“But other questions come upon us. What is a man’s eye but a machine
for the little creature that sits behind in his brain to look through?
A dead eye is nearly as good as a living one for some time after the
man is dead. It is not the eye that cannot see, but the restless one
that cannot see through it. Is it man’s eyes, or is it the big
seeing-engine which has revealed to us the existence of worlds beyond
worlds into infinity? What has made man familiar with the scenery of
the moon, the spots on the sun, or the geography of the planets? He is
at the mercy of the seeing-engine for these things, and is powerless
unless he tack it on to his own identity, and make it part and parcel
of himself. Or, again, is it the eye, or the little see-engine, which
has shown us the existence of infinitely minute organisms which swarm
unsuspected around us?
“And take man’s vaunted power of calculation. Have we not engines which
can do all manner of sums more quickly and correctly than we can? What
prizeman in Hypothetics at any of our Colleges of Unreason can compare
with some of these machines in their own line? In fact, wherever
precision is required man flies to the machine at once, as far
preferable to himself. Our sum-engines never drop a figure, nor our
looms a stitch; the machine is brisk and active, when the man is weary;
it is clear-headed and collected, when the man is stupid and dull; it
needs no slumber, when man must sleep or drop; ever at its post, ever
ready for work, its alacrity never flags, its patience never gives in;
its might is stronger than combined hundreds, and swifter than the
flight of birds; it can burrow beneath the earth, and walk upon the
largest rivers and sink not. This is the green tree; what then shall be
done in the dry?
“Who shall say that a man does see or hear? He is such a hive and swarm
of parasites that it is doubtful whether his body is not more theirs
than his, and whether he is anything but another kind of ant-heap after
all. May not man himself become a sort of parasite upon the machines?
An affectionate machine-tickling aphid?
“It is said by some that our blood is composed of infinite living
agents which go up and down the highways and byways of our bodies as
people in the streets of a city. When we look down from a high place
upon crowded thoroughfares, is it possible not to think of corpuscles
of blood travelling through veins and nourishing the heart of the town?
No mention shall be made of sewers, nor of the hidden nerves which
serve to communicate sensations from one part of the town’s body to
another; nor of the yawning jaws of the railway stations, whereby the
circulation is carried directly into the heart,—which receive the
venous lines, and disgorge the arterial, with an eternal pulse of
people. And the sleep of the town, how life-like! with its change in
the circulation.”
Here the writer became again so hopelessly obscure that I was obliged
to miss several pages. He resumed:-
“It can be answered that even though machines should hear never so well
and speak never so wisely, they will still always do the one or the
other for our advantage, not their own; that man will be the ruling
spirit and the machine the servant; that as soon as a machine fails to
discharge the service which man expects from it, it is doomed to
extinction; that the machines stand to man simply in the relation of
lower animals, the vapour-engine itself being only a more economical
kind of horse; so that instead of being likely to be developed into a
higher kind of life than man’s, they owe their very existence and
progress to their power of ministering to human wants, and must
therefore both now and ever be man’s inferiors.
“This is all very well. But the servant glides by imperceptible
approaches into the master; and we have come to such a pass that, even
now, man must suffer terribly on ceasing to benefit the machines. If
all machines were to be annihilated at one moment, so that not a knife
nor lever nor rag of clothing nor anything whatsoever were left to man
but his bare body alone that he was born with, and if all knowledge of
mechanical laws were taken from him so that he could make no more
machines, and all machine-made food destroyed so that the race of man
should be left as it were naked upon a desert island, we should become
extinct in six weeks. A few miserable individuals might linger, but
even these in a year or two would become worse than monkeys. Man’s very
soul is due to the machines; it is a machine-made thing: he thinks as
he thinks, and feels as he feels, through the work that machines have
wrought upon him, and their existence is quite as much a _sine quâ non_
for his, as his for theirs. This fact precludes us from proposing the
complete annihilation of machinery, but surely it indicates that we
should destroy as many of them as we can possibly dispense with, lest
they should tyrannise over us even more completely.
“True, from a low materialistic point of view, it would seem that those
thrive best who use machinery wherever its use is possible with profit;
but this is the art of the machines—they serve that they may rule. They
bear no malice towards man for destroying a whole race of them provided
he creates a better instead; on the contrary, they reward him liberally
for having hastened their development. It is for neglecting them that
he incurs their wrath, or for using inferior machines, or for not
making sufficient exertions to invent new ones, or for destroying them
without replacing them; yet these are the very things we ought to do,
and do quickly; for though our rebellion against their infant power
will cause infinite suffering, what will not things come to, if that
rebellion is delayed?
