CHAPTER 23
THE BOOK OF THE MACHINES
The writer commences:-- 'There was a time, when the earth was to all appearance utterly destitute both of animal and vegetable life, and when according to the opinion of our best philosophers it was simply a hot round ball with a crust gradually cooling. Now if a human being had existed while the earth was in this state and had been allowed to see it as though it were some other world with which he had no concern, and if at the same time he were entirely ignorant of all physical science, would he not have pronounced it impossible that creatures possessed of anything like consciousness should be evolved from the seeming cinder which he was beholding? Would he not have denied that it contained any potentiality of consciousness? Yet in the course of time consciousness came. Is it not possible then that there may be even yet new channels dug out for consciousness, though we can detect no signs of them at present?
`Again. Consciousness, in anything like the present acceptation of
the term, having been once a new thing -- a thing, as far as we can
see, subsequent even to an individual centre of action and to a
reproductive system (which we see existing in plants without apparent
consciousness) -- why may not there arise some new phase of mind which
shall be as different from all present known phases, as the mind of
animals is from that of vegetables?
`It would be absurd to attempt to define such a mental state (or
whatever it may be called), inasmuch as it must be something so
foreign to man that his experience can give him no help towards
conceiving its nature; but surely when we reflect upon the manifold
phases of life and consciousness which have been evolved already, it
would be rash to say that no others can be developed, and that animal
life is the end of all things. There was a time when fire was the end
of all things: another when rocks and water were so.'
The writer, after enlarging on the above for several pages, proceeded to inquire whether traces of the approach of such a new phase of life could be perceived at present; whether we could see any tenements preparing which might in a remote futurity be adapted for it; whether, in fact, the primordial cell of such a kind of life could be now detected upon earth. In the course of his work he answered this question in the affirmative and pointed to the higher machines.
`There is no security' -- to quote his own words -- 'against the
ultimate development of mechanical consciousness, in the fact of
machines possessing little consciousness now. A mollusc has not much
consciousness. Reflect upon the extraordinary advance which machines
have made during the last few hundred years, and note how slowly the
animal and vegetable kingdoms are advancing. The more highly
organised machines are creatures not so much of yesterday, as of the
last five minutes, so to speak, in comparison with past time. Assume
for the sake of argument that conscious beings have existed for some
twenty million years: see what strides machines have made in the last
thousand! May not the world last twenty million years longer? If so,
what will they not in the end become? Is it not safer to nip the
mischief in the bud and to forbid them further progress?
`But who can say that the vapour engine has not a kind of
consciousness? Where does consciousness begin, and where end? Who
can draw the line? Who can draw any line? Is not everything
interwoven with everything? Is not machinery linked with animal life
in an infinite variety of ways? The shell of a hen's egg is made of a
delicate white ware and is a machine as much as an egg-cup is: the
shell is a device for holding the egg, as much as the egg-cup for
holding the shell: both are phases of the same function; the hen makes
the shell in her inside, but it is pure pottery. She makes her nest
outside of herself for convenience' sake, but the nest is not more of
a machine than the egg-shell is. A "machine" is only a "device."'
Then returning to consciousness, and endeavouring to detect its earliest manifestations, the writer continued:--
`There is a kind of plant that eats organic food with its flowers:
when a fly settles upon the blossom, the petals close upon it and hold
it fast till the plant has absorbed the insect into its system; but
they will close on nothing but what is good to eat; of a drop of rain
or a piece of stick they will take no notice. Curious! that so
unconscious a thing should have such a keen eye to its own interest.
If this is unconsciousness, where is the use of consciousness?
`Shall we say that the plant does not know what it is doing merely
because it has no eyes, or ears, or brains? If we say that it acts
mechanically, and mechanically only, shall we not be forced to admit
that sundry other and apparently very deliberate actions are also
mechanical? If it seems to us that the plant kills and eats a fly
mechanically, may it not seem to the plant that a man must kill and
eat a sheep mechanically?
`But it may be said that the plant is void of reason, because the
growth of a plant is an involuntary growth. Given earth, air, and due
temperature, the plant must grow: it is like a clock, which being once
wound up will go till it is stopped or run down: it is like the wind
blowing on the sails of a ship -- the ship must go when the wind blows
it. But can a healthy boy help growing if he have good meat and drink
and clothing? Can anything help going as long as it is wound up, or
go on after it is run down? Is there not a winding up process
everywhere?
`Even a potato* in a dark cellar has a certain low cunning about him
`He knows what's what, and that's as high,
As metaphysic wit can fly.'
[This is from the poem _Hudibras, the Presbyterian Knight_, by an earlier satirical Samuel Butler, 1612-1680.]
