Nearly 162 years ago, a visionary predicted the evolution of machines and the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) with unnerving accuracy. He boldly foresaw a future where humanity’s mechanical creations might even gain consciousness and supplant us as the dominant species on Earth.
His name was Samuel Butler, a British-born writer (not to mention artist, photographer, composer, and sheep farmer) who’s perhaps best known for the satirical novel Erewhon. However, some of his less-appreciated insights can be found in a letter he sent to the editor of The Press newspaper in New Zealand on 13 June 1863, written under the pseudonym of “Cellarius.”
Given its timely themes of artificial machines running amok, the letter has recently done the rounds again on social media after being shared on X (the app formerly known as Twitter) by Peter Wildeford of the Institute for AI Policy and Strategy.
Titled Darwin Among The Machines, Butler’s letter infused ideas about the rapid development of machinery with the theory of evolution by natural selection. He argued that machines could develop to the point where their complexity and abilities would surpass our own. Eventually, their superiority would allow them to snatch our role as the dominant species and become too powerful to destroy.
Here are some of the most prophetic passages from the letter:
“Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life.”
“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.”
“This at once proves that the mischief is already done, that our servitude has commenced in good earnest, that we have raised a race of beings whom it is beyond our power to destroy.”
Butler’s vision wasn’t overly apocalyptic, though. He believed that the machines would have no need to malevolently suppress or destroy Homo sapiens, just as we have no need to actively eliminate the lives of all dogs, cats, and mice on Earth. In fact, we’ve arguably improved the lives of those “lesser animals” through domestication.
In this sense, maybe humans will become the pets of AI and partake in happy, fulfilling lives.
He writes: “Man will have become to the machine what the horse and the dog are to man. He will continue to exist, nay even to improve, and will be probably better of in his state of domestication under the beneficent rule of the machines than he is in his present wild state.”
“We treat our horses, dogs, cattle, and sheep, on the whole, with great kindness; we give them whatever experience teaches us to be best for them, and there can be no doubt that our use of meat has added to the happiness of the lower animals far more than it has detracted from it; in like manner it is reasonable to suppose that the machines will treat us kindly, for their existence is as dependent upon ours as ours is upon the lower animals,” he added.
Bear in mind that the year 1863 predates most of the inventions that would define the modern era, including the telephone, automobile, airplane, radio, and more. Furthermore, it was also just four years after the seminal book on evolution by natural selection, Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, was published.
As we stand on the brink of a much-hyped AI revolution, it’s remarkable to think how ahead of time Butler’s thoughts truly were. While we may not yet know whether AI will surpass us as a species, or lead to a new form of coexistence, his pondering into the evolving relationship between humans and machines still feels strikingly on point.
Source Link: In 1863, Samuel Butler Predicted Predicted AI Would Rise – And Rule Over Humanity
