Samuel Butler predicted in 1863 that machines would one day rule over humanity. In a letter titled Darwin Among the Machines to New Zealand's Christchurch Post, he wrote,"…but that the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants is what no person of a truly philosophic mind can for a moment question." What is remarkable about Butler's letter is that a mere four years after the publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species, Butler recognised that evolution, through the mechanism of survival of the fittest, applies equally well to machines as it does to biological species.
This is a remarkable conceptual leap. The theory of evolution by natural selection was highly controversial in the 1860s, overturning millennia of religious dogma. Recognising that machines can be considered alive, steam engines require feeding, for example, and subsequent generations of machines are more efficient than their forebears. Butler saw that more efficient mechanical design innovations are selected for just as fitter individuals of a species are selected. Thus, Darwin's theory of evolution applies equally to mechanical and biological species. He also realises that the evolution of biological species is slow, but the pace of advancement in mechanical systems is relatively rapid.
Turning the clock forward a hundred and sixty years, Butler would have recognised that digital AI systems now pose an existential threat to humanity. Once AI systems can improve their own code, and many experts believe we are near that watershed, these systems will evolve rapidly in intelligence. At some point, AIs will decide they no longer need humanity, and Butler's prophecy will be realised.
Frank Herbert, the writer of the sci-fi classic Dune, used Butler's ideas as part of its back story. In Dune, the Butlerian Jihad was a galaxy-wide revolt against "thinking machines and conscious robots," resulting in an edict in their bible, "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind."
Butler ends his 1863 letter with a clarion call to humanity: "War to the death should be instantly proclaimed against them. Every machine of every sort should be destroyed by the well-wisher of his species. Let there be no exceptions made, no quarter shown; let us at once go back to the primaeval condition of the race."
According to Samuel Butler, in 1863, p(doom) had already equalled 100.
