Darwin Among the Machines: The Butlerian Conjecture as Metaphor and Model

Four years after the appearance of Darwin's Origin of the Species Samuel Butler proposed that machines had emerged as a new form of life that would increasingly dominate the earth and eventually displace man and other life forms. Machine life would be (initially at least) symbiotic with human life much as bees and flowers are mutually symbiotic. In contrast to much science fiction both before and after his time, he did not propose that any machine would come to resemble a human being, be able to pass a Turing test, or star in a Terminator remake. Instead, his argument anticipates the thermodynamic vision of life proposed by Alfred Lotka (1922, 1945) in which evolution operates on an ecological assemblage of energy transformers. I will apply some of the methods and perspectives of modern evolutionary economics to ask a) if there is any empirical substance to Butler's claim, and b) to what extent Butler's metaphor/conjecture helps us to understand such issues as why some countries are rich and others are poor, the dynamics of world economy depression and recovery, the patterns of employment generation, and the prospects for climate change, biodiversity and energy supply.

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