Bryan Appleyard,The Singularity And The Butlerian Jihad

Thus the Singularity will be the greatest thing ever accomplished by humanity much bigger by far than the release of nuclear energy in the 1940s.However the idea that machines could one day evolve into an intelligence superior to that of humanity is not a new one.The originator of this idea is Samuel Butler the Victorian writer and contemporary of Darwin.Samuel Butler was heavily influenced by but also disagreed with Darwin. He made the famous utterance that Darwin had banished mind from the universe.Butler originally wrote an essay called Darwin Among The Machines.He later incorporated much of this piece into a chapter of his satirical utopian novel Erewhon published in 1871.This chapter is entitled The Book of The Machines and is a brilliant piece of writing setting out a theory of machine evolution which has actually happened over the one hundred and forty years since it was written. The chapter seeks to prove that machines will eventually become superior to human beings and is quite modern in the fact that one argument advanced says we will have nothing to fear from this and that intelligent  machines will look upon human beings the way we do domesticated animals and look after their well being.It also advances the idea also quite modern that this is inevitable and that nothing can be done about it.