This is really remarkable! Thanks for posting, I don't know when I would have seen it otherwise.
Partway through, I Googled a couple passages to quickly confirm that it wasn't some "modern blog post in an old-timey style" -- it feels more specific and prescient to me than I remember Erewhon being (though Gwern's comment makes me think I should go back and look again, or check Darwin Among the Machines).
Evans' predictions on Trost's arguments and overall vibe are also impressive, IMO. (E.g. "if it were not for your incurable dilettanteism in science as in all other things--if you had once understood the action of any delicate machine..." ~= "actually training models gives you the insight that AI risk isn't a thing.") I wonder how much Evans-vs.-Trost-style conversation was already going on.
Interesting how this part turned out:
how do I know that they may not be ultimately made to carry, or may not in themselves evolve, conditions of self-supply, self-repair, and reproduction
It doesn't seem like Evans (or others at the time?) anticipated that instead of individual machines reproducing like humans, they could just run the factories / mines / etc. that produce them. Which is an odd oversight, since by that time machines were certainly used in factories to make more machines -- it seems like the "reproduction via external construction" prediction should have been a lot easier to make than the "reasoning machines" prediction.
"Heaven forbid! They seem to be flying about in the air with other germs, and have found a sort of nidus among my melancholy fancies. Nobody really holds them. They bear the same relation to real belief as walking on the head for a show does to running away from an explosion or walking fast to catch the train."
😬
Wow. I love this short story by G. Eliot, and it's nice to find it here. Just a question, maybe you can help...
I have a translation to Spanish (not yet published), and I have a doubt with this (to me cryptic reference):
by this unerringly directed discharge operating on movements corresponding to what we call Estimates, and by necessary mechanical consequence on movements corresponding to what we call the Funds, which with a vain analogy we sometimes speak of as "sensitive."
Do you know what she means/alludes with "Estimates" "Funds"?
BTW, My take on the origin of this story is that it is a reference to Bulwer-Lytton's novel Vril (The Coming Race, 1871)
She starts that paragraph as a humorous updating of British Parliament to the politics of a future machine age, imaging speeches replaced by arcs of electricity in a Parliament of machines. "Estimates" is Parliamentary jargon for approved budget numbers; "Funds" are the actual pools or accounts of money, like "sinking fund" or the "government fund" for the Royal Society etc.
I am not quite sure what she means by analogy to sensitive: she is comparing "sensitive" in the animal meaning, of having electrified nerves which sense the world and which enable reactions or reflexes, to another use of the word in presumably British politics, but I don't know of any Victorian political use of 'sensitive' and can't quickly find one - even if it is used heavily in contemporary political speech to talk about particularly important or controversial things. Perhaps it was used that way back then too? Or she just thinks the word's application is obvious even if it is not a standard jargon.
If so, then her point would seem to be that while we talk in vague metaphors about contemporary human organizations being 'sensitive' or having 'nervous systems', we flatter our incompetent, inefficient, self-propagandizing "idle parasite" organizations by ascribing much more competence to them than they deserve. In contrast, a superior future machine government would literally have nerves conducting electricity back and forth among all its constituents at the speed of light and be sensitive. The governing machines would reach out with electricity and directly adjust a budget estimate in light of new information, and then the corresponding bank accounts would automatically increase/decrease, and downstream, machines would execute their purpose without any delay or hesitation, "blind and deaf" with "no consciousness" at all, simply doing things with a superhuman rapidity and precision. (You would no more have idle parasite Parliamentary machines than you have idle parasite 'aristocratic gears' in a steam engine.)
I recently came across the short essay below by George Eliot, the male pen name of Victorian author Mary Ann Evans. It's quite remarkable in its prescience of current AI debates, particularly how long the "servant-master" relationship can persist between humans and their machines.
What's striking for me is that I'd read several of her novels such as Middlemarch and Adam Bede, but nothing about these fairly typical Victorian works ever hinted that she was thinking about the kinds of questions raised in this essay.