Chapter XXIV: The Book of the Machines, continued
"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 qua 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."
Erewhon : Chapter XXV - The Book of the Machines, concluded
Erewhon