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In 1863, Samuel Johnson submitted an essay titled "Darwin Among the Machines" to a New Zealand newspaper warning that machines would soon replace man as the dominant species on earth. He later wote a novel titled "Erewhon, or Over the Range" exanding on these ideas. He also predicts that machines would attain conciousness.
His precience was remarkable given the state of machines in 1863 and also remarkable is that Darwin's "On the Origin of Species" was only published 4 years earlier in 1859.
In the Dune novels, thinking machines are outlawed and Frank Herbert, the author of Dune, inspred by Bulter named the revolution that resulted in the elimination of thinking machines the Butlerian Jihad.
Here are some excerpts from Darwin Among the Machines:
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.
…
When the state of things shall have arrived which we have been above attempting to describe, man will have become to the machine what the horse and the dog are to man.
…
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. The upshot is simply a question of time, but that the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants
Here he recommends destroying all machines to avoid the invetible enslavement of mankind and alludes to the fact that is already too late:
War to the death should be instantly proclaimed against them. Every machine of every sort should be destroyed by the well-wisher of his species. … If it be urged that this is impossible under the present condition of human affairs, this at once proves that the mischief is already done, that our servitude has commenced in good earnest, that we have raised a race of beings whom it is beyond our power to destroy and that we are not only enslaved but are absolutely acquiescent in our bondage.
This might be sacrcasm or a literal belief of the time:
We treat our horses, dogs, cattle, and sheep, on the whole, with great kindness; we give them whatever experience teaches us to be best for them, and there can be no doubt that our use of meat has added to the happiness of the lower animals far more than it has detracted from it; in like manner it is reasonable to suppose that the machines will treat us kindly...
These excerpts are from Erewhon, but note he applies the then brand new ideas of natural selection and he contrasts the very rapid advancement of machines:
The more highly organised machines are creatures not so much of yesterday, as of the last five minutes, so to speak, in comparison with past time. Assume for the sake of argument that conscious beings have existed for some twenty million years: see what strides machines have made in the last thousand! May not the world last twenty million years longer? If so, what will they not in the end become? Is it not safer to nip the mischief in the bud and to forbid them further progress?
…
I fear none of the existing machines; what I fear is the extraordinary rapidity with which they are becoming something very different to what they are at present. No class of beings have in any time past made so rapid a movement forward. Should not that movement be jealously watched, and checked while we can still check it? And is it not necessary for this end to destroy the more advanced of the machines which are in use at present, though it is admitted that they are in themselves harmless?
…We cannot calculate any corresponding advance in man’s intellectual or physical powers which shall be a set-off against the far greater development which seems in store for the machines. Some people may say that man’s moral influence will suffice to rule them; but I cannot think it will ever be safe to repose much trust in the moral sense of any machine.
…
Our bondage will steal upon us noiselessly and by imperceptible approaches.
This passage is remarkable, he predicts machine intelligence is an invetible as human intelligence. I find the invocation of relatively modern geological and biological concepts in 1863 when the reigning view was that of man being a creation of God:
There was a time, when the earth was to all appearance utterly destitute [of] life, and when … it was simply a hot round ball with a crust gradually cooling. …would not [a human being seeing this] have pronounced it impossible that creatures possessed of anything like consciousness should be evolved from the seeming cinder which he was beholding? Would he not have denied that it contained any potentiality of consciousness? Yet in the course of time consciousness came. Is it not possible then that there may be even yet new channels dug out for consciousness, though we can detect no signs of them at present?
Again. Consciousness, in anything like the present acceptation of the term, having been once a new thing — a thing, as far as we can see, subsequent even to an individual centre of action and to a reproductive system (which we see existing in plants without apparent consciousness) — why may not there arise some new phase of mind which shall be as different from all present known phases, as the mind of animals is from that of vegetables?
It would be absurd to attempt to define such a mental state (or whatever it may be called), inasmuch as it must be something so foreign to man that his experience can give him no help towards conceiving its nature; but surely when we reflect upon the manifold phases of life and consciousness which have been evolved already, it would be rash to say that no others can be developed, and that animal life is the end of all things. There was a time when fire was the end of all things.
The inspiration of Butler's writings to Dune was mentioned above, so here is similarly prescient quote from Dune about machines:
Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.
Which led to this commandment:
Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.
Last thought: Though 1863 seems a long time ago in terms of making such precient predictions given the state of the world then, I would imagine that even Butler would be surprised just how fast the development of machines has happened now that the world is on the verge of AGI. But consider that 1863 is really but a human lifetime and a half. As an example, my father who still walks the earth was born in 1935 and in 1935 there were millions of people still alive vorn in 1863 or before.
