Man v. Machine

[urbeatle]

I was watching a Twilight Zone episode ("The Brain Center at Whipple's",) about the fears of modern people becoming obsolete, when I started to wonder: what was the first "fear of being made obsolete by a machine" story? The earliest I can think of is the story of John Henry, which would be from about the 1880s.

Comments

[mmcirvin]

Frankenstein's monster wasn't a machine, but the theme of artificial Homo Superior was in there (though the creature doesn't become hostile until his jerk of a creator rejects him just for being ugly).

But the big boom in "mechanical man will replace us" stories, in newspaper features and such, was in the 1920s and 1930s. I'm not sure why this is; remarkably, it was before computers really became a coming thing and robots with complex behaviors became practically conceivable. I guess it was a reaction in part to industrial-age futurism and the subjugation of people to machines in the assembly-line factory. The Paleo-Future blog has collected a lot of these.

[mmcirvin]

There was a wave of dime novels with steam-powered automata in them in the 1860s-1870s. But I don't know if the "replacement" fear showed up in any of them; usually the steam man was just the faithful creation of a boy genius inventor, used more as locomotion than anything else. Still, it might be fruitful territory to examine, since it was always a steam man.

[mmcirvin]

...Is there anything in Karl Marx about this? It seems up his alley. He thought of capitalism + industrialization as immiserating the workers but I don't know if he specifically predicted technological unemployment as a problem. Maybe not, since he thought that profits would always decline because of competition and the inherent inefficiencies of a capitalist economy, not that automatically skyrocketing per-worker efficiency would motivate companies to reduce headcount.

Certainly lots of people since Marx have proposed some form of socialism as the solution to the problem.

[doctroid]

The Luddites got started in 1811; it'd surprise me if their attitudes were not reflected in fiction before mid century, but I certainly don't know of examples.

[mmcirvin]

That's a really good point.

I've always thought the original Luddites got a really bad rap by being associated with technophobes and back-to-the-land romantics; whether or not you agree with their tactics, they did what they did because their whole industry was under direct threat.

and that would fit with Frankenstein

[notr]

originally published in 1818. R.U.R. and the flurry of robot stories that followed came after the saboteurs 100 years later, and also in the wake of Communist revolution and a big jump in the mechanization of war.

Along those lines, I was also thinking of the Golem of Prague, whose tale may or may not go back to the 16th century, when it's set. He got attention a few years after the second publication of Frankenstein, and again in the years before R.U.R.

Re: and that would fit with Frankenstein

[urbeatle]

The Golem -- I'm thinking of the silent film, here, which I don't completely recall -- has a "knowledge (science) is dangerous" theme, but does it have a fear of obsolescence theme? Does Frankenstein?

I'm thinking here of stories where a human feels the need to argue or even prove the worth of humanity in the face of advancing technology. John Henry challenges the machine and wins, although he dies in the process; Whipple argues for the machines, but gets a taste of his own medicine. I never thought of Frankenstein as being threatened by feelings of personal worthlessness because his creation was so much better than he was. But then, I never got around to reading it, only watching the classic film versions (and the Magoo version.)

[mmcirvin]

Samuel Butler's letter "Darwin Among the Machines" (which provided the name for the Butlerian Jihad in Dune) was 1863.