Artificial Intelligence and Samuel Butler's Erewhon

I'm not worried, of course, but the current controversy over AI made me think of Samuel Butler's dystopian novel, Erewhon; Or, Over the Range (1872). Butler's narrator in the novel is a New Zealand sheepherder in search of lost sheep. He gets lost in the mountains himself, and stumbles into an isolated civilization. "Erewhon" is an anagram for "Nowhere." Butler was following the example of Sir Thomas More's Utopia. More's title means Nowhere in Latin. But you probably already knew or guessed that. 

Erewhon is an upside down world which the author uses to satirize the customs and practices of Victorian England. Erewhonians are vegetarians, but some people (men) are unable to follow the vegetarian code. They go to illicit chop houses to eat forbidden meat. The parallel to Victorian brothels is obvious. Crime is treated in hospitals rather than punished. In contrast, illness is criminalized and the ill sent to prison. 

Instead of churches, it has lavishly decorated musical banks, where people (mostly women) go ostentatiously once a week in their best outfits to deposit money and listen to "hideous" music. They act as if  they place the greatest value on the musical banks, and the money they deposit into them is the "real" currency. In fact, the musical currency is worth very little. Erewhonians place most of their wealth in an alternative set of financial institutions. No points for guessing what Butler was satirizing here.

Now to the connection to AI. The people of Erewhon have destroyed most of their machinery, except for some disabled models they have put in museums as a warning. The machines had been reproducing themselves. They were evolving, becoming intelligent and threatening to become the masters of humans. Here Butler was no doubt influenced by the evolutionary writings of Charles Darwin and others, which were producing enormous controversy in the Western world. 

The destruction of the machines had taken place hundreds of years before. The controversy over the machines had divided Erewhon into two camps, the machinists and the anti-machinists. A bloody civil war ensued that lasted for many years. The anti-machinists prevailed, wiped out their opponents, and destroyed the hated machines. Not all of them, but the most advanced and dangerous

Perhaps the Erewhonians were onto something. We may be at war with the machines soon, I write on my laptop, while listening to music on my iPhone and checking my activities on my Smart Watch. 

Darwin and Darwinism in Victorian Cartoon and Caricature

The publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871) provided plentiful material for the cartoonists and caricaturists. One of my favorites is this one, published in Punch in the year of Darwin's death, 1882. It plays on the fact that Darwin had also written the definitive work on earthworms. A worm emerging from CHAOS is evolving into a variety of questionable primate forms before emerging as a proper Victorian gentleman tipping his hat to Darwin, portrayed as a Greek philosopher. Scientific it isn't, but it is a worthy tribute to the great scientist.    

Many of the caricatures of Darwin highlighted the then frightening notion that man was descended from an ape or monkey, although Darwin stressed that humans were not descended from any existing primate species but from earlier, extinct forms. 

Punch published the two below in 1861, one of an ape arriving for a Victorian formal affair, the other of an ape asking about his relationship to homo sapiens. 

Intentionally or not, "Monkeyana" had definite racist overtones. In the 1780's Darwin's grandfather, Josiah Wedgwood, had produced a medallion for anti-slavery organizations in England in which an enslaved African in chains asked the same question. 

Darwin himself was sometimes presented as an ape-like man, or apes were portrayed as resembling him. The four below are from the 1870's, after the publication of the Descent of Man.

The last of these four, from Punch, was inspired by Darwin's book on climbing plants, reissued in 1875.

But Darwin was not the only famous person to be associated with apes, as this 20th century poster shows.