"Darwin among the Machines" appeared as the heading of an article published in The Press newspaper on 13 June 1863 in Christchurch, New Zealand. Signed Cellarius but written by Samuel Butler, the article raised the possibility that machines could evolve "mechanical consciousness" by means of Darwinian natural selection.
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Butler developed this and subsequent articles into The Book of the Machines, three chapters of Erewhon, published anonymously in 1872. From chapter xxiii: the book of the machines:
"There is no security"--to quote his own words--"against the ultimate development of mechanical consciousness, in the fact of machines possessing little consciousness now. A mollusc has not much consciousness. Reflect upon the extraordinary advance which machines have made during the last few hundred years, and note how slowly the animal and vegetable kingdoms are advancing. The more highly organized machines are creatures not so much of yesterday, as of the last five minutes, so to speak, in comparison with past time.
The Erewhonian society envisioned by Butler came to the conclusion "...that the machines were ultimately destined to supplant the race of man, and to become instinct with a vitality as different from, and superior to, that of animals, as animal to vegetable life. So... they made a clean sweep of all machinery that had not been in use for more than two hundred and seventy-one years..." (from chapter ix: to the metropolis.) Despite the initial popularity of Erewhon, its speculation on the evolution of "mechanical consciousness" was dismissed as an "attempt to laugh at Mr. Darwin." Furthermore, the type of intelligence envisioned by Butler is natural, not artificial.[1]
George Dyson applies Butler's original premise to the artificial life and intelligence of Alan Turing in Darwin Among the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence (1998) ISBN 0-7382-0030-1, to suggest coherently that the internet is a living, sentient being.
Dyson's main claim is that the evolution of a conscious mind from today's technology is inevitable. It is not clear whether this will be a single mind or multiple minds, how smart that mind would be, and even if we will be able to communicate with it. He also clearly suggests that there are forms of intelligence on Earth that we are currently unable to understand. From the book: "What mind, if any, will become apprehensive of the great coiling of ideas now under way is not a meaningless question, but it is still too early in the game to expect an answer that is meaningful to us."[2]
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