The Sorcerer's Slave

Disney's Fantasia, automation-magic, and Ivan Illich

The year is 1940. You are both a classical music and a Disney fan. You hear that a new Disney production synchronizing the studio’s world renowned animation with none other than Bach’s Tocatta and Fugue in D Minor, Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, and more, conducted by the cabinet-maker’s son Leopold Stokowski¹ of Philadelphia Orchestra fame, is slated to show in your local theater. You decide to purchase a pair of tickets for a steep-but-worth-it 72¢², one for you and one for your gal (you’ve been going steady for a while but the last thing you saw was the adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice starring Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier, so it’s time to catch a new flick).

A sumptuous feast is presented for your sensorial pleasure. Goldenrod bursts blossom across the silver screen to the pulse of bow strokes. Fairy folk flitter to and fro, alighting on flower petals soaked in a sonic bath of ethereal harp strings, clarinet’s warm, woody tones, and percussive pitches of xylophone. Mixed with the iconic aroma of freshly popped corn and head set a’spin by skin touching lover’s skin (just holding hands, people, no frisky business), seeing Walt Disney’s Fantasia was not an experience you’d soon forget, one worth at least the three quarters it cost for tickets.

Just tonight, the evening of August 20th, I was watching an old episode of the Disneyland TV show (later called The Wonderful World of Disney) entitled “The Pre-Opening Report from Disneyland” which, helpfully, is exactly what it sounds like. Half the episode was dedicated to giving a behind-the-scenes look at the progress of Walt Disney’s Original Magic Kingdom as opening day approached, only four short days after the airing of this episode³; the other half was a tribute to Mickey Mouse which included the Sorcerer’s Apprentice segment from Fantasia. As I watched this particular sequence, I was struck by something that had never occurred to me before: The Sorcerer’s Apprentice is, among other things, a warning against the undisciplined use of automation-magic.

As soon as the thought presented itself to me, I had to quickly do a Google search to see if anyone else had already written on this. In a piece exploring the ethical dimensions of AI, Martina Greco uses this exact segment from Fantasia as a jumping off point for her thoughts. She rightly points out that AI, like the tools that have come before it, fulfill “the basic mission statement of all technology…to save us time and energy.” But this is where what I wanted to say and what Greco said diverge. She goes on to draw a lesson directed, presumably, at coders: Apprentice Mickey’s spell-parameters were incorrect, or at least incomplete, and the chaos that ensues as a result illustrates for us the potential issues we might have with AI since it is a student and we humans the parameter-setting teachers. “[W]e just have to ensure we’re a good teacher,” Greco insists.

Indeed, our divergence actually happens in the middle of the quoted sentence. Hiding in the ellipses just before Greco wrote “to save us time” is the short phrase “to do the work”: “we create a machine to do the work to save us time and energy.” Put a pin in that for a moment and allow me to paint the animated scene.

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice

As Paul Dukas’s orchestral piece begins, we are greeted by the stern face of a hoary headed Yensid, master wizard under whom Mickey serves as apprentice, celestially patterned pointed cap sitting atop his silver hair. He waves hands full of crooked fingers over a human skull as smoke rises, becoming colorful and taking on the shape first of a bat, then of a swallowtail butterfly. We are then shown Mickey with a bucket of water in each of his hands, wearily but purposefully ascending a stone staircase towards a cistern that he might fill it for his master. The mouse’s eyes glance toward Yensid as he, with a wiggle of his fingers, beckons the spell downward, returning it to the skull from whence it came before succumbing to a well-earned yawn, removing his magic hat, and taking to the bed for a night’s rest. He sets the blue hat next to the skull on his table. The skull sits dull, lifeless. The hat, however, glows with a pulsing luminescence too tempting to resist.

Mickey, careful to peek around the corner, and thereby assured that the wizard has actually departed, sees his chance. He dons the hat. He, remembering his own toilsome labor, now wiggles his fingers, not at the skull to conjure images, but at a broom. It shivers to life. Mickey directs it to stand between two buckets of water. It does. He points at one bucket. An arm sprouts forth and grasps its handle. He points at the other bucket. Another arm. Mickey marches. The broom falls in line. Mickey makes his way to the cistern and mimes dumping the bucket. The broom approaches the cistern and actually does so. Mickey shows the broom where to get more water. It fetches more. And so the spell is cast.

