In these days of readily available AI chatbots, it’s not unusual to find speculation about whether artificial intelligence is going to “take over” the world in some usually unspecified way. This concern is older than you might expect. The Press newspaper in New Zealand published a letter in 1863 captioned Darwin among the Machines. Darwin’s On the Origin of Species had just been published in 1959, and the letter suggested that evolution among machines would outstrip human evolution, and “in the course of ages we shall find ourselves the inferior race.” The letter was signed “Cellarius,” which was a nom de plume of Samuel Butler, whose birthday is today.
Butler had been born in England to a middle-class family; his father was a local pastor, and Butler didn’t get along with his parents. He later wrote that they were “brutal and stupid by nature,” and “my father never liked me, nor I him; from my earliest recollections I can call to mind no time when I did not fear him and dislike him…. I have never passed a day without thinking of him many times over as the man who was sure to be against me.”
Butler’s dislike for his parents led to his emigration to New Zealand in 1859, where, at the age of about 24, he became a sheep farmer. He did pretty well at it, and eventually sold his farm for a substantial profit. His bigger accomplishment on his farm (which he wrote about in his book A First Year in Canterbury Settlement) was assembling drafts for his best-known novel, Erewhon. You may be familiar with Erewhon; it was first published in 1872, and has remained in print ever since.
Butler didn’t stop thinking about machine evolution after his letter to The Press — Erewhon includes three chapters specifically about conscious, self-replicating machines. That makes Butler one of the first (or the first) person to raise today’s issues about artificial intelligence and its dangers.
Butler didn’t stay in New Zealand; he returned to England in 1864 and rented rooms in Clifford’s Inn in London, where he stayed the rest of his life. Unfortunately you can’t visit Clifford’s Inn; it was demolished in 1934.
Butler published Erewhon anonymously at first, and the novel was extremely successful. There was so much public speculation about who might have written it that Butler finally revealed that he was the author, which made him a minor celebrity. He still had some financial difficulties, partly owing to his investment in two companies in Canada, both of which collapsed before he realized any profits. Luckily, though, his grandfather had left substantial property, and when Butler’s father died in 1886 Butler owned it all outright, which made him wealthy enough to devote himself to writing full-time, as well as enjoying annual vacations in Italy. He used Italy as the setting for two of his books, Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmond and the Canton Tocino and Ex Voto. He also translated both the Iliad and the Odyssey from Greek; Butler’s translations are still read.
He lived to be 66, and passed away in 1902, after which his novel The Way of All Flesh was published posthumously, as he had directed. The novel is partly autobiographical, and Butler evidently worried that it would be too controversial to publish during his lifetime. It was pretty controversial even in 1903; its original edition was highly edited. It wasn’t until 1964 that Butler’s original manuscript was published intact, as Ernest Pontifex or The Way of All Flesh. The controversy Butler was wary of stems from the novel’s critical view of the hypocrisy of the Victorian era. The Way of All Flesh was ranked number 12 on the list of the best 100 English-language novels of the 20th Century by Modern Language. Erewhon is still regarded as a masterpiece, both because of its speculation about the then-future and the quality of its writing. You can find both works, and probably Butler’s translations of the Greek classics, in most any library.
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