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Saffron Huang [verified] @saffronhuang · 20h Worrying about recursive self-improvement in 1996 is very impressive, but few know that George Eliot, of Middlemarch brilliance, wrote about the threat of RSI leading to human obsolescence way back in 1879 (!) She glimpsed this idea at the very start of the second industrial revolution, just by contemplating an automated weighing machine at the Bank of England. From "Shadows of the Coming Race": [embedded text image] "Pooh!" says Trost (We are on very intimate terms.) "Naturally," I persisted, "it is less easy to you than to me to imagine our race transcended and superseded, since the more energy a being is possessed of, the harder it must be for him to conceive his own death. But I, from the point of view of a reflective carp, can easily imagine myself and my congeners dispensed with in the frame of things and giving way not only to a superior but a vastly different kind of Entity. What I would ask you is, to show me why, since each new invention casts a new light along the pathway of discovery, and each new combination or structure brings into play more conditions than its inventor foresaw, there should not at length be a machine of such high mechanical and chemical powers that it would find and assimilate the material to supply its own waste, and then by a further evolution of internal molecular movements reproduce itself by some process of fission or budding. This last stage having been reached, either by man's contrivance or as an unforeseen result, one sees that the process of natural selection must drive men altogether out of the field; for they will long before have [cut off]
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
X post by Saffron Huang noting that George Eliot anticipated recursive self-improvement and human obsolescence in 1879 (in 'Shadows of the Coming Race' from Impressions of Theophrastus Such), quoting a passage in which the narrator argues a self-reproducing machine would drive humanity out through natural selection. The quoted passage is cut off mid-sentence at the bottom.
george eliotrecursive self-improvementshadows of the coming racehuman obsolescenceliteraturehistory of ai ideasnatural selectionmachine reproduction