# Shadows Of The Coming Race (1879)

I recently came across the short essay below by George Eliot, the male pen name of Victorian author [Mary Ann Evans](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Eliot). It's quite remarkable in its prescience of current AI debates, particularly how long the "servant-master" relationship can persist between humans and their machines. 

What's striking for me is that I'd read several of her novels such as *Middlemarch* and *Adam Bede*, but nothing about these fairly typical Victorian works ever hinted that she was thinking about the kinds of questions raised in this essay.



> 
>
>### Shadows Of The Coming Race
> 
> My friend Trost, who is no optimist as to the state of the universe
> hitherto, but is confident that at some future period within the
> duration of the solar system, ours will be the best of all possible
> worlds--a hope which I always honour as a sign of beneficent
> qualities--my friend Trost always tries to keep up my spirits under the
> sight of the extremely unpleasant and disfiguring work by which many of
> our fellow-creatures have to get their bread, with the assurance that
> "all this will soon be done by machinery." But he sometimes neutralises
> the consolation by extending it over so large an area of human labour,
> and insisting so impressively on the quantity of energy which will thus
> be set free for loftier purposes, that I am tempted to desire an
> occasional famine of invention in the coming ages, lest the humbler
> kinds of work should be entirely nullified while there are still left
> some men and women who are not fit for the highest.
> 
> Especially, when one considers the perfunctory way in which some of the
> most exalted tasks are already executed by those who are understood to
> be educated for them, there rises a fearful vision of the human race
> evolving machinery which will by-and-by throw itself fatally out of
> work. When, in the Bank of England, I see a wondrously delicate machine
> for testing sovereigns, a shrewd implacable little steel Rhadamanthus
> that, once the coins are delivered up to it, lifts and balances each in
> turn for the fraction of an instant, finds it wanting or sufficient, and
> dismisses it to right or left with rigorous justice; when I am told of
> micrometers and thermopiles and tasimeters which deal physically with
> the invisible, the impalpable, and the unimaginable; of cunning wires
> and wheels and pointing needles which will register your and my
> quickness so as to exclude flattering opinion; of a machine for drawing
> the right conclusion, which will doubtless by-and-by be improved into
> an automaton for finding true premises; of a microphone which detects
> the cadence of the fly's foot on the ceiling, and may be expected
> presently to discriminate the noises of our various follies as they
> soliloquise or converse in our brains--my mind seeming too small for
> these things, I get a little out of it, like an unfortunate savage too
> suddenly brought face to face with civilisation, and I exclaim--
> 
> "Am I already in the shadow of the Coming Race? and will the creatures
> who are to transcend and finally supersede us be steely organisms,
> giving out the effluvia of the laboratory, and performing with
> infallible exactness more than everything that we have performed with a
> slovenly approximativeness and self-defeating inaccuracy?"
> 
> "But," says Trost, treating me with cautious mildness on hearing me vent
> this raving notion, "you forget that these wonder-workers are the slaves
> of our race, need our tendance and regulation, obey the mandates of our
> consciousness, and are only deaf and dumb bringers of reports which we
> decipher and make use of. They are simply extensions of the human
> organism, so to speak, limbs immeasurably more powerful, ever more
> subtle finger-tips, ever more mastery over the invisibly great and the
> invisibly small. Each new machine needs a new appliance of human skill
> to construct it, new devices to feed it with material, and often
> keener-edged faculties to note its registrations or performances. How
> then can machines supersede us?--they depend upon us. When we cease,
> they cease."
> 
> "I am not so sure of that," said I, getting back into my mind, and
> becoming rather wilful in consequence. "If, as I have heard you contend,
> machines as they are more and more perfected will require less and less
> of tendance, how do I know that they may not be ultimately made to
> carry, or may not in themselves evolve, conditions of self-supply,
> self-repair, and reproduction, and not only do all the mighty and subtle
> work possible on this planet better than we could do it, but with the
> immense advantage of banishing from the earth's atmosphere screaming
> consciousnesses which, in our comparatively clumsy race, make an
> intolerable noise and fuss to each other about every petty ant-like
> performance, looking on at all work only as it were to spring a rattle
> here or blow a trumpet there, with a ridiculous sense of being
> effective? I for my part cannot see any reason why a sufficiently
> penetrating thinker, who can see his way through a thousand years or so,
> should not conceive a parliament of machines, in which the manners were
> excellent and the motions infallible in logic: one honourable
> instrument, a remote descendant of the Voltaic family, might discharge a
> powerful current (entirely without animosity) on an honourable
> instrument opposite, of more upstart origin, but belonging to the
> ancient edge-tool race which we already at Sheffield see paring thick
> iron as if it were mellow cheese--by this unerringly directed discharge
> operating on movements corresponding to what we call Estimates, and by
> necessary mechanical consequence on movements corresponding to what we
> call the Funds, which with a vain analogy we sometimes speak of as
> "sensitive." For every machine would be perfectly educated, that is to
> say, would have the suitable molecular adjustments, which would act not
> the less infallibly for being free from the fussy accompaniment of that
> consciousness to which our prejudice gives a supreme governing rank,
> when in truth it is an idle parasite on the grand sequence of things."
> 
> "Nothing of the sort!" returned Trost, getting angry, and judging it
