

Darwin Among the Machines (1863) - sampo
http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-ButFir-t1-g1-t1-g1-t4-body.html

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jcr
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](http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/1906)

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dang
Url changed from
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_among_the_Machines](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)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Butler_\(novelist\)).
Has anyone here read his novels?

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melloclello
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...](https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/butler-
samuel/1872/erewhon/ch23.htm)

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captnswing
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...](http://www.amazon.com/Darwin-Among-The-Machines-
Intelligence/dp/0465031625)

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sampo
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._

