E. M. Forster

Edward Morgan Forster, OM (1879-1970), was an English novelist, short story writer, and essayist. He is known best for his ironic and well-plotted novels examining class difference and hypocrisy in early 20th-century British society. His humanistic impulse toward understanding and sympathy may be aptly summed up in the epigraph to his 1910 novel Howards End. He had five novels published in his lifetime. He achieved his greatest success with A Passage to India (1924). The novel takes as its subject the relationship between East and West, seen through the lens of India in the later days of the British Raj. His views as a secular humanist are at the heart of his work, which often depicts the pursuit of personal connections in spite of the restrictions of contemporary society. He is noted for his use of symbolism as a technique in his novels, and he has been criticised for his attachment to mysticism. His other works include Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), The Longest Journey (1907), A Room with a View (1908) and Maurice (1971).

The Machine Stops

里森

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 quotes

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