`The potato says these things by doing them, which is the best of
languages. What is consciousness if this is not consciousness? We
find it difficult to sympathise with the emotions of a potato; so we
do with those of an oyster. Neither of these things makes a noise on
being boiled or opened, and noise appeals to us more strongly than
anything else, because we make so much about our own sufferings.
Since, then, they do not annoy us by any expression of pain we call
them emotionless; and so _qua_ mankind they are; but mankind is not
everybody.
`If it be urged that the action of the potato is chemical and
mechanical only, and that it is due to the chemical and mechanical
effects of light and heat, the answer would seem to lie in an inquiry
whether every sensation is not chemical and mechanical in its
operation? whether those things which we deem most purely spiritual
are anything but disturbances of equilibrium in an infinite series of
levers, beginning with those that are too small for microscopic
detection, and going up to the human arm and the appliances which it
makes use of? Whether there be not a molecular action of thought,
whence a dynamical theory of the passions shall be deducible? Whether
strictly speaking we should not ask what kind of levers a man is made
of rather than what is his temperament? How are they balanced? How
much of such and such will it take to weigh them down so as to make
him do so and so?'
The writer went on to say that he anticipated a time when it would be possible, by examining a single hair with a powerful microscope, to know whether its owner could be insulted with impunity. He then became more and more obscure, so that I was obliged to give up all attempt at translation; neither did I follow the drift of his argument. On coming to the next part which I could construe, I found that he had changed his ground.
`Either,' he proceeds, `a great deal of action that has been called
purely mechanical and unconscious must be admitted to contain more
elements of consciousness than has been allowed hitherto (and in this
case germs of consciousness will be found in many actions of the
higher machines) -- Or (assuming the theory of evolution but at the
same time denying the consciousness of vegetable and crystalline
action) the race of man has descended from things which had no
consciousness at all. In this case there is no _a priori_
improbability in the descent of conscious (and more than conscious)
machines from those which now exist, except that which is suggested by
the apparent absence of anything like a reproductive system in the
mechanical kingdom. This absence however is only apparent, as I shall
presently show.
`Do not let me be misunderstood as living in fear of any actually
existing machine; there is probably no known machine which is more
than a prototype of future mechanical life. The present machines are
to the future as the early Saurians to man. The largest of them will
probably greatly diminish in size. Some of the lowest vertebrata
attained a much greater bulk than has descended to their more highly
organised living representatives, and in like manner a diminution in
the size of machines has often attended their development and
progress.
`Take the watch, for example; examine its beautiful structure;
observe the intelligent play of the minute members which compose it:
yet this little creature is but a development of the cumbrous clocks
that preceded it; it is no deterioration from them. A day may come
when clocks, which certainly at the present time are not diminishing
in bulk, will be superseded owing to the universal use of watches, in
which case they will become as extinct as ichthyosauri, while the
watch, whose tendency has for some years been to decrease in size
rather than the contrary, will remain the only existing type of an
extinct race.
`But returning to the argument, I would repeat that I fear none of
the existing machines; what I fear is the extraordinary rapidity with
which they are becoming something very different to what they are at
present. No class of beings have in any time past made so rapid a
movement forward. Should not that movement be jealously watched, and
checked while we can still check it? And is it not necessary for this
end to destroy the more advanced of the machines which are in use at
present, though it is admitted that they are in themselves harmless?
`As yet the machines receive their impressions through the agency of
man's senses: one travelling machine calls to another in a shrill
accent of alarm and the other instantly retires; but it is through the
ears of the driver that the voice of the one has acted upon the other.
Had there been no driver, the callee would have been deaf to the
caller. There was a time when it must have seemed highly improbable
that machines should learn to make their wants known by sound, even
through the ears of man; may we not conceive, then, that a day will
come when those ears will be no longer needed, and the hearing will be
done by the delicacy of the machine's own construction? -- when its
language shall have been developed from the cry of animals to a speech
as intricate as our own?
`It is possible that by that time children will learn the
differential calculus -- as they learn now to speak -- from their
mothers and nurses, or that they may talk in the hypothetical
language, and work rule-of-three sums, as soon as they are born; but
this is not probable; we cannot calculate on any corresponding advance
in man's intellectual or physical powers which shall be a set-off
against the far greater development which seems in store for the
machines. Some people may say that man's moral influence will suffice
to rule them; but I cannot think it will ever be safe to repose much
trust in the moral sense of any machine.
`Again, might not the glory of the machines consist in their being
without this same boasted gift of language? "Silence," it has been
said by one writer, "is a virtue which renders us agreeable to our
fellow-creatures."