In his novel Erewhon, published in 1872, Samuel Butler describes an imagi­nary country (a "nowhere") in which all machines are forbidden. The inhabitants had once availed themselves of watches, steam engines, mechanical pumps and hoists, and all the other devices that could be admired in the great exhibitions of Victorian England. ¶ But unlike Butler's Victorian contemporaries, they had perceived the terrible danger that these things represented. Machines, they realized, were always improving. Never for one moment did they take a step backwards into imperfections that they had surpassed. Always, the next machine was better, more versatile, and more fully adapted to its uses than the last.

Inevitably, therefore, the process of improvement would continue, until machines had no need of humans at all--until they were able to produce and reproduce themselves. At that point, like all creatures obedient to the law of evolution, the machines would be locked in a struggle with their competitors. Their only competitor would be man. Hence, foreseeing that the machines would otherwise destroy them, the inhabitants of ­Erewhon had destroyed the machines.