Classic sci-fi 'Manna' rehosted for the web, typeset by Claude
Darpinian · x · 2026-11-01
Marshall Brain's classic novella Manna: Two Views of Humanity's Future has been rehosted because it reads poorly on the Internet Archive — and Claude did the typesetting, apparently quite well.
The story imagines the robotic takeover starting not at MIT or NASA but with a piece of fast-food management software called Manna, which gradually automates store operations, eliminates half of all jobs, and splits into two contrasting futures for humanity — one hopeful, one bleak. With autonomous agents on the rise, this decades-old prophetic fiction is worth revisiting.
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