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Darwin Among the Machines: The Anthropomorphic Slur
Samuel Butler’s 1863 essay “Darwin among the Machines,” published on June 13 in The Press (Christchurch, New Zealand), is widely recognized as one of the earliest systematic explorations of the evolutionary trajectory of technology and its existential implications for humanity. Drawing explicitly on Charles Darwin’s principles of natural selection, Butler posited that machines constitute a nascent “kingdom” of life, evolving at an accelerating pace and destined to surpass their human creators. He warned of progressive human subservience, observing that “day by day … the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them,” and urged preemptive destruction of advanced machinery to avert enslavement. Written in an era dominated by steam engines and telegraphs, the essay’s foresight, now more than 160 years distant, remains striking in the context of contemporary artificial intelligence.
The concept of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) directly echoes Butler’s central apprehension: the emergence of autonomous systems capable of recursive self-improvement, potentially triggering an “intelligence explosion” that outpaces human control.
