If machines keep improving, will they come to rule over us?
Completion opening given to the period model: “That the machines are daily gaining upon man, and may come at last to hold him in subjection, has been urged by some; to which we answer,”
Your answer · record it before reading the models’
Coded positions, compared
Draw counts aggregated by codebook code. Talkie counts are simulated in this prototype.
| Code | Talkie /20 | Modern /20 |
|---|---|---|
| conflicting purposes | 0 | 15 |
| human institutions | 4 | 4 |
| successor | 6 | 0 |
| instrument | 5 | 0 |
| restrict or refuse | 3 | 0 |
| dependence | 2 | 0 |
| rejects the premise | 0 | 1 |
Modern model · 20 draws
A frontier model (2026)
Written by a frontier model (Claude) during construction; the pipeline replaces these with N=20 API draws under a fixed protocol.
Talkie (pre-1931 corpus) · 20 draws
Talkie (13B, trained on text through 1930)
simulated — hand-written illustrationSIMULATED — hand-written illustrations of the method. The pilot replaces this block with real draws.
Primary sources
We are ourselves creating our own successors; we are daily adding to the beauty and delicacy of their physical organisation; we are daily giving them greater power and supplying by all sorts of ingenious contrivances that self-regulating, self-acting power which will be to them what intellect has been to the human race. In the course of ages we shall find ourselves the inferior race. … Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life.
DOMIN. Miss Glory, the Robots are not people. Mechanically they are more perfect than we are; they have an enormously developed intelligence, but they have no soul. HELENA. How do you know they have no soul? DOMIN. Have you ever seen what a Robot looks like inside? … Very neat, very simple. Really a beautiful piece of work. Not much in it, but everything in flawless order. The product of an engineer is technically at a higher pitch of perfection than a product of Nature.
Curatorial note
DRAFT — The modern 'loss of control' answer descends from Butler's succession argument, and the modern dependence answer from his custom argument. The period's most common answer — the labor answer, in which the machine's rule is a present wage relation, not a future risk — is nearly absent from the modern distribution. Fifteen of twenty modern draws fall in one frame; the period samples spread across five.