The textual content anticipated a number of trendy AI security issues, together with the potential for machine consciousness, self-replication, and people shedding management of their technological creations. These themes later appeared in works like Isaac Asimov’s The Evitable Battle, Frank Herbert’s Dune novels (Butler probably served because the inspiration for the time period “Butlerian Jihad“), and the Matrix movies.
Butler’s letter dug deep into the taxonomy of machine evolution, discussing mechanical “genera and sub-genera” and pointing to examples like how watches had developed from “cumbrous clocks of the thirteenth century”—suggesting that, like some early vertebrates, mechanical species may get smaller as they grew to become extra subtle. He expanded these concepts in his 1872 novel Erewhon, which depicted a society that had banned most mechanical innovations. In his fictional society, residents destroyed all machines invented inside the earlier 300 years.
Butler’s issues about machine evolution acquired blended reactions, in line with Butler within the preface to the second version of Erewhon. Some reviewers, he stated, interpreted his work as an try to satirize Darwin’s evolutionary idea, although Butler denied this. In a letter to Darwin in 1865, Butler expressed his deep appreciation for The Origin of Species, writing that it “completely fascinated” him and defined that he had defended Darwin’s idea in opposition to critics in New Zealand’s press.
What makes Butler’s imaginative and prescient significantly outstanding is that he was writing in a vastly completely different technological context when computing units barely existed. Whereas Charles Babbage had proposed his theoretical Analytical Engine in 1837—a mechanical pc utilizing gears and levers that was by no means inbuilt his lifetime—probably the most superior calculating units of 1863 have been little greater than mechanical calculators and slide guidelines.
Butler extrapolated from the easy machines of the Industrial Revolution, the place mechanical automation was remodeling manufacturing, however nothing resembling trendy computer systems existed. The first working program-controlled pc would not seem for an additional 70 years, making his predictions of machine intelligence strikingly prescient.
Some issues by no means change
The talk Butler began continues at present. Two years in the past, the world grappled with what one may name the “nice AI takeover scare of 2023.” OpenAI’s GPT-4 had simply been launched, and researchers evaluated its “power-seeking habits,” echoing issues about potential self-replication and autonomous decision-making.
