The Machine Stops

Or breaks down, or is hacked, or sabotaged.

In 1909 a short story bearing the same title as this post, The Machine Stops, was published by the author E. M. Forster. Forster imagined a future where every human being lived in their own personal underground room, with all their needs supplied by a great machine that ran the world.

Apparently originally intended as a benign living environment, the underground rooms had effectively become cells. They were no longer housing their occupants, they were containing them. Almost everything a cell’s inhabitant wanted could be acquired at the push of a button. Human contact was through a screen with virtually no physical meeting or interaction. Whilst the world we live in today is clearly not as Forster describes, might he have foreseen something of our future?

We are already moving toward a push button, on-demand society, at least in the technologically advanced parts of the world. Our needs, or more often simply wants, can in many instances be gratified remarkably quickly at the push of a button, or in our cas with a few taps on a screen.

We can adjust the heating in our homes, call a taxi, order food, pay bills. send a message, chat, view television or video, book a holiday, all through the little screen so many of us carry in our pockets. There is a living a generation for whom this is the normal way of life, that have not lived before this convenience was possible.

In Forster’s dystopian world the machine, as you might guess, breaks down. Not all at once but small failures here and there that over time become more and more serious and cumulative. The Machine has been designed to self repair but what happens if the self repair mechanism itself needs repair? The original designers and engineers of the machine have long since passed into oblivion.

With our software driven society, increasingly reliant on artificial intelligence, what happens if a tiny piece of code has a single digit mistake? It might have no effect for years, until that particular sub-routine is called. But tiny errors can have huge consequences in our connected world.

Is there a danger that, like in Forster’s imagined future, we might become too reliant on the technology? We need to remember that much of the smart-phone capability is not within the phone itself but is provided by a gargantuan infrastructure on miles, sometimes hundreds if not thousands of miles away, that we do not see and frequently forget about … until something does not work.

Hitchhiking

Is there any truth in The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy and its sequels?

A tongue-in-cheek look at Douglas Adams’ story, and how he probably didn’t mean the ‘alternative facts‘ I’m about to suggest.

When Ford Prefect, a native of the planet Betelgeuse rescues his earthling friend Arthur Dent from the total destruction of planet Earth, he takes him on a journey through the universe, some might say through creation. They travel in both space and time and amongst their adventures, they witness the end of the universe. But they are fine after it so don’t worry.

There are numerous prophecies that foretell the end of all things, like Adams’ end of the universe. Unlike Adams’ tale, most do not happen to have a restaurant where you can watch it. The Bible’s book of Revelation tells of a new heaven and a new earth, and was written at a time when the rest of the universe was not known to exist. So what if it simply encompassed all that was known and we interpret as all that is known now then there goes the universe, to be replaced by ….. a new universe?

The universe, or creation, has been created by an ultimate intelligence. Some might say a god is the ultimate intelligence. Of course in our world today lots of people do not believe in God, though they may have their own private little god/s (idols). That doesn’t, of course, stop them wondering about the answer to life, or as in The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, “life the universe and everything”. As I write this, we know the answer to “life the universe and everything”, it’s 42. The super mega computer Deep Thought told us it is 42.

Well, as we are not in the story, we haven’t got a computer that powerful yet but we are working on it. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is being used in more and more applications. Sooner or later someone is going to ask it, not necessarily in exactly the same words, what is the answer to “life the universe and everything”. The worst aspect of this is that we will believe the answer the AI gives us. A bit of prophecy in Adam’s tale?

Ultimately, at the conclusion we discover that planet Earth, which we are blissfully, ignorantly living on is in fact a giant, organic computer. It has been designed by the ultimate intelligence not to answer the question of “life the universe and everything” but to determine the actual question. We have been place here on this insignificant that no one else knows about as subjects in a great experiment. 

Well you have to admit, if we believe in any kind of ultimate intelligence, it is at least a possibility, no matter how unlikely that we are just experimental animals in a controlled environment..

“In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot
of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”