Man and Machine - Part 1

My daughter has said more than once, "when the computers take over..." to which I generally reply, "when they take over?"  As I told her today, YouTube cat videos are proof positive that they have taken over and they are using social media and performing felines to keep us in a state of blissful ignorance.

Maybe a little overstated, but the fear of machines rising to dominance and initiating a life-and-death conflict with their creators is an old one.  In fact, some elements seem to mirror the Biblical creation story - even further.  In John Milton's Paradise Lost, Lucifer rebels against his creator and causes havoc both in Heaven and Earth, luring Adam and Eve to similarly rebel.  None were machines or robots, of course, but the fear of creations opposing their creators with the creators losing all control is a common narrative thread.

Lucifer: Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven

Fear of non-thinking machines is not nearly as old as Mankind's fall from grace, but it still have a long history of animosity and conflict:

In the eighteenth century, a series of inventions transformed the manufacture of cotton in England and gave rise to a new mode or production -- the factory system. During these years, other branches of industry effected comparable advances, and all these together, mutually reinforcing one another, made possible further gains on an ever-widening front. The abundance and variety of these innovations almost defy compilation, but they may be subsumed under three principles: the substitution of machines -- rapid, regular, precise, tireless -- for human skill and effort; the substitution of inanimate for animate sources of power, in particular, the introduction of engines for converting heat into work, thereby opening to man a new and almost unlimited supply of energy; the use of new and far more abundant raw materials, in particular, the substitution of mineral for vegetable or animal substances. These improvements constitute the Industrial Revolution. [David Landes, The Unbound Prometheus, 1969](via The History Guide)

Improvements, unless you happen to be one of the human's having his or her skill replaced.  There's quite of bit of fear of becoming obsolete in our fascination with machines, robots and computers.  There's also the psychological revulsion at the strange, alien, "other" - machines that look nothing like the weavers and blacksmiths they replaced, and seeming operated on their own with the turn of a steam-powered crank or lever; they did their master's biding tirelessly, remorselessly, beyond concern, connection, and with only minimal cooperation with their human counterparts.

The fear of replacement, the devaluing of human labor, and, essentially devaluing humanity itself, soon became the stuff of philosophers and theorists such as Karl Marx:

The factory lord has become a penal legislator within his own establishment, inflicting fines at will, frequently for his own aggrandisement. The feudal baron in his dealings with his serfs was bound by traditions and subject to certain definite rules; the factory lord is subject to no controlling agency of any kind. (Marx in an address to the International Workingman's Association in 1868)

And, as literary history shows, what troubles philosophers usually comes to trouble their poor cousins - writers, especially those who write in the realm of speculative, or science, fiction.  It wasn't long before the question was raised - "if machines can duplicate and even replace human muscle, could they do the same with the human brain?"

Part 2 Tomorrow... I, Robot!