Past Visions of Artificial Futures One Hundred and Fifty Years under the Spectre of Evolving Machines Tim Taylor 1,2 and Alan Dorin 1 1 Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University, Australia 2 Independent Researcher, Edinburgh, Scotland tim@tim-taylor.com Abstract The influence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Artificial Life (ALife) technologies upon society, and their potential to fun- damentally shape the future evolution of humankind, are top- ics very much at the forefront of current scientific, govern- mental and public debate. While these might seem like very modern concerns, they have a long history that is often dis- regarded in contemporary discourse. Insofar as current de- bates do acknowledge the history of these ideas, they rarely look back further than the origin of the modern digital com- puter age in the 1940s–50s. In this paper we explore the ear- lier history of these concepts. We focus in particular on the idea of self-reproducing and evolving machines, and poten- tial implications for our own species. We show that discus- sion of these topics arose in the 1860s, within a decade of the publication of Darwin’s The Origin of Species, and attracted increasing interest from scientists, novelists and the general public in the early 1900s. After introducing the relevant work from this period, we categorise the various visions presented by these authors of the future implications of evolving ma- chines for humanity. We suggest that current debates on the co-evolution of society and technology can be enriched by a proper appreciation of the long history of the ideas involved. Introduction “And why should one say that the machine does not live? It breathes . . . It moves . . . And has it not a voice? . . . And yet the mystery of mysteries is to view ma- chines making machines; a spectacle that fills the mind with curious, and even awful, speculation.” Coningsby (Disraeli, 1844, p. 154) By the climax of the British Industrial Revolution in the early 1800s, the widespread introduction of increasingly sophisticated manufacturing machines had raised anxiety about the potential long-term consequences of mechanisa- tion. Areas of unease included not just the impact of tech- nology on the labour conditions of working people—a driv- ing concern of the Luddite movement (Archer, 2000), but also the growing appreciation of the self-amplifying poten- tial of the new machines. In 1844, the British author and fu- ture prime minister Benjamin Disraeli wrote the novel Con- ingsby. In a section describing the industrial landscape of Manchester, the narrator raises the idea of machines mak- ing machines and alludes to the profound potential of such a development (see quote above). During the same period, the scientific understanding of the complexity of biological life was undergoing a revo- lution, in the theories being developed by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace. Both theories were first pre- sented at the Linnean Society of London in 1858 (Darwin and Wallace, 1858), with a greatly extended presentation of Darwin’s theory appearing a year later with the publication of The Origin of Species (Darwin, 1859). At this time, the intellectual elite of England were a richly connected web of thinkers, among whom ideas of science, philosophy, technology, literature and the arts freely flowed. It did not take long for the contemporaneous ideas of ma- chines making machines, and of the evolution of biological organisms, to be connected—the result was the development of the idea of self-reproducing and evolving machines. In this paper we explore the work of prominent authors of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who addressed this topic. 1 We then identify common themes in their work in terms of the implications of these ideas for the future of human society and evolution, and conclude with brief com- ments about the relevance of this work to current debates. Early writing on self-reproducing and evolving machines Late Nineteenth Century (1860s–1890s) Almost as soon as The Origin of Species was published, some authors began exploring the applicability of Darwin’s ideas to human technology, and the potential consequences that this might entail. 1 The history of the idea of self-reproducing machines dates back even earlier (Taylor and Dorin, 2018), but here we focus on machines that can both self-reproduce and evolve. We acknowl- edge that our literature search has been conducted primarily in En- glish, and there may be relevant sources in other languages that we are unaware of. The review section of this paper draws upon material presented in our new book (Taylor and Dorin, 2018).