The Machine Stops

Written in 1909, which is really the only fact about it you need. Everyone lives alone in a hexagonal cell underground with every need met by pressing a button, they speak to each other through glowing plates, and they consume lectures on demand. Going outside is considered vulgar and faintly obscene, and first hand experience is held to be inferior to ideas received second hand, or better still tenth hand. Kuno wants to see the surface with his own eyes and gets threatened with Homelessness for it. Forster wrote this before broadcast radio, before the First World War, before anything that behaves remotely like a screen, and he still got the shape of it dead right. Then the Machine stops.

I realised recently that this story is the one I will always point to as the predictor of the AI era we find ourselves entering. Encourage more people to read it, I don’t want to end up like this.