> kind to treat me with some severity; "what you have heard me say is,
> that our race will and must act as a nervous centre to the utmost
> development of mechanical processes: the subtly refined powers of
> machines will react in producing more subtly refined thinking processes
> which will occupy the minds set free from grosser labour. Say, for
> example, that all the scavengers work of London were done, so far as
> human attention is concerned, by the occasional pressure of a brass
> button (as in the ringing of an electric bell), you will then have a
> multitude of brains set free for the exquisite enjoyment of dealing with
> the exact sequences and high speculations supplied and prompted by the
> delicate machines which yield a response to the fixed stars, and give
> readings of the spiral vortices fundamentally concerned in the
> production of epic poems or great judicial harangues. So far from
> mankind being thrown out of work according to your notion," concluded
> Trost, with a peculiar nasal note of scorn, "if it were not for your
> incurable dilettanteism in science as in all other things--if you had
> once understood the action of any delicate machine--you would perceive
> that the sequences it carries throughout the realm of phenomena would
> require many generations, perhaps aeons, of understandings considerably
> stronger than yours, to exhaust the store of work it lays open."
> 
> "Precisely," said I, with a meekness which I felt was praiseworthy; "it
> is the feebleness of my capacity, bringing me nearer than you to the
> human average, that perhaps enables me to imagine certain results better
> than you can. Doubtless the very fishes of our rivers, gullible as they
> look, and slow as they are to be rightly convinced in another order of
> facts, form fewer false expectations about each other than we should
> form about them if we were in a position of somewhat fuller intercourse
> with their species; for even as it is we have continually to be
> surprised that they do not rise to our carefully selected bait. Take me
> then as a sort of reflective and experienced carp; but do not estimate
> the justice of my ideas by my facial expression."
> 
> "Pooh!" says Trost (We are on very intimate terms.)
> 
> "Naturally," I persisted, "it is less easy to you than to me to imagine
> our race transcended and superseded, since the more energy a being is
> possessed of, the harder it must be for him to conceive his own death.
> But I, from the point of view of a reflective carp, can easily imagine
> myself and my congeners dispensed with in the frame of things and giving
> way not only to a superior but a vastly different kind of Entity. What I
> would ask you is, to show me why, since each new invention casts a new
> light along the pathway of discovery, and each new combination or
> structure brings into play more conditions than its inventor foresaw,
> there should not at length be a machine of such high mechanical and
> chemical powers that it would find and assimilate the material to supply
> its own waste, and then by a further evolution of internal molecular
> movements reproduce itself by some process of fission or budding. This
> last stage having been reached, either by man's contrivance or as an
> unforeseen result, one sees that the process of natural selection must
> drive men altogether out of the field; for they will long before have
> begun to sink into the miserable condition of those unhappy characters
> in fable who, having demons or djinns at their beck, and being obliged
> to supply them with work, found too much of everything done in too short
> a time. What demons so potent as molecular movements, none the less
> tremendously potent for not carrying the futile cargo of a consciousness
> screeching irrelevantly, like a fowl tied head downmost to the saddle of
> a swift horseman? Under such uncomfortable circumstances our race will
> have diminished with the diminishing call on their energies, and by the
> time that the self-repairing and reproducing machines arise, all but a
> few of the rare inventors, calculators, and speculators will have become
> pale, pulpy, and cretinous from fatty or other degeneration, and behold
> around them a scanty hydrocephalous offspring. As to the breed of the
> ingenious and intellectual, their nervous systems will at last have been
> overwrought in following the molecular revelations of the immensely
> more powerful unconscious race, and they will naturally, as the less
> energetic combinations of movement, subside like the flame of a candle
> in the sunlight Thus the feebler race, whose corporeal adjustments
> happened to be accompanied with a maniacal consciousness which imagined
> itself moving its mover, will have vanished, as all less adapted
> existences do before the fittest--i.e., the existence composed of the
> most persistent groups of movements and the most capable of
> incorporating new groups in harmonious relation. Who--if our
> consciousness is, as I have been given to understand, a mere stumbling
> of our organisms on their way to unconscious perfection--who shall say
> that those fittest existences will not be found along the track of what
> we call inorganic combinations, which will carry on the most elaborate
> processes as mutely and painlessly as we are now told that the minerals
> are metamorphosing themselves continually in the dark laboratory of the
> earth's crust? Thus this planet may be filled with beings who will be
> blind and deaf as the inmost rock, yet will execute changes as delicate
> and complicated as those of human language and all the intricate web of
> what we call its effects, without sensitive impression, without
> sensitive impulse: there may be, let us say, mute orations, mute
> rhapsodies, mute discussions, and no consciousness there even to enjoy
> the silence."
> 
> "Absurd!" grumbled Trost.
> 
> "The supposition is logical," said I. "It is well argued from the
> premises."
> 
> "Whose premises?" cried Trost, turning on me with some fierceness. "You
> don't mean to call them mine, I hope."
> 
> "Heaven forbid! They seem to be flying about in the air with other
> germs, and have found a sort of nidus among my melancholy fancies.
> Nobody really holds them. They bear the same relation to real belief as
> walking on the head for a show does to running away from an explosion or
> walking fast to catch the train."