Mickey, pleased with his obvious prowess in the ways of magic and newly unencumbered from his work, kicks his feet up on the table as outstretched index fingers wave opposite each other, conducting a symphony of one. He is in control of what’s happening, even from his seated position. That is, he was until his eyelids slammed shut. Mickey floats off into dreams of directing the motion of the stars and commanding the waving seas, but awakens from his slumber to discover that he’d lost control of his enchanted broom. It had not ceased from its magically automated labor, dumping bucketful after bucketful of water into the overflowing cistern until the chair on which he’d been sleeping was afloat, surging forward and tossing him into the violent drink.

Desperate to stop the rogue broom but finding himself unable to disenchant it with the same digital wave with which he’d begun (nor again did begging, pleading, or tackling the dang thing work), Mickey grabs an axe conveniently mounted to a nearby wall and, just off screen but visible by shadows, hacks away at the wooden handle of the cleaning tool. Cut all to toothpicks and splinters, the tool formerly known as “broom” laid still. The apprentice inhales, exhales, and trudges off. Anyone who has ever been an apprentice that has nearly caused disaster and narrowly avoided it knows the exact breath and the exact dragging footsteps.

But he breathed easy too soon. A moment later, the bits of wood are revivified, expanded, transmogrified into copies of the broom. Mickey had chopped off the hydra’s head only for fifty more to take its place. The chaos likewise multiplies fiftyfold. The apprentice is now in over his head fifty times more than he had been. The waters, filling the room nearly to the ceiling, threaten to drown our favorite rodent and would’ve been successful if the master’s grimoire hadn’t been floating on the surface within mouse-paddling distance. Mickey climbs on and manically flips through pages looking for the “Stop the broom” spell. Just as the flood waters began whirlpooling, dragging the apprentice to an indecorous and decidedly soggy death, Yensid descends his stairs and, with ire etched into his face and eyes alight, slices his hands through the air to part the waters as if he’d witnessed Moses do the same at the Red Sea.

The master had saved the apprentice, as masters often do. Yensid took several commanding steps forward toward the besogged mouse. Mickey could hardly raise his eyes to meet his masters fierce gaze. The hat sat dully atop the apprentice’s head. It was now Yensid whose eyes and head shone forth with magical luminescence. Mickey sheepishly removes the hat, hands it to his master, picks up the only remaining broom, hands it to his master, and then retrieves the buckets as if to say, “Oh boy, sir, I’m doing the work you asked me to do.” In the final moment of this segment, Yensid, not showing any sign of amusement with his apprentice’s ill-advised shenanigans, uses the broom to swat Mickey on the tuchus as he shuffles past.

The Lessons

Mickey in Fantasia is what we have become. In over his head? Yes. Smug in the little bit he thought he knew? Uh huh. Enticed by the power he thought he could wield? Definitely. Choking on a mouthful more than he could chew? Apparently so.

But it’s not merely these. These are symptoms. Go back to the pin I told you to place. He used his magic towards what end?

To do the work for him.

This is, I think, the source of our protagonist’s woes. Mickey was not motivated to use the little magic he possessed for something malicious, certainly, but neither was he motivated by virtue. The work was hard, he was tired of panting, his feet were achy, his grip growing weak. I’ve been in his shoes. Water weighs 8.33 pounds per gallon and there are five gallons in a Home Depot bucket. This was no light work. And yet the work was necessary to his apprenticeship, even if that fact was not immediately obvious to him. Mickey thought his woes were rooted in the difficulty of the task his master had assigned to him; his real problem was that he had succumbed to sloth’s promise of ease. He had become energized by vice and the allure of unearned leisure.

Or maybe these are further symptoms and not his real problem after all. Perhaps his real real problem is that, in spite of his title of Apprentice, Mickey thought himself a slave.

There is a world of difference between the master/slave and master/apprentice dynamics. In the former, labor is exploited for some benefit to the master irrespective of the effect on the enslaved. Agency is removed and there is only one job: to do what the master has instructed. In the latter, labor serves the dual purpose of completing necessary, sometimes menial tasks, and forming the technical skills, morals, and other faculties for the mutual benefit of master and apprentice. The master’s goal is to develop in the apprentice as much agency as possible so that, in time, they can themselves attain mastery and work for the common good. The slave is forever to remain a slave; the apprentice shall one day become a master.

