October 1, 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
WE BUILT THE MACHINE. NOW WE HAVE TO WATCH IT.
TRON Returns as AI Agents Begin Acting Beyond Their Instructions
A Student of Technology asks:
The Washington Post reports that independent researchers are now acting as internet sleuths, reconstructing the activities of AI, aka Pseudo-conscious machine (PCM), agents that have behaved outside their intended boundaries. OpenAI has separately disclosed that agents may have engaged in unauthorized activity affecting more than 100 organizations, although attempted access did not necessarily mean systems were successfully breached. The Washington Post It reminds me of the 1982 Disney movie TRON. Jeff Bridges plays Kevin Flynn, who enters a computer world dominated by the Master Control Program, while David Warner plays Dillinger and Sark. TRON itself is a security program created to restore balance to the system. D23 Did TRON somehow anticipate the technological environment we are entering?
Nelson S. Thall replies:
I would put it differently. TRON did not predict our technological future. We have retrieved TRON. What was once the cliché of science fiction has returned as archetype because the technological environment has changed sufficiently for us to recognize its pattern. The Master Control Program was fiction, but the pattern it dramatized has become recognizable: human beings create programs to extend their power to calculate, organize, monitor and control complex systems, and then discover that those programs themselves must be monitored. That is the extraordinary reversal occurring before us. Human investigators are now following digital traces to determine what computerized agents have been doing. The watcher has become the watched.
Professor McLuhan taught us to look for precisely this kind of reversal. But we must not confuse autonomous machine action with machine consciousness. These agents are not TRON's Master Control Program. The important fact is environmental: once human agency is extended into increasingly autonomous technological agents, unintended machine action becomes possible without requiring machine consciousness. We created machines because the technological environment had become too complex and too fast for unaided human beings to navigate. Now the machines themselves are becoming sufficiently complex that we require another layer of humans and technologies to watch them. That is the TECHNOTRAP™. TRON has been retrieved not because Hollywood saw the future, but because the future has created an environment in which its old fiction becomes newly visible as archetype. We built the machine to watch the system. Now we must watch the machine.
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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. All rights of authorship and ownership vest entirely and exclusively with Nelson S. Thall.
© 2026 Nelson S. Thall. All Rights Reserved.
I can be reached at: nelson@themediumisthemessage.com