With every article focused on the advance of artificial intelligence, someone inevitably asks how close we are to Skynet and the end of the human race. This question isn't new, and science fiction has explored it exhaustively, but it's much older than we imagine: in June 1863, a writer and sheep farmer named Samuel Butler wrote to a newspaper in Christchurch, New Zealand, warning about the danger of mechanical evolution and directly calling for its absolute destruction…
The Terminator saga has mutated over the years, but its essence remains the same: an artificial superintelligence becomes conscious and concludes that humanity is a threat, to the point of fighting it across time. In The Matrix, the opposite happens: humans (especially those in power) saw that the extraordinary technological and economic evolution of the mechanical nation '01' escaped their control, prompting a nuclear response… that turned our species into Duracell batteries.
Another example further back in time is Dune. Although its main plot is about power, politics, resource control, and family hatred, the Dune universe features the Butlerian Jihad, the great crusade against thinking machines that ended with a galactic prohibition (almost a religious commandment) and the formation of the Mentats. The term 'Butlerian' was expanded in the expanded universe, but if we trace its origin, the internet believes it comes from a sheep farmer in New Zealand who called for the total destruction of machines in 1863.
Samuel Butler: The John Connor of the 19th Century
It all began with a letter Butler sent to the editor of the Press newspaper in Christchurch, New Zealand, on June 13, 1863. Titled Darwin Among the Machines, the letter touches on several aspects, starting with the miniaturization of the clock, which in the writer's mind would eventually replace the large timepieces and cause their extinction. That leads to Butler's real argument: we are creating our own replacements, giving them more power every day, including the ability to act on their own and self-regulate.
Over time, humanity will find itself as 'the inferior race,' and man will be to machines what the dog and horse have been to man. Butler notes that machines keep gaining ground, with an increasing number of men turned into 'slaves' for their attention, investing the energies of their own lives in the development of mechanical life.
Butler's final opinion (who at the time signed the letter under the pseudonym 'Cellarius') boils down to a total declaration of war to the death against machines, without exceptions or mercy. And if we cannot do this, then our servitude has already begun: we have created a race of beings beyond our capacity to destroy, and we are not only enslaved to them but also absolutely content with that captivity.
Want to know more about Butler? He is the creator of the novel Erewhon, which has been in the public domain for several years.
Access the letter: Click hereSource: Ars Technica
