Darwin Among the Machines
1863
© 2026
Grundidee
Gut dreieinhalb Jahre nach der Ersterscheinung von Darwins Evolutionstheorie [1] schrieb der 27 Jahre alte englische Schriftsteller Samuel Butler (1835 bis 1902) einen Leserbrief an eine neuseeländische Zeitung. Darin deutete er das Maschinenwesen seiner Zeit, der industriellen Revolution, als eine eigene Lebensform. Diese, so Butler, würde letztendlich zur Selbstreplikation fähig sein und die Menschheit bedrohen. Sein Brief endet mit einem Aufruf zur Maschinenstürmerei.
Kommentierte Zitate
Die Zeit ist 1863. Seit etwa 50 Jahren wurde aus der Revolution der (Natur)Wissenschaften die Industrielle Revolution. Zeitlich kurz getaktet erscheinen immer neue Technologien im Leben der Menschen: billige Töpferwaren (Wedgwood), dampfgetriebene Eisenbahnen und Schiffe, Elektromotoren, Konservendosen, Streichhölzer, wasserfeste Kleidung (Macintosh), Fotokameras und die Nähmaschine sind nur einige Beispiele. Die Produktion erfolgte oft in großen Fabriken, in denen viele kleine Menschen riesige Maschinen bedienten. Um die Stimmung einzufangen, in der Butler vielleicht geschrieben hatte, möchte ich eine Beschreibung von seine Zeitgenossen Charles Dickens aus dessem Buch "Hard Times" voranstellen.
ZITAT:
Charles Dickens, 1854: "It [die Stadt Coketown] was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood, it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness. It contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and to-morrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next." []
Charles Dickens, 1854: "It [die Stadt Coketown] was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood, it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness. It contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and to-morrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next." []
In dieser Maschinenwelt sieht Butler nun Ähnlichkeiten zur belebten Welt der Pflanzen und Tiere. Schon im 18. Jahrhundert hatten fast lebensecht wirkende Modelle von Tieren (Vaucansons Ente) oder Menschen viel Aufsehen erregt. Die Analogie lag vielleicht für den ein oder anderen schon in der Luft.
ZITAT:
Samuel Butler, 1863: "We have used the words “mechanical life,” “the mechanical kingdom,” “the mechanical world” and so forth, and we have done so advisedly, for as the vegetable kingdom was slowly developed from the mineral, and as in like manner the animal supervened upon the vegetable, so now in these last few ages an entirely new kingdom has sprung up, of which we as yet have only seen what will one day be considered the antediluvian prototypes of the race.
Samuel Butler, 1863: "We have used the words “mechanical life,” “the mechanical kingdom,” “the mechanical world” and so forth, and we have done so advisedly, for as the vegetable kingdom was slowly developed from the mineral, and as in like manner the animal supervened upon the vegetable, so now in these last few ages an entirely new kingdom has sprung up, of which we as yet have only seen what will one day be considered the antediluvian prototypes of the race.
Und die Individuen dieser mechanischen Lebewesen unterliegen einem Selektionsdruck, ganz so wie Darwin es in seinem Buch über die natürliche Zuchtwahl kurz zuvor beschrieben hatte. Und noch ist der Mensch der Meister:
ZITAT:
Samule Butler, 1863: "subservience to the use of man has played that part among machines which natural selection has performed in the animal and vegetable kingdoms"
Samule Butler, 1863: "subservience to the use of man has played that part among machines which natural selection has performed in the animal and vegetable kingdoms"
Als Nebengedanke griff Butler auch den später im elektronischen Zeitalter so mächtigen Trend der Miniaturisierung auf. Man denke beim Lesen der folgenden Zeilen an das Schrumpfen der Computer bei gleichbleibender Rechenleistung oder die erschreckende Veränderung des Kriegswesens durch kleinste und bilige Drohnen:
ZITAT:
Samuel Butler, 1863: "Firstly, we would remark that as some of the lowest of the vertebrata attained a far greater size than has descended to their more highly organised living representatives, so a diminution in the size of machines has often attended their development and progress. Take the watch for instance. Examine the beautiful structure of the little animal, watch the intelligent play of the minute members which compose it; yet this little creature is but a development of the cumbrous clocks of the thirteenth century—it is no deterioration from them. The day may come when clocks, which certainly at the present day are not diminishing in bulk, may be entirely superseded by the universal use of watches, in which case clocks will become extinct like the earlier saurians, while the watch (whose tendency has for some years been rather to decrease in size than the contrary) will remain the only existing type of an extinct race."
