I was recently reminded of “The Machine Stops”, the 1909 short story by E. M. Forster. (It’s out of copyright, so it’s available on Project Gutenberg for free. If you haven’t read it before, go do that first; this blog can wait. It’s the first story in that anthology. I’ll wait.)
Now that you’ve read it, let me remind you it was first published in 1909.
Amazing, right?
Aside from foreseeing the Internet, it postulates the consequences of it.
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One of those consequences is the lack of connection to outside reality. Air comes from elsewhere; food is artificially produced. There are no pets, no aquariums. Each person resides entirely within their own tiny cell. Once in a while, someone goes outside to see real things, but this is unpopular and eventually banned. People find looking at the stars or the sunrise profoundly disturbing. The names of places of unimportant. Nobody does anything but write poems, give lectures, and discuss philosophy all day… including philosophy about how the further we are removed from the original truth of an event or place, the “better” we understand it.
What I take from this: Maybe touch some grass. (Or snow, as we’ve got here.) Go and do. Make something. Bake something. Plant some seeds. Say hi to your neighbor and ask to pet their dog. Break bread together.
I mention those last two in particular because that’s another theme in that short piece: all human connection is mediated by technology. In-person interaction is considered gauche or distasteful. (Isaac Asimov’s much later book “The Naked Sun” features a similar, and equally creepy, culture on Solaris.) Much as no one has a genuine knowledge, no one has family ties, either. A thousand chattering voices from around the globe, on different topics, and no genuine friends.
Except perhaps for one: The Machine. O, Machine! O, Machine!
The ever-present, ever-reliable Machine, which provides for all of humanity’s needs and wants, so long as they stay in their tiny boxes.
And here’s where it gets eerie for me. It’s so easy for us to anthropomorphize. This is perhaps fine with pets or stuffed animals. It’s less fine for something like Eliza, or modern chatbots, that produce pleasant, truth-shaped output that can nonetheless drag vulnerable people into the deepest possible depths of paranoia and despair.
It’s also less fine for the Machine, if equally understandable. Of course people grow to love and worship that which they depend on for everything.
The trouble really comes in when the Machine’s repair mechanisms begin to fail. Everyone is told that their complaint has been sent to the Committee. Everything will be fine. Everyone gets used to the bath being a little cold, the air being a little stale, the food being a little bad.
The whole thing falls apart gradually, then suddenly. The only reason humanity survives at all is that there are people living outside the Machine (we hope).
I’m not about to advocate that we abandon technology and live off our own lands. (That’s infeasible for so many reasons, including all the dangerous vagaries of subsistence farming.) So, what to do instead?
I don’t have a perfect answer here. But perhaps it starts with: don’t worship the Machine, whether it’s the Internet or generative AI or anything else. Don’t treat them as people when they’re not. Build connections to your friends, your family, your neighbors, your community. Don’t offload your brain, your decisions, your ideas, to flawed oracles on someone else’s computer. Don’t accept everything getting a little worse – try instead to make something a little better.
Maybe that’s a good enough place to start.
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Obligatory Plug: I’ve got a book out: The Cloak and Its Wizard! While some bad stuff does happen, I promise it has a much happier ending than “The Machine Stops.” (For flavor: the whole thing is from the magic cloak’s point of view, from monster chasing to evading the laundry machine, and, being urban fantasy, features locations in the Twin Cities here in Minnesota.)