On June 13, 1863, English author Samuel Butler published "Darwin among the Machines" in The Press newspaper in Christchurch, New Zealand. Writing under the pseudonym Cellarius, Butler suggested that machines might represent a form of "mechanistic life" undergoing constant evolution through Darwinian natural selection. He predicted that machines might eventually supplant humans as the dominant species.
It is a meditation at once scientific and poetic—a quiet reckoning with the idea that life, in all its forms, resists stasis; it persists, adapts, and—perhaps in ways still mysterious to us—reimagines itself. Butler’s words ripple through time, beckoning us to confront the fragile boundary between human and machine, creator and creation, and to ponder what it truly means to evolve.
"We refer to the question: What sort of creature man’s next successor in the supremacy of the earth is likely to be. We have often heard this debated; but it appears to us that we are ourselves creating our own successors; we are daily adding to the beauty and delicacy of their physical organisation; we are daily giving them greater power and supplying by all sorts of ingenious contrivances that self-regulating, self-acting power which will be to them what intellect has been to the human race. In the course of ages we shall find ourselves the inferior race. ...Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life. The upshot is simply a question of time, 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 " (Wikipedia article on Darwin among the Machines, accessed 01-02-2013).