AI before AI: Samuel Butler and Victorian Fears about Innovation and Automation

Abstract

Samuel Butler, the English writer and author of Erewhon, a dystopia in which machines take the power  over Man, has been recently hailed as a “visionary” who had anticipated the arrival of Artificial  Intelligence as early as in the second half of the 19th century. In his novel, at the end of a Darwinian  evolution which will make them independent and able to reproduce without human interaction, machines  will be able to dominate humankind. In the tradition of Luddism, “the Book of the Machines” ‒ the core of Erewhon ‒ advocates the destruction of all recent artefacts to save humans from slavery, i.e. from becoming  the “dogs” of all powerful machines.