Samuel Butler, 1863: "Firstly, we would remark that as some of the lowest of the vertebrata attained a far greater size than has descended to their more highly organised living representatives, so a diminution in the size of machines has often attended their development and progress. Take the watch for instance. Examine the beautiful structure of the little animal, watch the intelligent play of the minute members which compose it; yet this little creature is but a development of the cumbrous clocks of the thirteenth century—it is no deterioration from them. The day may come when clocks, which certainly at the present day are not diminishing in bulk, may be entirely superseded by the universal use of watches, in which case clocks will become extinct like the earlier saurians, while the watch (whose tendency has for some years been rather to decrease in size than the contrary) will remain the only existing type of an extinct race."
Butler sinniert dann, ob der Mensch bereits den Anfängen seiner Nachfolger gegenüber steht:
ZITAT:
Samuel Butler: "What sort of creature man’s next successor in the supremacy of the earth is likely to be. We have often heard this debated; but it appears to us that we are ourselves creating our own successors; we are daily adding to the beauty and delicacy of their physical organisation; we are daily giving them greater power and supplying by all sorts of ingenious contrivances that self-regulating, self-acting power which will be to them what intellect has been to the human race. In the course of ages we shall find ourselves the inferior race. Inferior in power, inferior in that moral quality of self-control".
Samuel Butler: "What sort of creature man’s next successor in the supremacy of the earth is likely to be. We have often heard this debated; but it appears to us that we are ourselves creating our own successors; we are daily adding to the beauty and delicacy of their physical organisation; we are daily giving them greater power and supplying by all sorts of ingenious contrivances that self-regulating, self-acting power which will be to them what intellect has been to the human race. In the course of ages we shall find ourselves the inferior race. Inferior in power, inferior in that moral quality of self-control".
Etwas befremdlich wirkt Butlers Einschätzung, dass die Maschinen in einem Zustand höherer Moral existieren könnten. Schon Darwin war ja erschrocken darüber, dass die von ihm studierte Natur letzte Endes auf ein Hauen und Stechen hinausläuft, evolutionäre Zwänge also gerade nicht nur Kooperation und Weltfreundlichkeit erzeugen:
"No evil passions, no jealousy, no avarice, no impure desires will disturb the serene might of those glorious creatures. Sin, shame, and sorrow will have no place among them. Their minds will be in a state of perpetual calm, the contentment of a spirit that knows no wants, is disturbed by no regrets. Ambition will never torture them. Ingratitude will never cause them the uneasiness of a moment. The guilty conscience, the hope deferred, the pains of exile, the insolence of office, and the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes—these will be entirely unknown to them.
Butler behält seinen Gedanken aber bei und siedelt seine hypothetischen Maschinenwesen sogar in einem paradiesischen Zustand der Glückseligkeit an:
If they want “feeding” (by the use of which very word we betray our recognition of them as living organism) they will be attended by patient slaves whose business and interest it will be to see that they shall want for nothing. If they are out of order they will be promptly attended to by physicians who are thoroughly acquainted with their constitutions; if they die, for even these glorious animals will not be exempt from that necessary and universal consummation, they will immediately enter into a new phase of existence, for what machine dies entirely in every part at one and the same instant?"
Der Mensch, und jetzt wird es düster, rutscht dabei immer mehr ab in die Rolle eines nützlichen und nur deshalb geduldeten bis gehätschelte Sklaven:
"We take it that when the state of things shall have arrived which we have been above attempting to describe, man will have become to the machine what the horse and the dog are to man. He will continue to exist, nay even to improve, and will be probably better off in his state of domestication under the beneficent rule of the machines than he is in his present wild state. We treat our horses, dogs, cattle, and sheep, on the whole, with great kindness; we give them whatever experience teaches us to be best for them, and there can be no doubt that our use of meat has added to the happiness of the lower animals far more than it has detracted from it; in like manner it is reasonable to suppose that the machines will treat us kindly, for their existence is as dependent upon ours as ours is upon the lower animals. They cannot kill us and eat us as we do sheep; they will not only require our services in the parturition of their young (which branch of their economy will remain always in our hands), but also in feeding them, in setting them right when they are sick, and burying their dead or working up their corpses into new machines."