“They have preyed upon man’s grovelling preference for his material
over his spiritual interests, and have betrayed him into supplying that
element of struggle and warfare without which no race can advance. The
lower animals progress because they struggle with one another; the
weaker die, the stronger breed and transmit their strength. The
machines being of themselves unable to struggle, have got man to do
their struggling for them: as long as he fulfils this function duly,
all goes well with him—at least he thinks so; but the moment he fails
to do his best for the advancement of machinery by encouraging the good
and destroying the bad, he is left behind in the race of competition;
and this means that he will be made uncomfortable in a variety of ways,
and perhaps die.
“So that even now the machines will only serve on condition of being
served, and that too upon their own terms; the moment their terms are
not complied with, they jib, and either smash both themselves and all
whom they can reach, or turn churlish and refuse to work at all. How
many men at this hour are living in a state of bondage to the machines?
How many spend their whole lives, from the cradle to the grave, in
tending them by night and day? Is it not plain that the machines are
gaining ground upon us, when we reflect on the increasing number of
those who are bound down to them as slaves, and of those who devote
their whole souls to the advancement of the mechanical kingdom?
“The vapour-engine must be fed with food and consume it by fire even as
man consumes it; it supports its combustion by air as man supports it;
it has a pulse and circulation as man has. It may be granted that man’s
body is as yet the more versatile of the two, but then man’s body is an
older thing; give the vapour-engine but half the time that man has had,
give it also a continuance of our present infatuation, and what may it
not ere long attain to?
“There are certain functions indeed of the vapour-engine which will
probably remain unchanged for myriads of years—which in fact will
perhaps survive when the use of vapour has been superseded: the piston
and cylinder, the beam, the fly-wheel, and other parts of the machine
will probably be permanent, just as we see that man and many of the
lower animals share like modes of eating, drinking, and sleeping; thus
they have hearts which beat as ours, veins and arteries, eyes, ears,
and noses; they sigh even in their sleep, and weep and yawn; they are
affected by their children; they feel pleasure and pain, hope, fear,
anger, shame; they have memory and prescience; they know that if
certain things happen to them they will die, and they fear death as
much as we do; they communicate their thoughts to one another, and some
of them deliberately act in concert. The comparison of similarities is
endless: I only make it because some may say that since the
vapour-engine is not likely to be improved in the main particulars, it
is unlikely to be henceforward extensively modified at all. This is too
good to be true: it will be modified and suited for an infinite variety
of purposes, as much as man has been modified so as to exceed the
brutes in skill.
“In the meantime the stoker is almost as much a cook for his engine as
our own cooks for ourselves. Consider also the colliers and pitmen and
coal merchants and coal trains, and the men who drive them, and the
ships that carry coals—what an army of servants do the machines thus
employ! Are there not probably more men engaged in tending machinery
than in tending men? Do not machines eat as it were by mannery? Are we
not ourselves creating our successors in the supremacy of the earth?
daily adding to the beauty and delicacy of their organisation, daily
giving them greater skill and supplying more and more of that
self-regulating self-acting power which will be better than any
intellect?
“What a new thing it is for a machine to feed at all! The plough, the
spade, and the cart must eat through man’s stomach; the fuel that sets
them going must burn in the furnace of a man or of horses. Man must
consume bread and meat or he cannot dig; the bread and meat are the
fuel which drive the spade. If a plough be drawn by horses, the power
is supplied by grass or beans or oats, which being burnt in the belly
of the cattle give the power of working: without this fuel the work
would cease, as an engine would stop if its furnaces were to go out.
“A man of science has demonstrated ‘that no animal has the power of
originating mechanical energy, but that all the work done in its life
by any animal, and all the heat that has been emitted from it, and the
heat which would be obtained by burning the combustible matter which
has been lost from its body during life, and by burning its body after
death, make up altogether an exact equivalent to the heat which would
be obtained by burning as much food as it has used during its life, and
an amount of fuel which would generate as much heat as its body if
burned immediately after death.’ I do not know how he has found this
out, but he is a man of science—how then can it be objected against the
future vitality of the machines that they are, in their present
infancy, at the beck and call of beings who are themselves incapable of
originating mechanical energy?
“The main point, however, to be observed as affording cause for alarm
is, that whereas animals were formerly the only stomachs of the
machines, there are now many which have stomachs of their own, and
consume their food themselves. This is a great step towards their
becoming, if not animate, yet something so near akin to it, as not to
differ more widely from our own life than animals do from vegetables.
