The singularity is always near

I’ve been at least vaguely aware of Samuel Butler’s 1865 essay “Darwin Among the Machines” for a long time (mainly through quotations in George Dyson’s excellent book of the same title), but I hadn’t read it in full until I stumbled on a copy online a couple of days ago. It’s a strange and remarkable piece of work, and one that echoes loudlytoday. In fact, given the dire new predictions about humankind’s coming servitude to machines with artificial intelligence,the essay’s resonance may be gr...