Jetzt kommt der Moment, wo der Klöppel auf die Glocke trifft: Butler macht die Evolvierbarkeit der Maschinenwesen zum Kippmoment für das Schicksal der Menschheit. Wenn die Maschinen ihre eigenen Nachkommen erzeugen können, sind wir nicht mehr nötig. Im Jahr 2026, gut 160 Jahre nach Butler, warnten Evolutionsforscher vor genau dieser ungeheuerliche Vorgang inmitten der uferlos sich austreitenden Künstlichen Inntelligenzen. [4] Bleiben wir aber weiter bei Butler im 19. Jahrhundert:
"It is obvious that if all the animals in Great Britain save man alone were to die, and if at the same time all intercourse with foreign countries were by some sudden catastrophe to be rendered perfectly impossible, it is obvious that under such circumstances the loss of human life would be something fearful to contemplate—in like manner were mankind to cease, the machines would be as badly off or even worse. The fact is that our interests are inseparable from theirs, and theirs from ours. Each race is dependent upon the other for innumerable benefits, and, until the reproductive organs of the machines have been developed in a manner which we are hardly yet able to conceive, they are entirely dependent upon man for even the continuance of their species. It is true that these organs may be ultimately developed, inasmuch as man’s interest lies in that direction; there is nothing which our infatuated race would desire more than to see a fertile union between two steam engines; it is true that machinery is even at this present time employed in begetting machinery, in becoming the parent of machines often after its own kind, but the days of flirtation, courtship, and matrimony appear to be very remote, and indeed can hardly be realised by our feeble and imperfect imagination."
Dass der Mensch einmal trostlos verloren sein wird, ist für Butler nur eine Frage der Zeit:
"Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life. The upshot is simply a question of time, but that the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants is what no person of a truly philosophic mind can for a moment question."
Sein Fazit: Maschinensturm
ZITAT:
Samuel Butler, 1863: "Our opinion is that war to the death should be instantly proclaimed against them. Every machine of every sort should be destroyed by the well-wisher of his species. Let there be no exceptions made, no quarter shown; let us at once go back to the primeval condition of the race."
Samuel Butler, 1863: "Our opinion is that war to the death should be instantly proclaimed against them. Every machine of every sort should be destroyed by the well-wisher of his species. Let there be no exceptions made, no quarter shown; let us at once go back to the primeval condition of the race."
Könnte es sich die Menschheit der 2020er Jahre leisten, das Internet "abzustellen"? Wohl kaum. Es gäbe Millionen von Toten und unsere gesamte Infrastruktur, vom bezahlen an der Supermarktkasse bis hin zu Frühwarnsystemen für Unwetter wäre weg. Doch die Abhängigkeit sah Butler auch schon vor der Zeit der Computer:
ZITAT:
Samuel Butler, 1863: "If it be urged that this is impossible under the present condition of human affairs, this at once proves that the mischief is already done, that our servitude has commenced in good earnest, that we have raised a race of beings whom it is beyond our power to destroy, and that we are not only enslaved but are absolutely acquiescent in our bondage."
Samuel Butler, 1863: "If it be urged that this is impossible under the present condition of human affairs, this at once proves that the mischief is already done, that our servitude has commenced in good earnest, that we have raised a race of beings whom it is beyond our power to destroy, and that we are not only enslaved but are absolutely acquiescent in our bondage."
Fußnoten
- [1] Charles Darwin: On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. Verlag von John Murray, London, 1859.
- [2] Samuel Butler: Darwin Among the Machines. Letter to the Editor of the Press, Christchurch, New Zealand, 13 June, 1863. Online: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/3279/pg3279-images.html#page179
- [3] Charles Dickens. Hard Times. 1854.
- [4] V. Müller, L. Steels, & E. Szathmáry: Evolvable AI: Threats of a new major transition in evolution, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 123 (17) e2527700123. Online: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2527700123 (2026).