Before “Erewhon,” Samuel Butler floated its most famous idea in a short newspaper article. Writing from New Zealand in 1863, he published “Darwin among the Machines,” which took Charles Darwin’s recently published theory of evolution and asked whether machines, too, were evolving - growing more complex and capable so quickly that they might eventually develop a kind of consciousness and supersede humanity. Butler’s provocative conclusion was that people might need to destroy their machines before the machines outgrew their need for people.
Butler later expanded the argument into the three “Book of the Machines” chapters of his 1872 novel “Erewhon.” In the novel’s own prefaces, Butler states plainly that “the first part of ‘Erewhon’ written was an article headed ‘Darwin among the Machines,’” and that the chapters were a serious extension of the evolutionary analogy rather than a parody of Darwin. The line of reasoning - that machine capability follows a self-accelerating, evolution-like curve - anticipates the modern notion of an intelligence explosion by roughly a century.