“The Machine Stops” is a novel which mainly describes the possible consequences of extreme industrialization. Machines take complete control of life. People live underground and interact with each other entirely electronically. One day the machine stopped working and the whole human society fell apart. The author satirized many phenomena in society by imagining the future. At the beginning there is a sentence writes “ She knew several thousand people, in certain directions human intercourse had advanced enormously.” It seems that the machines make the social contact more convenient to connect us all together, but actually to the contrary, a phenomenon is analyzed by the author that modern people are increasingly dependent on science and technology which has created a non-necessity for direct interpersonal communication. So instead of connecting us the machines actually make every one of us more isolated.
When things come to the relationship between humans and machine, the arguments never stop. In the story, the machines feed humans, cloth humans, house humans and make humans see as well as hear from each other. Humans, in return, think of machines as something sacred as religion. If the machines stop, humans will die. It’s a tragedy that humans have forgotten that it is themselves that create the machines. They forget that they create the machines to do their will but in the end, they have to compromise with the machine. I think behind the story, the key idea the author wants us to know is “ Man is the measure”.
After reading the article, look back on our daily life. Our life is full of high technology and algorithm which make our life become monotonous. Is it really what we want in the beginning? Will the physical and mental deterioration happen like the plot of the story? In this era of rapid technological progress, maybe it’s time to reconsider the relationship between humans and machine. Be the master of the machine, not the slave.