In an effort to work through the backlog of relevant literature assigned to me by AIN agents helping me determine our possible futures I decided to read E M Forster's short story "The Machine Stops". I found a quick PDF version here:

The Machine Stops By E.M. Forster

This was published in 1909. I'm still digesting this. 1909.

The language definitely reflects the era, and instead of detracting it drew me in.

There are many key concepts worth unpacking. The "ideas" so passionately pursued by the machine's most dutiful adherents feel dissonant and contradictory in to what I think of as ideas. The mantra of, "no ideas here" could be a piece of carefully crafted branding. There is also a reference to distance and space that I connected with. Often when I travel to a city (or even when I'm running around my own) I find myself wondering why more people aren't outside experiencing the space that they live in. So many people move from car to house to car to workplace and ever onward. In this passage, Kuno - the man who has been testing the boundaries built by the machines remarks

“You know that we have lost the sense of space. We say ‘space is annihilated,’ but we have annihilated not space, but the sense thereof. We have lost a part of ourselves. I determined to recover it, and I began by walking up and down the platform of the railway outside my room. Up and down, until I was tired, and so did recapture the meaning of ‘Near’ and ‘Far.’ ‘Near’ is a place to which I can get quickly on my feet, not a place to which the train or the air-ship will take me quickly. ‘Far’ is a place to which I cannot get quickly on my feet; the vomitory is ‘far,’ though I could be there in thirty-eight seconds by summoning the train. Man is the measure. That was my first lesson. Man’s feet are the measure for distance, his hands are the measure for ownership, his body is the measure for all that is lovable and desirable and strong."

Later in the story a man drops his handbook that they are all given and they retreat to like a religious tomb whenever anxiety strikes. While in their living pods the machine conforms to the space dynamically, able to move items and objects around with ease. The man who drops the book realizes he is on a airship platform and the people exiting all step on the book as they disembark. The absurdity of leaving a dropped book on the ground because the machine is not there to pick it up for you must have seemed ridiculous in 1909. However I found myself thinking of how my grandfather might stare at me if he saw the amount of my life that I've outsourced...

In the end I felt deeply connected to Kuno and Vasthi. The passage that stuck with me is Vasthi's seemingly fictional reference to a long forgotten/discredited philosophy:

She could not be sure, for the Machine did not transmit nuances of expression. It only gave a general idea of people — an idea that was good enough for all practical purposes, Vashti thought. The imponderable bloom, declared by a discredited philosophy to be the actual essence of intercourse, was rightly ignored by the Machine, just as the imponderable bloom of the grape was ignored by the manufacturers of artificial fruit. Something "good enough" had long since been accepted by our race. (Forster, 1909, Italics added)

The concept of the imponderable bloom is a poetic and appropriate a moniker for our predicament. Is there something in the space between our exchanges? Large Language Models feel far more real than the truncated systems in Forster's future. But when we imagine a future managed by AI systems will an approximation of connection be enough? Will we long for our messy systems and reject the optimum in favor of the imponderable?