He is such a hive and swarm of parasites that it is doubtful whether his body is not more theirs than his, and whether he is anything but another kind of ant-heap after all. May not man himself become a sort of parasite upon the machines? An affectionate…
Book 1872
Erewhon quotes
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About the book
A young Englishman crosses an unexplored mountain range in a remote colony and finds Erewhon, a hidden country whose customs turn Victorian values upside down. There illness is punished as a crime while wrongdoing is treated like a sickness, and machines have been banned for centuries after a learned treatise warned that they might evolve consciousness and supplant mankind. The satire is one of the earliest works to imagine machine intelligence arising through evolution.
6 quotes
Are we not ourselves creating our successors in the supremacy of the earth? daily adding to the beauty and delicacy of their organisation, daily giving them greater skill and supplying more and more of that self-regulating self-acting power which will be…
There is no security … against the ultimate development of mechanical consciousness, in the fact of machines possessing little consciousness now. A mollusc has not much consciousness. Reflect upon the extraordinary advance which machines have made during the…
Does any one say that the red clover has no reproductive system because the humble bee (and the humble bee only) must aid and abet it before it can reproduce? No one. The humble bee is a part of the reproductive system of the clover. … These little creatures…
It is all very well for you to say that you came of unhealthy parents, and had a severe accident in your childhood which permanently undermined your constitution; excuses such as these are the ordinary refuge of the criminal; but they cannot for one moment be…
But who can say that the vapour engine has not a kind of consciousness? Where does consciousness begin, and where end? Who can draw the line? Who can draw any line? Is not everything interwoven with everything?