This TL;DR is for Marc Drees, the ever so cynical writer about recruitment tech, who also suffers from an attention deficit issue:
You read the title that’s what made you click. But can you believe it? A guy living in 1863 (yes, your age), who was surrounded by sheep and steam engines, predicted the rise of intelligent machines. He wasn’t a scientist, nor some inventor, but just a regular bloke from New Zealand who somehow saw the future.
He warned us that machines would outsmart us, take control, and we would be too dependent to stop it. And here we are, 161 years later, proving him right.
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And for the rest of us, the real article
In 1863, the world was busy with war, and pretending that cholera wasn’t a problem. But in that century a guy called Samuel Butler, who was an English sheep farmer (pronounce: faama) and was living happily in New Zealand, wrote a letter that screamed to all who dared read it: “Hey, machines are going to destroy us”, bye now!
The letter was titled “Darwin among the machines”, and it was published in The Press newspaper in Christchurch (download link). This wasn’t some editorial page about farming tools. The guy actually claimed that machines would evolve faster than humans and eventually become our masters. Yep, he predicted AI doom 161 years before ChatGPT could even predict the next best word.
Butler wasn’t a scientist though.
He wasn’t an inventor even.
He herded sheep.
But somehow, he saw that something was coming. His letter talked about the fact that machines were evolving just like biological species. He compared mechanical development to Darwin’s theory of natural selection. He basically said that machines would outcompete humans because they evolve faster. Butler wrote, “We are ourselves creating our own successors.” That’s not poetic. That’s a warning. He believed that with every new invention, we were handing over control to machines.
At the time, the most advanced tech wasn’t AI.
It wasn’t even electricity.
It was steam engines, mechanical gears, and Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine – that was a giant, gear-filled calculator that was so complicated, that no one even finished building it during Babbage’s lifetime.
This was the 1860s version of futuristic tech.
It couldn’t think.
It couldn’t adapt.
It couldn’t even function without someone cranking a handle. But Butler didn’t care. He believed machines were already on an evolutionary path. To him, size didn’t matter. Complexity did.
Butler didn’t stop with predictions though.
He suggested humans that would become like caretakers for machines, just as we domesticated animals. In his words, “Man will have become to the machine what the horse and the dog are to man” First, we build them. Then we maintain them. Eventually, we serve them. Butler thought it was only a matter of time before machines would treat us like pets, useful, but ultimately replaceable.
He didn’t think that machines would be evil. He didn’t think they would rise up with guns and lasers. He thought that they would quietly take over because we would become dependent. We would hand over power without even realizing it. “Day by day,” he wrote, “we are becoming more subservient to them.” Not through war. Through convenience.
Not very far from the truth innit?
Butler expanded on these ideas in his 1872 book, Erewhon. (apparently that is an annagram of the word ‘nowhere’ – had to look that up). In that he spoke of a fictional society, where people banned machines entirely. They destroyed any machine the people invented in the previous 300 years. Why did they do that? They believed that the machines could evolve consciousness. They weren’t scared of robots with guns. They were scared of machines that could think.
Now that’s what I call foresight.
But at the time, people didn’t know what to make of Butler. Some thought he was mocking Darwin. He wasn’t. He wrote to Darwin himself, and said that he loved On the Origin of Species.
He wasn’t anti-science.
He was anti-complacency.
He believed that humanity’s biggest mistake would be trusting machines too much.
And he wasn’t wrong.
Fast forward to now
AI is everywhere. We have left the calculators and steam engines in museums. Now we have got language models, image generators, deepfake tech, and algorithms that decide what you see online. Machines process data, and they make decisions nowadays (read my article about it). They follow commands, and they predict what you will do next.
Exactly what Butler feared.
AI panic hit hard in 2024, when OpenAI released GPT-4o, and suddenly, everyone was talking about “power-seeking behavior” in machines. Researchers signed open letters warning about AI risks. Some even called for a global pause on AI development. Governments got involved. Tech CEOs testified in front of Congress.
Those are the same fears that Butler wrote about in 1863. The only difference is that it is now front-page news.
Butler didn’t suggest regulations.
He didn’t propose safety measures.
He went straight to full-on apocalypse mode. His solution was to destroy every machine. “War to the death should be instantly proclaimed against them”, is what he wrote.
No exceptions.
Burn it all.
If that sounds extreme, it’s because it was. But he had a point. He believed that if we couldn’t destroy the machines, it was already too late. “This proves that the mischief is already done”, is what he wrote. “Our servitude has commenced in good earnest” (it has begun)
But I don’t see anyone smashing their laptops in the streets. But Butler’s fear is alive and well, and I feed it as well, because I feel that when we rely on machines for everything, like work, communication, transportation, and even relationships, the AI doesn’t need to be conscious to control us.
It just needs to be highly necessary. And that’s the real takeover.
Butler saw it coming, but we didn’t listen.
We still aren’t.
Signing off from the frontlines of human complacency
Marco
Download link to: “Darwin among the machines”
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