Is the essence of humanity the birth of ideas—creation?
In this episode, we dig into all the sci-fi connections in E.M. Forster’s The Machine Stops. We cannot believe how prescient Forster was back in 1909! Is he a time traveler?
As with so many of the planets the Starship Enterprise encounters on its voyages, Forster’s world is facing an existential threat as they’ve forgotten who built the machine that protects them.
Forster creates a frightening world where people are hooked into a machine afraid to go into the polluted outside world—perhaps inspiring later works like Logan’s Run or 12 Monkeys or The Matrix . And like Neo, the protagonist of The Machine Stops wakes up to the fact that he’s living in a pod without any true connection or concept of the outside world, an awakening that leads him on a sort of hero’s journey to escape the machine.
How could E.M. Forster have known so much about 100 years into his future? Respect.
Image: https://www.goodreads.com/book/photo/4711854-the-machine-stops
Music:(Alien 1963) Music No Copyright Download Mp3
Trovi Alien 1963 Mp3 qui: https://www.file-up.org/1xyadit3u1ml
Selected links from the episode
The Matrix
Wall-E
12 Monkeys
Oryx and Crake
Feed
Logan’s Run
The Giver
Childhood’s End
Fahrenheit 451
A Pleasure to Burn (“The Pedestrian”)
The Martian Chronicles (Yes! As Eric said, “There Will Come Soft Rains” is one of the short stories is indeed from The Martian Chronicles, a book we later discuss as a part of our Mars-themed Season 2.)
Waitbutwhy posts on AI, “The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence” (Part 1) and “The AI Revolution: Our Immortality or Extinction” (Part 2)
“Zima Blue,” episode from Netflix’s show, Love, Death, Robots.
Show notes
[11:48] Connections to the COVID pandemic[15:23] Is Kuno, the protagonist, a Christ-like figure?
[17:35] Connection to Zoom. Is Zoom making us less human?
*Apologies for the music overlay at the 19:45 mark!
[20:00] Possible connections to machine learning and AI
[29:00] Is The Machine Stops cyberpunk?
[30:25] At what point is a new idea generated? Is the essence of humanity in the birth of ideas, in creation?
[31:20 Person vs machine conflict running throughout. What does it mean to be human?
[35:00] sci-fi elements/devices
