ReWriting the Human Story - Chapter 11

"Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes." Edsger Dijkstra "When looms weave by themselves, man’s slavery will end." Aristotle "Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended." Vernor Vinge, 1993 Today we are entirely dependent on machines. So much so, that, if we were to turn off machines invented since the Industrial Revolution, billions of people will die and civilization will collapse. Therefore, ours is already a civilization of machines and technology because they have become indispensable. The question is: What is the outcome of that process? Is it freedom and transcendence or slavery and extinction? Our present situation is no surprise for it was in the relatively low-tech 19th century when Samuel Butler wrote Darwin among the Machines. There he combined his observations of the rapid technological progress of the Industrial Revolution and Darwin’s theory of evolution. That synthesis led Butler to conclude that intelligent machines are likely to be the next step in evolution: "…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." Samuel Butler developed further his ideas in Erewhon, which was published in 1872: "There is no security against the ultimate development of mechanical consciousness, in the fact of machines possessing little consciousness now. A mollusk has not much consciousness. Reflect upon the extraordinary advance which machines have made during the last few hundred years, and note how slowly the animal and vegetable kingdoms are advancing. The more highly organized machines are creatures not so much of yeste