The Machine Stops Book

Would you panic more at losing your wallet or your phone?

A few years ago, the question would be ridiculous, but now, it's a tough call, and many of us fear losing our smartphone more, even with data synced in the cloud. Our world, and all our access to it, is there. I no longer know the phone numbers of my closest family.

We have outsourced our knowledge, and maybe ourselves, to our devices. Perhaps by recording my thoughts on this website, rather than trying to remember them in my head, I'm compounding that.

As machines become more human, will we become cyborgs, and then machines - or worse, irrelevant?

Update, January 2019: I was recently without a smartphone, and locked out of all data and apps for four weeks, and at a particularly difficult time. Sorting it out, and managing in the interim was far, far worse than the time my wallet was stolen.

Setup

This short story is told in three chapters. The first describes the situation, and has a hook as to what follows. The middle has someone questioning, and the third explores consequences.

The surface of the earth cannot support life, so everyone lives underground. Identical, solitary, sedentary lives, their every need provided by the Machine at the press of a button. People give and watch lectures, always on a quest for "ideas", and ever grateful to the omnipotent and benevolent Machine. Each has their own Book of the Machine, with "instructions against every possible contingency". That appeals to the technical writer in me.

Civilized people neither need nor want to be polluted by touch or smell. Contact with others is invariably by videocall, even between Vashti and her adult son, Kuno:
"'Parents, duties of,' said the book of the Machine, 'cease at the moment of birth. P.422327483.'".

They have everything they need, but nothing that matters to being human.
"Men seldom moved their bodies; all unrest was concentrated in the soul."
Do you have a soul when there's so little opportunity for emotional engagement with anything, let alone anyone?

Only Connect

"Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer."
From Howards End.

Like GoodReaders, the people in this story are hyperconnected: simultaneously always and never alone.

"She knew several thousand people, in certain directions human intercourse had advanced enormously."

Can one have meaningful friendships with so many? Can you even remember who's who? Having so many connections surely dilutes the value of each one. Maybe hyperconnectivity makes us more isolated, despite the veneer of popularity?

Vashti has an isolation knob, mainly used when sleeping.
What if GoodReads capped friends at 500 instead of 5000?


Image: cover of Hawkwind's concept album, The Machine Stops, from 2016
Title track (audio+video), A Solitary Man, HERE.

God in the Machine, or God IS the Machine?

Humans may have created the Machine, but now it bestows life, sustains life, and chooses when to allow life to end. Reverence, rituals, and liturgy accrue to the Machine, and to the Book of the Machine. Eventually, the Machine seems to believe as well, and to institutionalise and coerce that faith, gaslighting as it goes. Humans subjugate themselves to the Machine their forefathers made to serve them.

"We only exist as the blood corpuscles that course through its arteries."

I asked the same question about God and the Machine of Harlan Ellison's 1967 story, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream (see my review HERE), last week. That also has people living underground, their lives controlled by an omnipotent computer, but in that, it's the machine itself that usurps the mantle of God, and with very different consequences.

For a different and more comical slant on the apocalyptic danger of big brains, see Vonnegut's Galapagos, which I reviewed HERE.

Edwardian Sci-Fi

EM Forster wrote this staggeringly prescient short story in 1909, set a few hundred years in his future, though we're almost there now. He was 30, had published A Room with a View the previous year, and would publish Howards End (see my review HERE) the year after. Queen Victoria had died only eight years earlier, and The Great War wouldn't start for another five years. A world or three away from now, even allowing for the technological and industrial progress of his age. I almost wonder if he had access to HG Wells' The Time Machine, as he describes things close to Skype, Spotify/streaming, MOOCs, online shopping, social media, virtual reality, and post-truth, fake news.

Quotes

• "Just as the imponderable bloom of the grape was ignored by the manufacturers of artificial fruit. Something 'good enough' had long since been accepted by our race." Note, the anonymous narrator says "our race".

• "I see something like you in this plate, but I do not see you. I hear something like you through this telephone, but I do not hear you." Skype and virtual reality are not quite reality.

• "The [previous] civilization that had mistaken the functions of the [airship] system, and had used it for bringing people to things, instead of for bringing things to people."

• "We have lost the sense of space... I determined to recover it, and I began by walking... and so did recapture the meaning of "Near" and "Far"... Man is the measure."

• "Man must be adapted to his surroundings, must he not? In the dawn of the world our weakly must be exposed on Mount Taygetus, in its twilight our strong will suffer euthanasia... that the Machine may progress eternally."

• "On atavism the Machine can have no mercy."

• "There will come a generation that had got beyond facts, beyond impressions, a generation absolutely colourless, a generation seraphically free from taint of personality."


Cartoon: Are we there yet?! (Source.)

Update, May 2020. Will Gompertz, BBC arts editor, thinks we're there. He writes about the specific parallels with Coronavirus Covid-19 lockdown, HERE.