George Eliot flagged recursive self-implacement risks in 1879, long before Chalmers
alexisgallagher · x · 2026-09-15
David Chalmers shared a 1996 Australian TV clip worrying about recursive self-improvement. Quoting it, @saffronhuang notes an even earlier source: George Eliot's 1879 essay "Shadows of the Coming Race," where she glimpsed the threat of machines making humans obsolete—inspired simply by an automated weighing machine at the Bank of England at the dawn of the second industrial revolution.
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