Shadows of the Coming Race - Page 2

mildness on hearing me vent
this raving notion, "you forget that these wonder-workers are the slaves
of our race, need our tendance and regulation, obey the mandates of our
consciousness, and are only deaf and dumb bringers of reports which we
decipher and make use of. They are simply extensions of the human
organism, so to speak, limbs immeasurably more powerful, ever more
subtle finger-tips, ever more mastery over the invisibly great and the
invisibly small. Each new machine needs a new appliance of human skill
to construct it, new devices to feed it with material, and often
keener-edged faculties to note its registrations or performances. How
then can machines supersede us?--they depend upon us. When we cease,
they cease."

"I am not so sure of that," said I, getting back into my mind, and
becoming rather wilful in consequence. "If, as I have heard you contend,
machines as they are more and more perfected will require less and less
of tendance, how do I know that they may not be ultimately made to
carry, or may not in themselves evolve, conditions of self-supply,
self-repair, and reproduction, and not only do all the mighty and subtle
work possible on this planet better than we could do it, but with the
immense advantage of banishing from the earth's atmosphere screaming
consciousnesses which, in our comparatively clumsy race, make an
intolerable noise and fuss to each other about every petty ant-like
performance, looking on at all work only as it were to spring a rattle
here or blow a trumpet there, with a ridiculous sense of being
effective? I for my part cannot see any reason why a sufficiently
penetrating thinker, who can see his way through a thousand years or so,
should not conceive a parliament of machines, in which the manners were
excellent and the motions infallible in logic: one honourable
instrument, a remote descendant of the Voltaic family, might discharge a
powerful current (entirely without animosity) on an honourable
instrument opposite, of more upstart origin, but belonging to the
ancient edge-tool race which we already at Sheffield see paring thick
iron as if it were mellow cheese--by this unerringly directed discharge
operating on movements corresponding to what we call Estimates, and by
necessary mechanical consequence on movements corresponding to what we
call the Funds, which with a vain analogy we sometimes speak of as
"sensitive." For every machine would be perfectly educated, that is to
say, would have the suitable molecular adjustments, which would act not
the less infallibly for being free from the fussy accompaniment of that
consciousness to which our prejudice gives a supreme governing rank,
when in truth it is an idle parasite on the grand