CHAPTER 24
THE BOOK OF 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 seeingengine 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 antheap
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 lifelike! 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 flywheel, 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 selfsacrifice
?
`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 vapourengine
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.'