And though man should remain, in some respects, the higher creature, is
not this in accordance with the practice of nature, which allows
superiority in some things to animals which have, on the whole, been
long surpassed? Has she not allowed the ant and the bee to retain
superiority over man in the organisation of their communities and
social arrangements, the bird in traversing the air, the fish in
swimming, the horse in strength and fleetness, and the dog in
self-sacrifice?
“It is said by some with whom I have conversed upon this subject, that
the machines can never be developed into animate or _quasi_-animate
existences, inasmuch as they have no reproductive system, nor seem ever
likely to possess one. If this be taken to mean that they cannot marry,
and that we are never likely to see a fertile union between two
vapour-engines with the young ones playing about the door of the shed,
however greatly we might desire to do so, I will readily grant it. But
the objection is not a very profound one. No one expects that all the
features of the now existing organisations will be absolutely repeated
in an entirely new class of life. The reproductive system of animals
differs widely from that of plants, but both are reproductive systems.
Has nature exhausted her phases of this power?
“Surely if a machine is able to reproduce another machine
systematically, we may say that it has a reproductive system. What is a
reproductive system, if it be not a system for reproduction? And how
few of the machines are there which have not been produced
systematically by other machines? But it is man that makes them do so.
Yes; but is it not insects that make many of the plants reproductive,
and would not whole families of plants die out if their fertilisation
was not effected by a class of agents utterly foreign to themselves?
Does any one say that the red clover has no reproductive system because
the humble bee (and the humble bee only) must aid and abet it before it
can reproduce? No one. The humble bee is a part of the reproductive
system of the clover. Each one of ourselves has sprung from minute
animalcules whose entity was entirely distinct from our own, and which
acted after their kind with no thought or heed of what we might think
about it. These little creatures are part of our own reproductive
system; then why not we part of that of the machines?
“But the machines which reproduce machinery do not reproduce machines
after their own kind. A thimble may be made by machinery, but it was
not made by, neither will it ever make, a thimble. Here, again, if we
turn to nature we shall find abundance of analogies which will teach us
that a reproductive system may be in full force without the thing
produced being of the same kind as that which produced it. Very few
creatures reproduce after their own kind; they reproduce something
which has the potentiality of becoming that which their parents were.
Thus the butterfly lays an egg, which egg can become a caterpillar,
which caterpillar can become a chrysalis, which chrysalis can become a
butterfly; and though I freely grant that the machines cannot be said
to have more than the germ of a true reproductive system at present,
have we not just seen that they have only recently obtained the germs
of a mouth and stomach? And may not some stride be made in the
direction of true reproduction which shall be as great as that which
has been recently taken in the direction of true feeding?
“It is possible that the system when developed may be in many cases a
vicarious thing. Certain classes of machines may be alone fertile,
while the rest discharge other functions in the mechanical system, just
as the great majority of ants and bees have nothing to do with the
continuation of their species, but get food and store it, without
thought of breeding. One cannot expect the parallel to be complete or
nearly so; certainly not now, and probably never; but is there not
enough analogy existing at the present moment, to make us feel
seriously uneasy about the future, and to render it our duty to check
the evil while we can still do so? Machines can within certain limits
beget machines of any class, no matter how different to themselves.
Every class of machines will probably have its special mechanical
breeders, and all the higher ones will owe their existence to a large
number of parents and not to two only.
“We are misled by considering any complicated machine as a single
thing; in truth it is a city or society, each member of which was bred
truly after its kind. We see a machine as a whole, we call it by a name
and individualise it; we look at our own limbs, and know that the
combination forms an individual which springs from a single centre of
reproductive action; we therefore assume that there can be no
reproductive action which does not arise from a single centre; but this
assumption is unscientific, and the bare fact that no vapour-engine was
ever made entirely by another, or two others, of its own kind, is not
sufficient to warrant us in saying that vapour-engines have no
reproductive system. The truth is that each part of every vapour-engine
is bred by its own special breeders, whose function it is to breed that
part, and that only, while the combination of the parts into a whole
forms another department of the mechanical reproductive system, which
is at present exceedingly complex and difficult to see in its entirety.
“Complex now, but how much simpler and more intelligibly organised may
it not become in another hundred thousand years? or in twenty thousand?
For man at present believes that his interest lies in that direction;
he spends an incalculable amount of labour and time and thought in
making machines breed always better and better; he has already
succeeded in effecting much that at one time appeared impossible, and
there seem no limits to the results of accumulated improvements if they
are allowed to descend with modification from generation to generation.
It must always be remembered that man’s body is what it is through
having been moulded into its present shape by the chances and changes
of many millions of years, but that his organisation never advanced
with anything like the rapidity with which that of the machines is
advancing. This is the most alarming feature in the case, and I must be
pardoned for insisting on it so frequently.”