The Machine Stops

Answers

• Q14SUCCESSION

  Would machines becoming more capable than humans necessarily place humans in a subordinate position?

  Yes. dependence subordinates humans. Depicts a humanity that lives underground wholly dependent on and worshipping a Machine, which collapses and kills them.

  Rather did they yield to some invincible pressure, which came no one knew whither, and which, when gratified, was succeeded by some new pressure equally invincible. To such a state of affairs it is convenient to give the name of progress. No one confessed the Machine was out of hand. Year by year it was served with increased efficiency and decreased intelligence. The better a man knew his own duties upon it, the less he understood the duties of his neighbour, and in all the world there was not one who understood the monster as a whole. Those master brains had perished. They had left full directions, it is true, and their successors had each of them mastered a portion of those directions. But Humanity, in its desire for comfort, had over-reached itself. It had exploited the riches of nature too far. Quietly and complacently, it was sinking into decadence, and progress had come to mean the progress of the Machine.

  Oxford and Cambridge Review, November 1909 (Wikipedia). No listed-repository text opened.

• Q25DEPENDENCE

  Does relying on machinery for ordinary necessities reduce people's ability to provide for themselves?

  Yes. total reliance leaves people helpless. Kuno says the Machine has robbed people of spatial and tactile capacities, weakened relationships, paralyzed bodies and wills, and compelled worship. This is his speech, not the later narrated collapse.

  Cannot you see, cannot all your lecturers see, that it is we who are dying, and that down here the only thing that really lives is the Machine? We created the Machine, to do our will, but we cannot make it do our will now. It has robbed us of the sense of space and of the sense of touch, it has blurred every human relation and narrowed down love to a carnal act, it has paralysed our bodies and our wills, and now it compels us to worship it.

  Gutenberg #72890 (The Eternal Moment and Other Stories, 1928), story text searched; first published Oxford and Cambridge Review 1909.

• Q31SACRED

  Can reliance on machinery become a form of idolatry?

  Yes. dependence becomes worship. People consult the Book of the Machine as scripture and come to worship the Machine that serves them.

  The second great development was the re-establishment of religion. This, too, had been voiced in the celebrated lecture. No one could mistake the reverent tone in which the peroration had concluded, and it awakened a responsive echo in the heart of each. Those who had long worshipped silently, now began to talk. They described the strange feeling of peace that came over them when they handled the Book of the Machine, the pleasure that it was to repeat certain numerals out of it, however little meaning those numerals conveyed to the outward ear, the ecstasy of touching a button, however unimportant, or of ringing an electric bell, however superfluously. "The Machine," they exclaimed, "feeds us and clothes us and houses us; through it we speak to one another, through it we see one another, in it we have our being. The Machine is the friend of ideas and the enemy of superstition: the Machine is omnipotent, eternal; blessed is the Machine." And before long this allocution was printed on the first page of the Book, and in subsequent editions the ritual swelled into a complicated system of praise and prayer. The word "religion" was sedulously avoided, and in theory the Machine was still the creation and the implement of man. But in practice all, save a few retrogrades, worshipped it as divine.

  Gutenberg #72890; 'worship the Machine' passages found.