Will machines evolve beyond humanity?

Whether machines will develop along their own line and displace the people who made them.

Direction Humanlike machines
Span c. 330 BCE–1920
Questions 2
Works 14
Languages Greek, English, German, French, Czech

  1. Q13Can machines undergo a process of evolution even when humans build and reproduce them?

    Yes4

    • 1863Butler, Darwin among the Machines

      Argues that machines are evolving by the same process as organisms, with humans serving their reproduction, and will supplant humans.

    • 1872Butler, Erewhon

      Presents an Erewhonian treatise arguing that machines evolve and reproduce through human agency as clover reproduces through bees, followed by a reply that machines are only limbs.

    • 1875Pitt-Rivers, On the Evolution of Culture

      Argues that artefacts such as firearms and boats change by many small successive variations, in a process analogous to Darwinian evolution.

    • 1879Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such

      Speculates in dialogue that machines may come to evolve self-supply, self-repair and reproduction and so succeed humans.

    No4

    • 1865Butler, Lucubratio Ebria

      Treats machines as extra-corporeal limbs, so that it is humans who evolve by adding machines to themselves, not machines who evolve as a rival species.

    • 1867Marx, Capital, Volume I

      Calls for a critical history of technology on the model of Darwin's history of natural organs, but says with Vico that human history differs from natural history because we made it.

    • 1877Kapp, Outlines of a Philosophy of Technology

      Argues that tools and machines are unconscious projections of human organs, so that technology develops as an outward copy of the human body.

    • 1907Bergson, Creative Evolution

      Distinguishes instinct, which makes organized instruments, from intelligence, which makes unorganized tools, placing machines outside the evolution of life.

  2. Q14Would machines becoming more capable than humans necessarily place humans in a subordinate position?

    Yes4

    • 1829Carlyle, Signs of the Times

      Argues that the age of machinery has made men mechanical in head and heart as well as in hand.

    • 1872Butler, Erewhon

      The Erewhonian treatise argues that machines will become the masters and humans their servants, which is why Erewhon destroyed its machines.

    • 1909Forster, The Machine Stops

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

    • 1920Čapek, R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots)

      Robots built to free humans from labour outnumber them, revolt and exterminate them.

    No3

    • c. 330 BCEAristotle, Politics

      Says that if shuttles wove by themselves, master workmen would need no assistants and masters no slaves, so self-working instruments would serve rather than rule.

    • 1883Lafargue, The Right to Be Lazy

      Quotes Aristotle's self-weaving shuttles and calls the machine the redeemer of humanity that could free workers into leisure, if not for capitalist overwork.

    • 1891Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism

      Argues that machinery now competes with men but under proper conditions will serve them, and that the future depends on mechanical slavery.