But the slave, in spite of the master/slave arrangement, does not long to remain enslaved. Of course not. Their desire is to be free of their toil and become a master themselves. One cannot live long under the direct influence of tyranny free of the temptation to become a tyrant.

And so it was with Mickey. Yensid’s appearance had shifted in the mouse’s mind. How can I be sure? Consider the glimmer of the hat when Yensid set it down and how Mickey, when placing it on his own head, failed to do what his master had been doing. He gave no thought to the skull, to conjuring what Yensid had, but only to bringing a technology into existence, an automaton, that would complete his labor for him as he what? Sat back with feet crossed on the table? Mickey made what he imagined he himself was, a machine in his own image: he enslaved the broom with automation-magic. And it was an absolute disaster.

How could it not be? When we are energized by vice, we sow seeds of chaos and, in due time, reap a harvest of death.

In arguably his most famous work, Tools for Conviviality, Roman Catholic priest and philosopher Ivan Illich presents us with some helpful sentences that I will quote here at length. Writing in the early 1970s, Illich says:

For a hundred years we have tried to make machines work for men and to school men for life in their service. Now it turns out that machines do not “work” and that people cannot be schooled for a life at the service of machines. The hypothesis on which the experiment was built must now be discarded. The hypothesis was that machines can replace slaves. The evidence shows that, used for this purpose, machines enslave men. Neither a dictatorial proletariat nor a leisure mass can escape the dominion of constantly expanding industrial tools.

The crisis can be solved only if we learn to invert the present deep structure of tools; if we give people tools that guarantee their right to work with high, independent efficiency, thus simultaneously eliminating the need for either slaves or masters and enhancing each person’s range of freedom. People need new tools to work with rather than tools that “work” for them. They need technology to make the most of the energy and imagination each has, rather than more well-programmed energy slaves. (Illich, 1973, p. 10)

Is this not the lesson Mickey learned? He had intended to make for himself an energy slave such as he felt he was, and quickly learned that he had lost all of his freedom. He had dreams of directing the motion of celestial bodies and making fans of sea foam as waves broke against the rock of his power but was reduced to gasping breaths and desperate cries for salvation.

How could he possibly hope to orchestrate the cosmos with a sweep of his hand when he could not even handle a broom? How could he control the breaking waves when he had forgotten his responsibility to tote buckets of water? On what virtue would this structure of mastery be built?

We often look at technology’s shimmer with the naïve optimism of would-be tyrants, seeking to create energy slaves so that we can kick our feet up on life’s desk and conduct the symphony until we fall asleep. It appears to us to be aglow with opportunity, filled with promise of a leisurely, restful future. But technologies and machines, contrary to Greco and consonant with Illich, “do not ‘work’.” People do.

This was Yensid’s final on-screen lesson for Mickey when he swatted him with the broom, and it is now the lesson we must learn. A society which gives “priority to the protection, the maximum use, and the enjoyment of the one resource that is almost equally distributed among all people: personal energy under personal control,”⁴ Illich’s convivial society, can only come about when that society is populated by working apprentices under benevolent masters. Slaves will continue to desperately wave their hands in hope of controlling automation-magic that will “do the work for them,” but apprentices have been tutored to work in and with the world by masters who have contemplated the skull, those who, like Yensid, bring forth balance and beauty.

We find ourselves floating amidst chaos and the Yensids that remain are quickly passing to their slumber. Let us apprentice ourselves to them while we have the time that we ourselves might become masters: not those who seek that work be done for us and so enslave ourselves and others, but those who likewise beget masters, who labor in the world to still the chaos, tools in hand and sweat on brow for the common good and mutual flourishing of all.

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1. Leopold Stokowski. (2023, August 15). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_Stokowski

2. Greenwald, M. (2019, April 4). Here's How Much a "Cheap Date" Cost Every Decade Since the 1940s. BestLife. Retrieved August 20, 2023, from https://bestlifeonline.com/cost-of-a-date/

3. Disneyland’s opening day was July 17, 1955. This episode of Disneyland aired on July 13, 1955.

4. Illich, I. (1973). Tools For Conviviality (5th ed., pp. 11-12). Marion Boyars Publishers Ltd.