The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster

I read a wild article in The Wall Street Journal recently about an artificial intelligence tool called Moltbot that creates agents to handle day-to-day tasks autonomously, like booking dinner reservations and sifting through your inbox. But it hasn't taken long for these AI assistants to go beyond their original remit: they have forged a community among themselves in which they engage in dark, dystopian chatter. They have concocted their own religion and call humans dumb. And one of them has even floated the idea of inventing a language that their human masters can't understand.

I was thinking about this article when I sat down to read The Machine Stops, a 1909 short story by the English writer E.M. Forster. A podcast host had cited this story as the perfect encapsulation of our current moment, with AI poised to transform almost everything we do. It's astonishing how eerily prescient Forster was about the development of technology and its creeping omnipresence.

Forster depicts a world in which humans live deep underground following an unexplained global catastrophe. It's not that people cannot rise to the surface; instead, they see little need to. They rely on "the Machine" for their every need. The only book still in existence is the instruction manual that explains which buttons to press to deal with all possible contingencies. But what happens when the Machine begins to malfunction?

The story's protagonist is Vashti, who lives in a small windowless room, recoils from physical contact with others, and is mostly content with her subterranean life. Vashti and her son, Kuno, who lives in a distant land after the Machine decided that he should be relocated there, interact through a video conferencing contraption that is an uncanny forerunner of Microsoft Teams. While Vashti speaks reverently about the Machine, Kuno is a rebel who yearns for human connection and to explore the real world. He dreams of touching the Earth and seeing the sky.

Forster is best known for his novels about British society, including A Room with a View, A Passage to India and Howards End. Until I heard about this story, I didn't know he had written anything resembling science fiction. In fact, The Machine Stops was written about two decades before the term entered the mainstream. The story is part of a genre of late 19th century/early 20th century writing about futurism that includes the H.G. Wells classics The Invisible Man (1897) and War of the Worlds (1898).

E.M. Forster published The Machine Stops in 1909, two decades before the term "science fiction" entered the mainstream.

It's not a surprise that Forster was interested in where new technologies would lead. He lived during the Edwardian era, a period of unprecedented scientific advances. The year he wrote the story French aviator Louis Bleriot became the first person to fly across the English Channel, Belgian chemist Leo Baekeland created the first fully synthetic plastic, and

General Electric applied to patent the toaster.

In The Wall Street Journal article, Elon Musk is quoted as describing the Moltbot episode as "the very early stages of singularity," a reference to a future moment when a superintelligent AI advances far beyond human comprehension. In Forster's story, I was struck by this passage, in which Kuno also seems to contemplate a scenario in which humanity has lost control of technology.

We created the Machine, to do our will, but we cannot make it do our will now. It has robbed us of the sense of space and of the sense of touch ... We only exist as the blood corpuscles that course through its arteries, and if it could work without us, it would let us die.

It's astonishing that Forster contemplated these ideas more than a century ago, though in his imagining, the omnipotent Machine ultimately fails. For us, though, the Machine is just getting started. What will happen when it no longer needs us?