A Room Without a View
AI Histories #12: The Machine Stops
Out of the Unknown was a BBC television series about what technology does to the human condition. You can think of it as Black Mirror almost 50 years before the first Black Mirror episode aired. There’s one about a doctor pushed to the edge while treating a man suffering from radiation poisoning. Another deals with a spaceship en route to a distant star system, which we later learn is a simulation running on Earth.
But the best of the bunch is ‘The Machine Stops’ from the show's second season based on E.M. Forster's novella of the same name. Written in 1909, it’s a small book about what happens when humans triumph over nature. People reside in underground pods watched over by a machine that provides every comfort they could possibly need.
No one ever goes to the surface, except a special few who get permission from the ruling elites. When they do, they have to wear a ventilator because the atmosphere is so unfamiliar. The story follows Vashti, an ordinary person who stays busy with video calls and lectures. In the opening pages we find that her son, Kuno, isn’t happy with the way things are. He wants to go to the surface but Vashti can’t understand why anyone would want to leave the comfort provided by the machine.
In the 1960s, when the time came to adapt the novella, the BBC decided that the underground tunnels needed to be as convincing as possible to make life underground feel real. To make that happen, the producers suspended a working monorail track from studio rigging. John Bruce, the assistant floor manager on the shoot, said it was capable of ‘carrying passengers in a capsule and depositing them into a station,’ a feat he thought was especially important because ‘the essence of what E. M. Forster had written way back in 1909, was now, today, fast becoming a reality.’
Contemporary reviews were fairly positive, with the Daily Telegraph remarking the production was ‘visually inventive’ and dialogue ‘unusually distinguished’. A year later in 1967, the episode won first prize at Italy’s Festival Internazionale del Film di Fantascienza.
The writer, director and cast all went on to other things, but the story didn’t. Like so many TV dramas from the era, the reels were taped over during one of the regular purges of the 1970s that sought to free up real estate on expensive videotapes. But Out of the Unknown managed to survive. The director had opted to shoot on 35mm, and a single negative survived in a film vault in Brentford that re-emerged in 2014.
Its survival is fitting in that The Machine Stops is a story about vanishing acts. The episode reminds us about the perils of over-reliance, but it also warns us about letting someone or something mediate our interactions with the world.
Edwardian futurism
When Forster wrote The Machine Stops, London had electric lights and trains that ran beneath the ground. Telegraph cables linked continents and the first transatlantic telephone was less than a generation away. Writers like H. G. Wells cheered on progress, imagining scientific utopias run by technocrats and planetary planners. Even socialists came around, thinking that machines could provide the abundance required to improve the worker’s lot.
Forster had always been a novelist for whom the best things in life arrived by accident. In Howards End, published a few years earlier, he had already warned that the new world might be frictionless but anaemic. The railways may be fast, but they moved people past one another to places they seldom needed to go. Or as Thoreau knowingly put it in Walden half a century earlier: ‘We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.’
When he sat down to sketch a science fiction story, Forster took aim at the dream that technology could deliver comfort and culture. He imagined a world in which physical effort had been designed away, where information was summoned at will, and where the whole structure worked so smoothly that no one remembered what life looked like before.
In The Machine Stops, the breakdown happens slowly. The music, usually delivered on demand, takes a while to get going. The air vents grow sluggish. A lecture feed stutters, then goes dark. Vashti calls for repair and shrugs when it doesn’t respond.
There’s no immediate panic, because panic requires one to believe the machine to be fallible. The needs of every citizen — food, warmth, knowledge, and intimacy — have been routed through humanity’s big brother for generations. They communicate by screen, consume information mediated by the system, and believe without irony that direct experience is vulgar.
I think the The Machine Stops is important reading, but not because Forster prefigured the internet (or even because he was one of the first warn of disempowerment via intelligent machines). One way the story works is as a meditation on what happens when the filters that control the flow of information get gummed up.
Forster imagined a future in which data is abundant but free-floating, where the process for turning the raw ore of information into the alloy we call knowledge becomes fundamentally deficient. That problem occurs because knowing is, at least in part, something we do by living in the world.
Forster’s experiment with sci-fi is well read in AI safety circles. It’s a good reminder that what looks benign right now may prove to be misaligned given enough time. The machine in the novella does exactly what it was designed to do: it feeds, warms, educates, and entertains. It delivers ideas on demand and it encourages communication to keep people connected. While it does keep people apart, it makes sure they aren’t alone.
The Machine Stops is a story about what happens when a society replaces reality with representation, when the whole world forgets to touch grass. That risk exists for powerful AI and pod people as well as generative media, recommender algorithms, and remote everything. Systems that replace the condition of understanding with the appearance of it should be handled with care, lest we find ourselves needing to fix them.
You can read The Machine Stops here for free. The Out of the Unknown episode based on the novella is available for free on Internet Archive here (along with every episode of the show).