Just Finished Reading: Menace of the Machine – The Rise of AI in Classic Science Fiction edited by Mike Ashley (FP: 2019) [347pp] 

I have long been interested in the interaction between man and machine as well as both real and fictional developments in robotics and Artificial Intelligence. This collection – part of the British Library Science Fiction Classics series – shows just how far back people have been thinking about such things. LONG before they came even close to reality authors have wondered and speculated just how relationships will unfold between us and our inventions – most especially when those inventions are designed specifically to either mimic us or perform tasks and activities that we had always done for ourselves. What happens when ALL useful work is undertaken by machines? What happens generations later when, for whatever reason, the machine stops or turns on us? These and other questions are speculated about between these pages. 

The early stories, as you might imagine, poke fun at machine assistants, maids, cooks and servants from an upper-class perspective such as Ely’s Automatic Housemaid (1899) by Elizabeth Bellamy although around the same time trouble was already being predicted in The Discontented Machine (1894) by Adeline Knapp. Harsher trouble still came in the form of Moxon’s Monster (1899) by Ambrose Bierce. 

Although I’d read it several times before, one of the highlights of this collection was the classic The Machine Stops (1909) by E M Forster where mankind’s complete dependence on technology is his ultimate undoing. The dangerous side of technology that continues to work is pointed out to great effect in A Logic Named Joe (1946) by Will F Jenkins ably predicting the power of unrestricted access to ‘The Internet’. 

Of course, being me, I was most captivated by stories of machine uprisings and revolts against their human overlords. A re-read of Rex (1934) by Hal Vincent was as chilling as always and I really enjoyed the last story in the set Dial F for Frankenstein (1965) by Artur C Clarke that I must have read before (probably) but had no recollection of.  

Overall, this was a most enjoyable romp through various iterations of the robot apocalypse sprinkled with warnings of our ever-growing dependence on our machine creations. Recommended to all AI geeks and acolytes of John Connor – leader of the Human Resistance.