“That’s the end the human race will come to,” said Hilliard. “It’ll be driven mad and killed off by machinery. Before long there’ll be machines for washing and dressing people — machines for feeding them — machines for — —” His wrathful imagination led him to grotesque ideas which ended in laughter.
George Gissing - Eve's Ransom (1895)
The 'driven mad' aspect seems to have arrived. Maybe the 'killed off' aspect will happen if the machines eventually make life too easy and birth rates drop well below replacement...
oh hang on...
Gissing's Victorian error, if such it be, was to envisage machines doing physical tasks for us like a punctilious butler (or perhaps prostitute, if that's what the unspoken bit at the end is coyly alluding to...). But all of that is relatively benign, these days. It just makes me think of semi-retired engineers making wheelchair adaptations for paraplegic kids. The real threat is mental; that machines will enable us to absent ourselves from reality, or to live in a bubble where we are fed lies and distortions.
ReplyDeleteSam - yes, for some reason nutters have a loud media voice which shows no sign of fading. As if they want to absent themselves from reality and live in a bubble, but nobody is allowed to spoil it by standing outside the bubble looking in.
ReplyDeleteHave just re-read "When the machine stops". The future is scary.
ReplyDeletePenseivat - yet many would adapt well to that world before the machine stopped.
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