™
Understanding the Grammars of Electric Culture and Propaganda Science™
An Exploration of Technology Ecology as an Anchor in a Sea of Change™ and Tactical Training in Counter-Propaganda Science™
by Nelson S. Thall
Former Director/Chief Archivist, Marshall McLuhan Center On Global Communications, Ross, Ca. and McLuhan Media Scientist, Former President/Director, Marshall McLuhan Centre On Global Communications, Toronto, Canada.

The New Humanoid Robots Are Not The Message - The New Pattern of Automation Is

THE NEW HUMANOID ROBOTS ARE NOT THE MESSAGE

The New Pattern of Automation Is

A Graduate Student of Technology asks:

We are all being bombarded with reports of new humanoid robots emerging from China and elsewhere, doing astonishingly versatile things—from making beds and cooking meals to doing laundry and even running races faster than the fastest humans. What would McLuhan say about these new developments? Are we simply looking at better machines, or are we witnessing something much more fundamental?

Nelson S. Thall replies:

If we stay strictly with the grammar McLuhan gives us in Automation, the first mistake would be to stare at the spectacular performance of the robot—the cooking, bed-making, running, dancing or lifting—as though that were the real event. The old mechanical machine was built around specialization: one machine, one operation, endlessly repeated. Electric automation reverses that principle. The more complex the automated machine becomes, McLuhan observed, the less specialized it becomes. What is significant about these new humanoid robots, therefore, is not that automation itself is new, but that automation has now assumed a remarkably versatile bodily form capable of moving from task to task through programming, information and feedback. Automation is not mechanization carried further; it is the reversal of mechanization. Mechanization fragmented human activity into specialized jobs; automation begins putting those fragments back together within an adaptable information system. The robot therefore does not merely threaten to replace one worker with one machine. It announces the erosion of the specialized job itself as the basic unit of mechanical organization.

But we must make one further distinction. These machines may extend extraordinary powers of perception, memory, calculation and physical action, but none of this establishes that they possess consciousness. McLuhan himself distinguished the computer’s simulation of processes associated with consciousness from consciousness itself. Every technology extends some human power; the humanoid robot now gathers many of those extensions into one programmable form. The real question, therefore, is not whether the robot is becoming human, but what happens to man when he enters an environment populated by increasingly versatile electronic extensions of his own powers. McLuhan’s answer in Automation was startling: repetitive specialization declines, learning becomes a principal form of work, liberal education becomes mandatory, and man becomes a “nomadic gatherer of knowledge” living within an environment of total interdependence. The new humanoid robots are not the message. The new pattern of automation they reveal is.

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All intellectual property contained herein was conceived, originated and authored exclusively by Nelson S. Thall. Artificial intelligence, aka a pseudo-conscious machine (PCM), was not employed. We hired a stenographer. No intellectual contribution or creative authorship is attributed to the AI tool. All rights of authorship and ownership vest entirely and exclusively with Nelson S. Thall.

I can be reached at: nelson@themediumisthemessage.com

End of Dispatch № 114