E. M. Forster

Golden Deer Classics

The Machine Stops is a short science fiction story. It describes a world in which almost all humans have lost the ability to live on the surface of the Earth. Each individual lives in isolation in a 'cell', with all bodily and spiritual needs met by the omnipotent, global Machine. Most humans welcome this development, as they are skeptical and fearful of first-hand experience. People forget that humans created the Machine, and treat it as a mystical entity whose needs supersede their own. Those who do not accept the deity of the Machine are viewed as 'unmechanical' and are threatened with "Homelessness". Eventually, the Machine apocalyptically collapses, and the civilization of the Machine comes to an end.

The Machine Stops (Golden Deer Classics)

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The Machine develops – but not on our lines. The Machine proceeds but not to our goal. We only exist as the blood corpuscles that course through its arteries and if it could work without us, it would let us die.

Generative models like GPTs do indeed emit defective rhymes; especially below a certain size.

The sigh at the crisis of the Brisbane sym- phony no longer irritated Vashti; she accepted it as part of the melody. The jarring noise, whether in the head or in the wall, was no longer resented by her friend. And so with the mouldy artificial fruit, so with the bath water that began to stink, so with the defective rhymes that the poetry machine had taken to emit. 

Less prescient that one might think; first successful submarine telegraph cables existed in the late 1800s.

Thousands of miles away his audience applauded. The Machine still linked them. Under the seas, beneath the roots of the mountains, ran the wires through which they saw and heard, the enormous eyes and ears that were their heritage, and the hum of many workings clothed their thoughts in one garment of subserviency. 

But there came a day when, without the slightest warning, without any previous hint of feebleness, the entire communication-system broke down, all over the world, and the world, as they understood it, ended. 

She had never known silence, and the coming of it nearly killed her – it did kill many thousands of people outright.

Man, the flower of all flesh, the noblest of all creatures visible, man who had once made god in his image, and had mirrored his strength on the constellations, beautiful naked man was dying, strangled in the garments that he had woven. 

Kang Jie Ng

For a moment they saw the nations of the dead, and, before they joined them, scraps of an untainted sky

The Machine Stops (Golden Deer Classics) quotes

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