I’ve always been enjoying science fictions regarding man-machine relationship, in most cases through movies though. It’s undoubtedly amazing experience to read a story from 1909 which ironically indicated a real problem nowadays, that people are tied so much to the internet that traditional concept of privacy, relationship and trust are dramatically changing. Fortunately we are not yet under the circumstances that we have to live underground and rely on the machine/computer to survive. We are thus not yet that desperate to trust machine more than human beings, most of the time we’re just using it to connect to people (and forget that we could physically contact them too).
The idea of machine ruling the world is nothing new now but I’m not sure whether it’s origining from this 1909 story. Strictly speaking in this story the machine is not even ruling the world. The “Central Committee” keeps being mentioned that it feels like it’s still managed by men. It’s just in this story people love machines so much that they accept it as dictator or even the divine. “The (Whatever) Committee” becomes an abstract concept.
I do believe this situation is in some way a Stockholm Syndrome, that people develop this complex feeling of the machine that helps them survive however restricts their mind and body (infants showing undue strength get killed) as well. This paradox could be a problem that we’ll all facing while we have to make decision to keep mankind survive with extremely restricted resources (which might not be the case in the novel, but I suppose it did happen while the machine initially took over the housekeeping work for men). This is why when I was reading I keep thinking of the anime “Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagaan” which show lots of similarity in the concept. While in the novel Kuno dug his way along out to the surface of the earth, I feel exactly the same excitement when I saw the scene in the anime that Simon, Kamina and Yoko fought their way to the surface (The still image I posted at the beginning of the entry).
It’s interesting that in the story, money was never mentioned. It’s likely that the worldwide disaster helped to form a centralized society where capitalism was perished. “The Commitee” could be a small group of humen elites or maybe the machine itself. It leveraged resources all over the globe after the disaster and as described in the novel, the resource shortage seemed to be already over and people did look for higher level of spiritual intercourse.
But why would the machine stop? How could that happen?
Technically speaking, I believe that the maintenance of such large scale of machinery is out of human beings control. That is, the machine must be self-maintaining (see the mending apparatus?) and possibly has already developed its own will and somehow keeps doing its job to babysitting the human beings (otherwise it’s gonna lose its raison d’etre, this is also typically the reason why I do not wish to talk about The Matrix, for machines in that movie is “evil-minded” and totally against men, which I believe is not the case here). However inhuman it could be (i.e. killing babies) it’s executing the already-made decision according to its preset programs to protect the mankind from extinction. So why would the machine let this happen? Is it really doing everything it can (like at least send out the alert)? Apparenly not. It’s not even showing much intelligence in the novel, the “committee” is the only channel between the machine and ordinary people, and what the committee shows, is exactly human bureaucracy. Maybe it’s just way too smart. Anyway the Answer is not revealed in the novel, and Forster actually did really well in predicting the situation that the internet distracts people from their real life, make them believe that they are more spiritual and have too much more important things to do to spare time for a face-to-face talk.
So far we are still lucky. We can unplug the cable and walk out of the room for fresh air (yeah, instead of changing the air in the room).
It crashed downwards, exploding as it went, rending gallery after gallery with its wings of steel. For a moment they saw the nations of the dead, and, before they joined them, scraps of the untainted sky.
However sad story it is, the ending is really … really beautiful.
Links:
- The Machine Stops. by E. M. Forster, 1909 (Wiki, Amazon)
- Stockholm syndrome
- 天元突破グレンラガン
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