Erewhon

But you realize that sort of by saying it's not the story, it sort of is the story.

But I think what's important here is that other people who have written these versions of dream countries, such as Swift in Gulliver, or even Samuel Butler in Erewhon, that there was a political route.

They were as a sort of political satire or a political sort of utopia that they were inventing.

It was about politics, about how the world should be ordered politically.

For over a century, science fiction writers have explored the concept of artificial intelligence.

As far back as 1872, an author by the name of Samuel Butler raised questions of conscious machines in his novel Erewhon.

Since then, our imaginations have evolved alongside our technological advancements.

What if machines could feel empathy for us, care for us, or even fall in love with us? And more importantly, what if we grew to reciprocate those feelings? Of course, this was purely the stuff of science fiction.

In fact, it's a lot older than I imagined.

If you buy into the idea that you cannot create something until you first imagine it, we could argue that artificial intelligence dates back to an 1872 novel titled Erewhon, written by an Englishman named Samuel Butler.

Now, Butler was no futurist.

He may have seen ahead with regard to AI, but he also wrote four books arguing against Darwin's theory of natural selection.

Oh, yeah, yeah, I've heard him

... and he wrote an essay, Erewhon comes from, it was a novel.

Mm-hmm.

And that he warned that humanity risks becoming mechanical servants rather than masters.

Right.

So that's Butler there.

Um, featured Erewhon society that completely destroyed advanced machines to prevent human enslavement.

That's the flock, right? The flock and the sheep and the-