Category: Ann Chen

This reading strikes me with its strong contrast between people’s peaceful and regular routine under the service of the Machine at the beginning, and the scene of total chaos and violence at the end when the Machine stops. I’m especially impressed by the struggle between humanity and the religion of the Machine that the reading depicts.

In this reading, people live under the surface of the earth and depend their lives on the Machine. It reminds me of the recent Chinese sci-fi movie “The Wandering Earth”, in which people also live undergrounds and are banned from visiting the earth’s surface unless having special working licenses, and the earth is powered by multiple huge engines around the globe. This common setting reflects the concern that human activities will exhaust the earth’s resources someday in the future, and that people will be both benefitting and suffering from their high-tech creations.

Different from the movie, where the underground world is built up and operate by humans, the one in the reading is under the charge of a humming Machine. There is a contrast between Vashti’s and Kuno’s attitude towards the Machine. The former, representing the majority, worships the Machine as a almighty “God” and is too fear to leave its control or violate its rules, while the latter, tired of the mechanic routine and driven by his strong curiosity about the outside world, is looking forward to a life without the Machine. It’s ironic that the Machine, enabling people to call and see each other whenever and wherever with the Virtual Reality technology, is at the same time distancing the relationships between them, and isolating individuals’ lives. Vashti often emphasizes the preciousness of her time, but all she do after getting up is connecting friends and attending or giving lectures through the Machine, even without leaving her armchair. It seems that the machine brings people closer, as they can see the virtual images of each other when making calls and talk to them as if face to face. But such technology at the same time deprive people’s desire to actually come out and communicate with each other in the fresh. Vashti seldom sees her son since he left, not even knowing the detail reasons and process of his moving to the other side of the earth. Moreover, the Book of the Machine forbids direct body contact undergrounds, and as Vashti expresses, there is not much different in seeing somebody virtually or in reality, which also accounts for her reluctance to travel to visit her son initially. I stopped and pondered as I read this part. Virtual reality breaks the time and space limits, and enriches our experiences, but it can never replace reality. We should be alerted when the majority of us are indulged in the virtual world created by technology and become unwilling to get out of our own safe-zones, because that is the time when the reality starts to fade.

There is another interesting idea expressed in the reading. The Book of the Machine serves as a Bible in that world, and the Machine is the God. Although Vashti denies trusting the Machine as a religion, she and many other people have already become its most pious followers. On the other hand, as Kuno mentions, the Machine is created by man, so are the rules. And thus, men are trapped by their creation. In the world of the Machine, people not only become more selfish and complacent, but also lose the passion to explore and improve, which inevitably leads to the stop of the Machine in the end. But the Machine should never be to blame, since it did nothing wrong other than regulates and serves people well. It is men who ruined their life with their own hands and minds. Extending to the popular topic of the threats of the AIs, it is also man rather than AI brains that we should worry about. Many Science Fictions today describe the future to be under the deployment of AIs, and humans are only tools of these super minds. But will the AIs evolve and develop their own minds that planning on turning against human? No one knows the answer, since no human can catch up with the speed of machine learning. However, I believe that AIs are just magnified human minds, which intensify the power of both the strengths and weaknesses of humanity. After all, AIs are lack of emotions. When AIs kill a man, it is not because they want to, but usually that removing him or her is the easiest way achieve certain goals, and they are programmed by man to pursue the highest efficiency. In many cases where men are troubled with their emotions and hesitate to balance the pros and cons of certain decision, AIs won’t, which leads to their so-called evilness. The world of Machine in the reading is lack of humanity, in that it eliminates the physically strong body at birth to maintain the order of that society. Is it that the Machine is plotting some scheme against humans and that it is preparing for it by removing those strong bodies? No, the Machine is created and programmed by people. When we are overwhelmed by greediness and desires, we want the most of everything, and tend to choose the easiest and quickest way. The Machine stands for an easy way of governance, in which athletics and explorers are not needed, and their existence are likely to bring disturbances. Kuno is a representation of such exception, who dares to break the rules. His role in the reading reminds me that troubles and hardness are necessary in our life, and can sometimes save us from blindness. Efficiency and easiness are not always the best, and thus we need to consider more comprehensively instead of making easy conclusions.

The stop of the Machine, which seems like a total disaster, is in fact the beginning of the fortune of the society.

Response to E.M. Forster

When we imagine about the future, people can’t neglect the question that where we are going and whether there is an end. The sci-fi story The Machine Stops by E. M. Forster offers the answer of a catastrophe; and while it is the end of the life of an entire generation, it is not the end of humanity. This brings readers deep questions on technology-based life style and what is necessary for living as a human being.

The saddest element in this story is that people ditch the significance of living. They keep themselves alive in artificial cages where their basic needs are satisfied in a world with no reality. Being born and raised with the extreme dependence on the Machine, people lose senses and feelings, they forget the ways of communication, they even lose their natural rights to experience in real world. Although forms of interaction like talking and observing still exist, society has collapsed into isolated units. Without connection and communication, people are just flesh that consume resources. The point of humanity is lost.

The fall-down of the world and the hope held by Kuno in the end leaves readers a strong impact. It might be hard to visualize the destination when we first start the journey of machinery revolution, but it is a must to keep in mind that “Man is the measure”. Man should never forget senses and communications, or pass the bottom line that let go of the core of humanity. The world may be manipulated, but there will still be one last man standing for humanity, just like “scraps of the untainted sky” Kuno saw before they joined the history made up by dead lives.

This short story, “The Machine Stops” by E.M. Forster, is about the role technology has in media and its implications of how we experience anything through technological media. Media is any medium through which people experience something. Examples of media include movies, video games, web comics, and, in the case of this book, the Machine. The Machine serves as the sole medium for all interactions inside of your room, which ultimately becomes your world. Everything in Vashti’s life—her baths, her lectures, and her interactions with her son—was experienced through the Machine until she decided to meet him. The Machine was her only way of seeing the world from her room. She “had no ideas of her own[,]” but was fed them through the Machine (4). Seeing the world through only one medium—through the Machine: her world, her truth, her God—left Vashti robbed of her own ideas and removed her capacity to see the world her way. She wasn’t really interested in the process or the discovery of ideas, but only of ideas themselves. She notes this by criticising the system of the previous civilisation, which “had used [the system] for bringing people to things, instead
of for bringing things to people” (5). The process or discovery of these things is irrelevant, to Vashti. The only thing that mattered was the immediacy of the thing—the “truth” she wants.

While we aren’t exactly living inside of the Machine ourselves, there is something to be learned from Vashti and the Machine itself. Namely, how we see technological media. Technological media—and, in my opinion, media in general—should not be seen as a means to an end but an end in of itself. The mere process or discovery of conveying ideas, the media itself, is just as important if not more important than the destination or the “truth.” How a certain mode of media communicates its intended message or theme is crucial. What is lost in the Machine is this discovery or process through a contradictory indirect immediacy. The sea, the world above the ground, and the whole Earth itself is experienced through the Machine, yet this experience loses a significant part of its meaning. The Machine, as Vashti put it, “did not transmit nuances of expression[,]” as it instead reduced the interaction with technological media to a dogmatic and unilateral truth, for “[i]t only gave a general idea… an idea that was good enough for all practical purposes” (3). The particular context for this line was used to describe the lack of nuance to her son’s features when communicating through the Machine, but this idea can easily be extended to every experience users of the Machine have with the world they see through it.

To put it all in a single sentence: how you communicate a point is just as important, if not more important, than what you communicate through media.