A Response to "The Machine Stops"
David Bowen, Department of Interdisciplinary Studies

"The Machine Stops," by E.M. Forster, portrays a society that is totally dependent on "the machine" - a centralized robotic device which supplies communication, air, water, food and energy. A small band of rebels tries to live outside the machine, but this is not allowed. When the machine breaks down and cannot be repaired, the entire population dies, including the rebels. Forster means this to be a fable, to point out the dangers of depending on technology, before it is too late for us.

There may be dangers in depending too heavily on technology, but this story does not describe a believable scenario for our society. Following is a list of some of the reasons for this statement:

1. Throughout history, natural disasters have been even more dangerous than technological disasters. Floods, famines, and diseases have been common. Being at the mercy of nature has proven dangerous. That is why urbanization - people moving from countryside to city - is becoming a problem in the third world. Life in the countryside is hard and dangerous, and as bad as life in the overcrowded cities is, your odds are better in the city. We have been much safer with technology than our ancestors were without it.
2. We, of course, do not have centralized technology such as that in Forster's story, but generally we have several levels of technology, all of them dispersed. To take a trivial example, there used to be a concern that if we let students use calculators on exams, they would not know what to do when the batteries ran out. That proved to be a non-problem - we have solar calculators, and they are so cheap that anyone who depends on a calculator probably has several anyway. And a computer is part of the software on almost any computer these days.
3. To take a more serious example, consider reliance on the computer itself. Computers do so many things for us today that it is possible that, if all computers were to fail at the same time, we would have trouble carrying on our normal activities, and, some say, society might come to a halt. Such, indeed, was the threat in the Y2K scare. But we proved to be more than capable of dealing with Y2K, and in retrospect, most of the aspects of the disaster that were forecast, would never have happened. Our critical computer are highly redundant, which means that there is not one central, irreplaceable computer, but several computers, each capable of doing the whole job, such that if one fails, another can take over. Plus, each of our systems is independent, not linked together with only a single machine in control.