The Awful Vitality of the Machine

Lord Dunsany, The Last Revolution (Part 2)

The Last Revolution is about the possibility of robotic conquest, but the danger implicit in the story is more tied to psychology than the iron fists of automated overlords.  Artificial intelligence appears to trouble Dunsany on many levels.  First, there is a disorientating sense of human inferiority, a debasement of the arrogance towards nature that characterized so much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  It’s not simply the intelligence that is the problem with the machines – but their capacity to use that against us, to put it to practical application.  The narrator observes, “… I was more surprised to see the monster doing a simple act with a shovel than I had been to see it outmoding one of the best-established openings at chess.”  Likewise, as it works at assembly, “It was as though I had seen a dentist drilling a patient’s tooth… and with the other hand at the same time doing an etching…. It was terrible to see how easy its two occupations evidently came to the monster, and how rapidly and efficient it was dealing with them.”

Artificial intelligence, for Dunsany, is capable not just of logic but of emotion – for Pender’s robot was made in the image of humankind, and so shares its complexities and psychological energies.  The monster is not happy that Pender has a woman in his life: “there it sat with its jealousy of Alicia smouldering to glowing hatred.” 

The monster builds new monsters.  So, of course, “The central concern of my worry was simply this: could those things go on reproducing themselves?”  When the narrator later refers to the machine’s “awful vitality,” he means its strength, but that strength is not unique – it is replicated in all the subsequent machines, like an iron strand of DNA pushing aside the softer coils of the human genome.

The threat of this artificial intelligence is crystalized into one unforgettable moment of violence: “And before we could do anything it had torn the dog to pieces and was holding the pieces up so as to let the blood run all over it.”  The narrator calmly notes, “Its idea of eating, I suppose.”  Yet the action is never really explained.  Was the monster mimicking and corrupting human consumption, trying to generate oil for its gears, or simply indulging in experimental bloodlust?

“I say,” says Pender.  “Is that quite right?”

Image: Rodin Museum, Philadelphia