MECHANICAL MAN

Taranaki Daily News, 18 October 1927, Page 6

MECHANICAL MAN

FUTURISTS PITY MACHINES. BUTLER’S “EREWHON.” London, Sept. 22. Devotees of the Butler creed know how the strange philosophy propounded in “Erewhon” regarded machines. They were destroyed lest they would make men their slaves, because they had life, a soul. To quote: “Man’s very soul is due to the machine ; it is a machine-made being, he thinks as he thinks and feels as he feels through the work the machines have wrought upon him, and their existence is quite as much in sine quo non for his, as his for theirs.” The newspapers this week are full of the wonders of our mechanised army. Must we then begin to wonder whether Samuel Butler’s idea was altogether fantastical when he says, “Who can say that the vapour engine has not-a kind of consciousness?” And again, “There is .no security,” he says, “against the ultimate development of mechanical consciousness in the faet of machines possessing little consciousness now, Reflect upon the extraordinary advance which machines have made during the last few hundred years, and note how slowly the animal and vegetable kingdoms are -advancing. The more highly organised machines are creatures not so much of yesterday as of the last five minutes, so to speak, in comparison with past time. Assume, for the sake of argument, that conscious beings have existed for some twenty million years; see what strides machines have made in the last thousand. May not the world last twenty Million years longer? If so, what will they not in the end become?” Marinetti, the futurist artist, has gone far along that way, for in MUan on August 17, he presided over a meeting to organise a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Machines. In presenting his report to the Milan meeting, Signor F. Azari, the secretary of the Futurist movement, said that the machine was destined “to redeem humanity from the slavery of manual labour and definitely to eliminate poverty and all traces of class struggle.” The humanity of the - future, Signor Azari believes, will be completely served by docile and formidable “generations of machines,” and will thus be able to devote all its t’me to aesthetic pleasures and intellectual labours, the machines to be commanded without effort by a few privileged persons. Signor Azari wrung his hearers hearts when he went on to say: “Although it cannot be denied that all machines possess a rudimentary soul, there are brutes who ignore the fact and treat the poor things in a most heartless manner. Some exceptionally bad cases,” exclaims Signor Azari, “have often made my heart bleed!” Hence the necessity of a society for the protection of these ill-treated machines.