The Machines That Save Us Are Also the Ones That Kill Us: William T. Wiley Revisited

Introduction

When American artist William T. Wiley coined the cryptic acronyms M.A.S.U. (“Machines Are Saving Us”) and M.A.K.U. (“Machines Are Killing Us”), he was not simply commenting on technology. He was revealing a deeper paradox at the heart of modern life, the impossibility of separating our tools from ourselves. In Wiley’s ironic phrasing, the machine embodies both hope and threat, salvation and destruction, cure and poison. Today, as artificial intelligence and large language models (LLMs) transform our creative and intellectual landscape, Wiley’s playful opposition feels uncannily prophetic. His “both/and” vision captures the essence of our contemporary anxiety: the very technologies that extend human thought also risk erasing the distinction between the human and the machinic. In Derrida’s sense, they are pharmaka, remedies that contain their own poison. To understand how Wiley anticipated this moment, we can trace his ideas back to the artistic lineage that first blurred the boundaries between art, technology, and the real.

Comic Books and the Challenge to Artistic Hierarchy

Comic books may seem far removed from today’s debates on AI, yet they played a decisive role in reshaping how artists understood reality in the twentieth century. In postwar Britain, figures like Eduardo Paolozzi, Peter Blake, and Richard Hamilton began appropriating comic imagery and symbols of American popular culture as a form of rebellion against the conservative art establishment. Their use of comic strips and advertisements was not mere decoration, it was a statement against cultural hierarchy, against the assumption that “fine art” must be separate from mass media.

Across the Atlantic, American Pop artists such as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein radicalized this gesture. By enlarging comic panels or repeating images of Superman and Popeye, they revealed that modern reality itself was already mediated, a copy of copies. As critics noted, their “realism reflected the loss of the real.” Pop Art thus exposed a world where images had replaced experiences, anticipating what Jean Baudrillard would later call the era of simulation. Disneyland, for Baudrillard, was not fantasy but hyperreality, a mirror that hides the absence of reality itself.

This artistic shift prepared the way for Wiley’s work. If Pop Art revealed that life had become indistinguishable from its media representations, Wiley pushed further, showing that language and technology were part of the same system, one that now shapes the very conditions of perception.

William T. Wiley’s Playful Use of Image and Text

William T. Wiley emerged in the 1960s within this Pop-inflected milieu but infused it with a uniquely reflective irony. His canvases often feature puns, cryptic symbols, and enigmatic slogans that play between humor and philosophical critique. The juxtaposition of text and image in his work echoes the strategies of Magritte, Jasper Johns, Barbara Kruger, and Jean-Michel Basquiat — artists who used words as visual elements to expose social contradictions.

For Wiley, however, the pun is more than wit; it becomes a method of thinking. His wordplay forces viewers to oscillate between meanings, never resting on one interpretation. M.A.S.U. and M.A.K.U. exemplify this logic. They condense two contradictory attitudes toward technology, faith and fear, into a single linguistic gesture. Beneath their comic brevity lies a serious philosophical question: can machines both save and destroy us?

This blend of playfulness and critique anticipates today’s digital irony — the way memes, slogans, and viral phrases compress complex emotions about technology into shorthand. Wiley’s art thus mirrors a world where image and word, humor and anxiety, coexist within the same frame.

Technology, Ambivalence, and Derrida’s Logic of “Both/And”

Wiley’s refusal to choose between M.A.S.U. and M.A.K.U. places his work squarely within a Derridean logic of both/and. Jacques Derrida dismantled binary oppositions — presence/absence, speech/writing, good/evil — showing that meaning emerges from their interplay rather than from stable separation. Similarly, Wiley’s slogans refuse the comfort of clarity. Machines are not simply saving or killing us; they do both, simultaneously.

This ambivalence echoes Derrida’s notion of the supplement — something that adds to and replaces the original at the same time. Technology supplements humanity, it extends our reach but also reveals lack and dependence. The very tools that empower us also define and limit us. Wiley’s art captures this tension through visual and verbal irony, where the comic surface conceals an existential reflection on modern life.

By inhabiting contradiction rather than resolving it, Wiley’s M.A.S.U. / M.A.K.U. dialectic becomes a philosophical stance. It reminds us that technology is not external to humanity but woven into our being. There is no “outside” from which to judge it. This insight provides the conceptual bridge to our present condition, where artificial intelligence functions as both an extension and a displacement of human cognition.

Relation of “M.A.S.U.” and “M.A.K.U.” with Today’s AI and LLMs

In the twenty-first century, Wiley’s twin slogans find new life in the discourse surrounding AI and large language models. The ambivalence he expressed through painting has become the defining mood of our digital era.

M.A.S.U. – Machines Are Saving Us: For many, AI represents salvation. It accelerates research, democratizes information, aids creativity, and addresses global challenges from medical diagnostics to climate prediction. Large language models amplify human intellect by processing and organizing vast bodies of knowledge. In this sense, they are cognitive prosthetics, technologies that expand rather than replace human thought. They appear as the ultimate manifestation of progress: efficient, accessible, tireless, and endlessly adaptable.

M.A.K.U. – Machines Are Killing Us: Yet the same systems that promise salvation also provoke anxiety. AI is perceived as eroding authenticity, threatening jobs, and compromising privacy. Artists fear obsolescence; educators face plagiarism; writers and programmers see their skills automated. Even more troubling is the epistemic uncertainty: LLMs produce language that sounds human but originates from statistical correlation, not understanding. They “simulate meaning” rather than generate it, echoing the Pop Art paradox that “realism reflects the loss of the real.” The M.A.S.U. / M.A.K.U. tension thus encapsulates AI’s double face. It is both a mirror and a mask.

From a Derridean perspective, AI exemplifies the supplement. It “adds” to human creativity — by generating ideas, translations, or artworks — but also “replaces” it, challenging the notion of originality. The machine’s power to produce meaning destabilizes the distinction between the human and the artificial. In this sense, AI is a pharmakon: it cures the limitations of human labor while poisoning the very concept of human uniqueness. Wiley’s slogans, once playful, now read as prophecy.

From Machines to Metaphors: Wiley’s Insight Today

What makes Wiley’s vision so enduring is precisely his irony, his refusal to resolve the contradiction. In a culture that swings between techno-utopian optimism (“AI will save us”) and apocalyptic pessimism (“AI will destroy us”), Wiley’s both/and offers a more truthful stance. He invites us not to choose sides but to recognize the entanglement.

AI, like Wiley’s machines, functions as a mirror. It reflects the desires and fears of its creators. Its “intelligence” is not alien but human, a projection of our longing to transcend limitation and our dread of losing control. The task, then, is not to reject the machine but to interpret what it reveals about ourselves.

In this light, Wiley’s M.A.S.U. and M.A.K.U. become more than witty acronyms. They are metaphors for our time, for a world where art, philosophy, and technology converge to expose the ambiguity of progress. The line between creator and creation, human and machine, is no longer clear. Yet perhaps, as Wiley suggests, the goal is not to restore that boundary but to understand its dissolution.

The artist’s role, like the philosopher’s, is to illuminate contradiction, not to resolve it. In an era when AI generates images, poems, and arguments, Wiley’s ironic wisdom remains vital: the machine that saves us is also the one that kills us, and both gestures are part of the same creative act.

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