When Robots Ruled the World

I am a big movie guy and while reading "The Machine Stops" I can't help but think of one movie; WALL·E. The article and the film have so much in common, yet they were written almost 90 years apart. Both describe a world where humans have drifted away from the world we live in now and are blind to the hand controlling their every move. Both have a computer or "the Machine;" technologies that have a mind of their own. I can see a world very similar to the ones described in both "The Machine Stops" and WALL·E.

I am sure many people have heard the expression (most likely from their mother as a child) you shouldn't believe everything you hear. More and more today it seems that we believe every tiny bit of gossip we hear on the news, from friends, and now on the Internet. I fear that one day when individual technologies, even artificial intelligence, are providing us with the only outlet of information we will fall victim to their bias. We become puppets of this technological dictatorship and are no longer free individuals. Our entire lives are based upon the "Book of the Machine" and any rebellion is immediately put to rest.

Naturally we love technological advancement and new technology, but at what point does this technology we create begin to think on its own and control us. It is ironic that society's controller is called "the Machine." The people put their entire hope, trust, and lives into an inorganic android. I don't know about you but I prefer real humans with real emotions and real brains telling me what to do. We are definitely far away from Forster's imagined future, but with the emergence of IBM's Watson, I wouldn't say its that far away.