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Darwin Among the Machines
To the Editor of the Press, Christchurch, New Zealand, 13 June, 1863.
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Sir--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. And indeed it
is matter for great congratulation on many grounds. It is
unnecessary to mention these here, for they are sufficiently
obvious; our present business lies with considerations which may
somewhat tend to humble our pride and to make us think seriously of
the future prospects of the human race. If we revert to the
earliest primordial types of mechanical life, to the lever, the
wedge, the inclined plane, the screw and the pulley, or (for
analogy would lead us one step further) to that one primordial type
from which all the mechanical kingdom has been page 180 developed,
we mean to the lever itself, and if we then examine the machinery
of the Great Eastern, we find ourselves almost awestruck at the
vast development of the mechanical world, at the gigantic strides
with which it has advanced in comparison with the slow progress of
the animal and vegetable kingdom. We shall find it impossible to
refrain from asking ourselves what the end of this mighty movement
is to be. In what direction is it tending? What will be its upshot?
To give a few imperfect hints towards a solution of these questions
is the object of the present letter.
We have used the words "mechanical life," "the mechanical kingdom,"
"the mechanical world" and so forth, and we have done so advisedly,
for as the vegetable kingdom was slowly developed from the mineral,
and as in like manner the animal supervened upon the vegetable, so
now in these last few ages an entirely new kingdom has sprung up,
of which we as yet have only seen what will one day be considered
the antediluvian prototypes of the race.
We regret deeply that our knowledge both of natural history and of
machinery is too small to enable us to undertake the gigantic task
of classifying machines into the genera and sub-genera, species,
varieties and sub-varieties, and so forth, of tracing the
connecting links between machines of widely different characters,
of pointing out how subservience to the use of man has played that
part among machines which natural selection has performed in the
animal and vegetable kingdoms, of pointing out rudimentary organs
^* which exist page 181 in some few machines, feebly developed and
perfectly useless, yet serving to mark descent from some ancestral
type which has either perished or been modified into some new phase
of mechanical existence. We can only point out this field for
investigation; it must be followed by others whose education and
talents have been of a much higher order than any which we can lay
claim to.
Some few hints we have determined to venture upon, though we do so
with the profoundest diffidence. Firstly, we would remark that as
some of the lowest of the vertebrata attained a far greater size
than has descended to their more highly organised living
representatives, so a diminution in the size of machines has often
attended their development and progress. Take the watch for
instance. Examine the beautiful structure of the little animal,
watch the intelligent play of the minute members which compose it;
yet this little creature is but a development of the cumbrous
clocks of the thirteenth century-- it is no deterioration from
them. The day may come when clocks, which certainly at the present
day are not page 182 diminishing in bulk, may be entirely
superseded by the universal use of watches, in which case clocks
will become extinct like the earlier saurians, while the watch
(whose tendency has for some years been rather to decrease in size
than the contrary) will remain the only existing type of an extinct
race.
The views of machinery which we are thus feebly indicating will
suggest the solution of one of the greatest and most mysterious
questions of the day. We refer to the question: 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.
Inferior in power, inferior in that moral quality of self-control,
we shall look up to them as the acme of all that the best and
wisest man can ever dare to aim at. No evil passions, no jealousy,
no avarice, no impure desires will disturb the serene might of
those glorious creatures. Sin, shame, and sorrow will have no place
among them. Their minds will be in a state of perpetual calm, the
contentment of a spirit that knows no wants, is disturbed by no
regrets. Ambition will never torture them. Ingratitude will never
cause them the uneasiness of a moment. The guilty conscience, the
hope deferred, the pains of exile, the insolence of office, and the
spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes page 183 --these
will be entirely unknown to them. If they want "feeding" (by the
use of which very word we betray our recognition of them as living
organism) they will be attended by patient slaves whose business
and interest it will be to see that they shall want for nothing. If
they are out of order they will be promptly attended to by
physicians who are thoroughly acquainted with their constitutions;
if they die, for even these glorious animals will not be exempt
from that necessary and universal consummation, they will
immediately enter into a new phase of existence, for what machine
dies entirely in every part at one and the same instant?
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. He will continue
to exist, nay even to improve, and will be probably better off 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. They cannot kill us and eat us as we do
sheep; they will not only require our services in the parturition
of their young (which branch of their economy will remain always in
our hands), but also in feeding them, in setting page 184 them
right when they are sick, and burying their dead or working up
their corpses into new machines. It is obvious that if all the
animals in Great Britain save man alone were to die, and if at the
same time all intercourse with foreign countries were by some
sudden catastrophe to be rendered perfectly impossible, it is
obvious that under such circumstances the loss of human life would
be something fearful to contemplate--in like manner were mankind to
cease, the machines would be as badly off or even worse. The fact
is that our interests are inseparable from theirs, and theirs from
ours. Each race is dependent upon the other for innumerable
benefits, and, until the reproductive organs of the machines have
been developed in a manner which we are hardly yet able to
conceive, they are entirely dependent upon man for even the
continuance of their species. It is true that these organs may be
ultimately developed, inasmuch as man's interest lies in that
direction; there is nothing which our infatuated race would desire
more than to see a fertile union between two steam engines; it is
true that machinery is even at this present time employed in
begetting machinery, in becoming the parent of machines often after
its own kind, but the days of flirtation, courtship, and matrimony
appear to be very remote, and indeed can hardly be realised by our
feeble and imperfect imagination.
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. The upshot is simply page 185 a question of time, but that
the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy
over the world and its inhabitants is what no person of a truly
philosophic mind can for a moment question.
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. Let there be no exceptions made, no
quarter shown; let us at once go back to the primeval condition of
the race. If it be urged that this is impossible under the present
condition of human affairs, 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, and that we are not only enslaved but are absolutely
acquiescent in our bondage.
For the present we shall leave this subject, which we present
gratis to the members of the Philosophical Society. Should they
consent to avail themselves of the vast field which we have pointed
out, we shall endeavour to labour in it ourselves at some future
and indefinite period.
