The Machine Stops
This is a science fiction story by Forster. The story describes a world in which most of the human population has lost the ability to live on the surface of the Earth. In 1973 it was included in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame. It was considered one of the best novellas ever published. Television and stage adaptations were made in the UK and in the USA.
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What Hacker News says
- Looks like you have some reading to do. Let me start with two:
These are short stories. If you want to get into more stuff, you can go through Hyperion Cantos by Dan Simmons.- The Machine Stops - Pump SixFor anyone wondering, yes, a good Sci-Fi novel(la) is also a great philosophical piece. It's not only robots vs. humans, all the time.
- > That's not how humans work. We developed math, art, literature, etc., because people love the act of doing it. We will continue to do that.
Sure, for art, literature, etc. For math, physics, biosciences, etc, we pay people to do it. There are too few people who would work for free to push progress in those areas. We are most certainly not going to do that, we're going to leave it to the AIs and hope for the best.
This sort of thing (human brains atrophying over generations) is like something out of a dystopian nightmare[1], but hey, that's natural selection for you: if intelligence is not a selection criteria (and it won't be if machines do all the thinking), it's unlikely that it will be present in future generations.
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[1]. "The Machine Stops", E. M. Forster, 1907. Or "Pump 6" (can't remember the author, Italian author). Just because it's fiction does not mean it's impossible.
- for those not aware of the reference, "The Machine Stops" was a 1909 novelette by E. M. Forster. It was very forward thinking, and so full of ideas!
On project gutenberg: first story in this anthology, https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/72890
PDF of just the story: https://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~koehl/Teaching/ECS188/PDF_files/...
- If you haven't read it, I think you'd enjoy The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster. It's amazingly prescient, given it was written in 1909.
- Great book.
But if you want some even earlier forward-thinking stuff, look up Forster's "The Machine Stops." It's not a full book, more a novella if it's even that. Extremely prescient!
And of course if you haven't read the relevant portions of Butler's "Erewhon," it's remarkable how closely they map onto today's issues. He kind of takes Thoreau's "Lo, men have become the tools of their tools" a few more stops down the line.
- I think it would be wise to heed the lessons of "The Machine Stops", a short story from 1909.[1,2]
I personally, want to learn as much as possible about infrastructure, and how to build and maintain it. I spend quite a bit of time helping a friend repair old electronics. We've even repaired Cesium beam atomic clocks!
It would be quite foolish to give up coding as a human skill. For me, being a full stack developer goes all the way back to knowing how use sticks and sharpened stones to build bricks, roof tiles, and shelter, as John Plant documents so well on his YouTube channel[3]. (Turn on subtitles!)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops
[2] https://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~koehl/Teaching/ECS188/PDF_files/...
