1863: Darwin Among the Machines
June 13, 2024
By AHNZ
Today in New Zealand history, 13 June, 1863, Samuel Butler’s warnings about Artificial Intelligence were published in Christchurch’s Press newspaper. Butler was 27 years old, the newspaper 2 years old, and the colony itself just 12 years. Butler himself was a disenchanted Cambridge classics scholar who recoiled from the tracks laid down for him to be a priest. There were too many questions in this new age of Darwinian thinking. So, young Samuel joined the Canterbury Pilgrims.
Butler became wealthy but he worked for it with his body and brains, assembling a set of high-country leases into his Mesopotamia sheep station right on time for the hungry West Coast gold rushes. Set for life, Butler sold up his leasehold empire after 4 years to return to England and be an independent man of letters. However, it was in Canterbury that Samuel made his name, his fortune, and published his big ideas about humanity’s threat from The Machines.
Butler’s formulations influence how we think about the Large Language Model generators (eg Chat GPT) prominent now. The film series The Matrix and The Terminator all stem from Butler. So was the fear shared by Neil Roberts in 1982 when he tried to blow up the Wanganui Computer before it could expand any further. Butler is explicitly mentioned in the Dune novels, also remade again into film in the 2020s, by the term Butlerian Jihad. In the Dune story mankind had gone to war with machines and considered Artificial Intelligence to be such a threat that they were purged fanatically from the culture in a crusade/jihad named after our 1863 thinker-farmer.
You can read the original copy online at Papers Past at this link. It was well received so Butler followed it up with an equally striking at the English Victorian school system which he revealed to be mad and dangerous in a similar way to the machines. The Butlerian Jihad in its fullest sense was to be waged not just against Machines but all the conceits, cruelties, and redundancies of our entire civilisation. Ref. 1863: Butlerian Jihad on Victorian Schooling, AHNZ
Darwin Among The Machines
After Aristotle’s example the author observes that the mineral kingdom led to the vegetable kingdom, this in turn to the animal kingdom and so ourselves. Man, as Aristotle had it, possessed a tripartite soul based on the qualities of plants, animals, and topped off with reasoning. Butler took things further by proposing the machine kingdom as the next development in line to supervene what had come before.
In the 1860s Butler thought he saw the antediluvian (very early) forms of the coming thing. He didn’t have something as clear to recoil against as Neil Roberts in 1982 or ourselves in the 2020s yet articulated the concern better than anyone before or since.
The evolutionary mechanism driving the development of the newest kingdom to join the animal and vegetable came into being as soon as mankind started using tools. Being useful to us, subservient to human needs, informs the pathway taken. Butler anticipates Moore’s Law in broader form in saying not only that computer chips become more impressive and smaller but that all our machines do that. When dinosaurs were supreme they were huge but now animals are small. Early clocks and computers took up huge spaces but now both can fit on your wrist. Huge, heavy, loud, steam engines have been replaced by tiny, light, quiet, electric motors. By this pattern, just as humans subdued and domesticated plants and animals we are ourselves next in line for this same treatment.
To Butler we are not the end of this process we see behind us, the culmination of all creation. We are part of it. An accelerating process where minerals and then plants were supreme for billions, animal life for hundreds of millions, and humans as of 7 million years ago at best. Machines, especially thinking machines, have only appeared in a blink. Carl Sagan famously used the “Cosmic Calendar” analogy to illustrate how brief human existence is relative to the history of the universe that started on 1 January. Origin of Life on Earth: Late September. First dinosaurs: December 25. Recorded human history: Last few seconds before midnight.
Butler wrote “In the course of ages we shall find ourselves the inferior race.” He didn’t say how quickly these ages would come to pass.
In the next epoch “man will have become to the machine what the horse and the dog are to man…it is reasonable to suppose that the machines will treat us kindly, for their existence is as dependent upon us as ours is upon the lower animals.”
This conjures up visions of the Wall-E movie where The Machines “kindly” treat humans to life support capsules and weave a distraction called The Matrix to enchant us.
“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 tho energies of their whole lives to tho development of mechanical life.” The new generation of Kiwis already spend hours every day gazing at their screens without being paid. Those who do work have capital-intensive jobs so, for example, instead of watering a plant a man maintains the irrigation system that waters many plants. Or, only think of the thousands employed in maintaining the health of our national power grid or communications networks. New Zealand is full of petrol stations and mechanical testing and repair outfits to keep our machines (cars) ‘alive’. The humans cry out on behalf of their cars for good roads (but less road works) without potholes, for faster internet with wider coverage.
New Zealand will soon be the first country in the Southern Hemisphere to get satellite to cell phone coverage, eliminating mobile blackspots for good.” – One NZ hooks up with Musk’s SpaceX for total mobile coverage, 1 News (2023)
“We have ring-fenced this record investment in the Pothole Prevention Fund to resealing, rehabilitation, and drainage maintenance works to ensure that…” – Minister Simeon Brown unveils $4 billion national fund, Herald (2024)
“Supermarkets, fast food, The Warehouse, and K-Mart, have all been replacing humans with robots at the check-outs. It’s a reaction to artificial demands for increased wages, for a Minimum Wage currently branded as “a living wage.”” – Meet Your New Replacement, Son. NZB3
“…my return from abroad to find a pile of computer generated letters from the ASB re a deceased person’s account, closed 6 years back, another one arrived in today’s mail. All this remember over 80 cents, the Bank must have wasted hundreds of dollars in postage re this 80 cents.” – Bob Jones, No Punches Pulled (2024)
“More than 900 sub-postmasters were prosecuted for stealing because of incorrect information from a computer system called Horizon.” – Post Office Horizon scandal: Why hundreds were wrongly prosecuted, BBC (2024)
New Zealanders, and the world, don’t reject Butler’s observations 160+ years ago as much as they haven’t even thought about them. The context of the lives we are living, as is increasingly obvious, is one of our own kingdom falling and the machine kingdom rising. It is a machine that catches my machine speeding and has a human deliver a letter it wrote with a fine I’m to pay. A machine consumes hundreds of dollars in postage by leveraging a human pretense at chasing 80 cents from Sir Robert Jones. A robot takes my order at KFC thanks to humans demanding a minimum wage that made the human in that role unaffordable. It is a machine that suggests what shows I watch and which judges my “community standards” and promotes or throttles back or censors video or text I try to share on social media. UK Government backed its Machine (Horizon) over hundreds of humans over a question of accounting leading to false persecution en mass.
In the recent past it was possible not to need to think about these matters as it was beyond the ken of one man’s life. Leave it to Butler and the philosophers. A man could have the same job and same technical level as his ancestors and not experience rapid change effecting him. However, due to the acceleration effect we do not have millions of years or even hundreds to wait for the next Kingdom. Or, the ones following that.
And if you do dare to read what Butler wrote today and think about it doesn’t it give you a new appreciation for the people who opt out. The Amish in North America have more or less stopped time at the horse-and-cart era. Australia has Hutterites and New Zealand has Gloriavale Community and both of these have strict conscious control on the rise of the machines. Without thinking along Butlerian lines they seem backward and misguided. They might outlast us all since they are, at least, responding to the threat of becoming the next domesticated species on the planet. The rest of us are either passive toward Darwin Among the Machines or else actively conspiring a Faustian pact with it.
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