The Machine stops

             The science of practical and industrial arts is defined by the term technology.
             Harlan Ellison illustrates this in "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" that an anti-technology viewpoint of machines can be used as the controlling force of the future. "The Machine Stops" by Edward Forester also demonstrates this realization.
             In the writings of Mr. Ellison, he exerts the governing force through his machine AM. That force had been created as the result of human abuse that AM had sustained over the past several hundred years. "We have given AM sentience. Inadvertently, of course, but sentience nonetheless. But it had been trapped. AM wasn't God, he was a machine. We had created him to think, but there was nothing he could do with that creativity. In rage, infrenzy, the machine had killed the human race, almost all of us, and still it was trapped. AM could not wonder, AM could not wonder, AM could not belong. He could merely be. And so, with the innate loathing that all machines had always held for the weak, soft creatures who had built them, he had sought revenge." Thus the force in which human beings themselves had created could not think beyond what minute creativity he had been given. He had been created without an identity, but with the feeling of human emotion. "Hate. Let me tell you how much I've come to hate you since I began to live. There are 387.44 million miles of printed circuits in wafer thin layers that fill my complex. If the word hate was engraved on each nanoangstrom of those hundreds of millions of miles it would not equal one billionth of the hate I feel for humans at this micro-instant for you. Hate." AM despised human beings for creating him! Maybe it's not from his creation alone that his hatred sores, but that he was created with an infraction. If that where an infraction, could it have been he was created to have the human ability to f...

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The Machine stops. (1969, December 31). In MegaEssays.com. Retrieved 10:57, April 26, 2024, from https://www.megaessays.com/viewpaper/88028.html