Darwin Among the Machines (1863)

http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-ButFir-t1-g1-t1-g1-t4-body.html

by sampo • 11 years ago

36 7 11 years ago

nzetc.victoria.ac.nz

dang• 11 years ago

Url changed from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_among_the_Machines, since the original source is online.

More about Samuel Butler: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Butler_(novelist). Has anyone here read his novels?

Moshe_Silnorin• 11 years ago

I read The Way of All Flesh as a kid. I remember liking it but can't recall much more about it.

schoen• 11 years ago

Huh, I kind of thought Dune's Butlerian Jihad was named for this

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butlerian_Jihad

but apparently it's regarded as a coincidence!

melloclello• 11 years ago

The Book of the Machines (Erewhon chapter 23 [1]) predicts networked machines and even that we would teach their programming languages to children:

“As yet the machines receive their impressions through the agency of man’s senses: one travelling machine calls to another in a shrill accent of alarm and the other instantly retires; but it is through the ears of the driver that the voice of the one has acted upon the other. Had there been no driver, the callee would have been deaf to the caller. There was a time when it must have seemed highly improbable that machines should learn to make their wants known by sound, even through the ears of man; may we not conceive, then, that a day will come when those ears will be no longer needed, and the hearing will be done by the delicacy of the machine’s own construction? — when its language shall have been developed from the cry of animals to a speech as intricate as our own?

“It is possible that by that time children will learn the differential calculus — as they learn now to speak — from their mothers and nurses, or that they may talk in the hypothetical language, and work rule of three sums, as soon as they are born; but this is not probable; we cannot calculate on any corresponding advance in man’s intellectual or physical powers which shall be a set-off against the far greater development which seems in store for the machines. Some people may say that man’s moral influence will suffice to rule them; but I cannot think it will ever be safe to repose much trust in the moral sense of any machine.

“Again, might not the glory of the machines consist in their being without this same boasted gift of language? ‘Silence,’ it has been said by one writer, ‘is a virtue which renders us agreeable to our fellow-creatures.’”

[1] https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/butler-samuel/187...

sampo• 11 years ago

A short summary, by just quoting from the article:

There are few things of which the present generation is more justly proud than of the wonderful improvements which are daily taking place in all sorts of mechanical appliances. […] what the end of this mighty movement is to be. In what direction is it tending?

[…]

What sort of creature man’s next successor in the supremacy of the earth is likely to be. We have often heard this debated; but it appears to us that we are ourselves creating our own successors; we are daily adding to the beauty and delicacy of their physical organisation; we are daily giving them greater power and supplying by all sorts of ingenious contrivances that self-regulating, self-acting power which will be to them what intellect has been to the human race. In the course of ages we shall find ourselves the inferior race.

[…]

We take it that when the state of things shall have arrived which we have been above attempting to describe, man will have become to the machine what the horse and the dog are to man.

[…]

Our opinion is that war to the death should be instantly proclaimed against them. Every machine of every sort should be destroyed by the well-wisher of his species.

jcr• 11 years ago

Pilfered from Wikipedia entry:

Butler developed "Darwin Among the Machines" and subsequent articles into The Book of the Machines, three chapters of Erewhon, published anonymously in 1872.

Project Gutenberg eBook Erewhon by Samuel Butler:

http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/1906

captnswing• 11 years ago

check out George Dyson's great book of the same title that covers Butlers' essay in detail

Very recommended reading

http://www.amazon.com/Darwin-Among-The-Machines-Intelligence...

Darwin Among the Machines (1863)

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