Gaby Wood

The modern world is so full of artificial creatures that we dare not stop to think what it means to make a perfect copy of a human being. But behind each of these inventions is a single notion: that life can be simulated by art or science or magic. And embodied in each invention is a riddle, a fundamental challenge to our perception of what makes us human.

In other words, the problem was not just that workers only made a small piece of the final object, but that in the process they themselves were broken into pieces, as if producer and product were so closely identified with one another that they took on each other's attributes, and as if man, in making machines, must inescapably lose his "manhood" and become a part of a machine himself.
It is a scenario familiar from early-twentieth-century films such as Fritz Lang's Metropolis and Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times, but in late-ninetieth-century America nowhere was the mechanization of human beings more ironically in force than in the production, piece by piece and thousand by thousand, of Edison's talking doll.