Before ChatGPT: How a 19th-Century Satirist Predicted the Machine Age

The author Samuel Butler was born in 1835, the son of a strict clergyman who expected him to follow the same path. He resisted, left England for New Zealand, and made money sheep farming before returning to live as a writer and satirist. Butler was restless, skeptical of authority, and fascinated by Darwin’s theory of evolution, which influenced all his work. In Erewhon (1872), he built a fictional country to parody Victorian norms, flipping morality and common sense on their head. It was in this satirical frame that he wrote his most famous chapters, “The Book of the Machines.”The setting of Erewhon is a land that outlawed advanced machines centuries earlier, fearing they might evolve beyond human control. In those chapters, Butler argues that machines progress like living organisms, with humans as their reproductive organs, and that unchecked growth could make them surpass us. It reads now like an early map of the AI debate: machines gaining a kind of consciousness, the erosion of human work, and the consolidation of wealth into the hands of the few who control the systems. What Butler imagined as satire has become reality with automation replacing jobs, AI systems writing and reasoning, and massive profits pooling at a few tech companies. His warning that dependence on machines could reshape society wasn’t just fantasy; it was the opening chapter of the story we’re in.What follows here are the chapters that seem to predict the rise of AI.