I finally read The Machine Stops, a short story by E.M. Forster from 1909.
Despite some archaic syntax, it’s so current to be a slap in the face… strong enough to knock the device right out of your grasping fist.
The protagonist Vashti is a perfect product of her synthetic environment. She desires only the serene safety of the Machine, constant digital stimulation, zero physical contact. Her son Kuno demands physical connection. He challenges the Machine’s divinity and eventually goes rogue, leaving his underground pod to explore the foreign surface of the Earth.
Vashti fights to ignore the truth revealed by her son until the system crumbles around her. It’s a classic story arc, moving rapidly from comfortable denial to irritated awareness, tosystemic collapse and finally, tragic acceptance.
Once you read it, you’ll see the story fingerprints all over our favorite science fiction from HAL 9000 to the Agents of the Matrix.
So, what are the hardest hitting lessons for us, people of 2026, as our Machine burrows deeper into every corner of our existence?
This installment of Ink & Time unpacks it for you, and encourages you to read the original short story here.
Our Fatal Dependence on Technology
The danger seems obvious, yet we ignore it.
We rejoice in the promise of “smart cities,” yet we ignore the risk of being mostly too dumb to meet our own needs if the technology should fail. We are already tethered to systems that few understand, and are being increasingly outsourced to algorithms to administer.
In Forster’s story, humanity has gone underground. All needs are met by a Machine which acts as a universal benefactor, to the extent that only vague memories exist of life before the ultimate automation.
It’s a parable that prefigures our tensions over AI autonomy and even AI authority, if one dares to believe in such a possibility.
It elicits the nightmare scenario of a system crash that could prove catastrophic: the stopping of food, water, power, and even our sacrosanct connectivity, ubiquitous as it might seem just before it cuts.
What if The Machine Stops?
The Loss of Human Agency
Short of the worst fears of a cyber-attack that could interrupt life support systems, indeed, the low-grade erosion of human capability and the loss of human connection, is a more immediate and relatable threat.
The steady deprioritizing of meaningful time with other humans, in favor of the infinite scroll: it’s the modern proxy for a central theme in The Machine Stops.
Kuno is an outlier who pierces the veil of mechanical satiety. He describes the unnatural state, the deprivation from human connection, and the cold calculus of a mechanical surrogate parent:
“We created the Machine, to do our will, but we cannot make it do our will now. It has robbed us of the sense of space and of the sense of touch, it has blurred every human relation and narrowed down love to a carnal act, it has paralysed our bodies and our wills, and now it compels us to worship it.
The Machine develops — but not on our lines. The Machine proceeds— but not to our goal. We only exist as the blood corpuscles that course through its arteries, and if it could work without us, it would let us die.”
A fanciful parable from 117 years ago anticipated what we now debate: the power of AI to make decisions that may or may not be in our best interests, the so-called “alignment problem.”
Ironically, in the story, it appears to be less malevolence, and more about basic mechanical failures, common wear and tear, that causes the deterioration of The Machine and dooms our fated heroes to a dark, crushing and emotionally fleeting destruction.
Read the story to see how it ends. It is not particularly uplifting.
We tend to worry about evil robots becoming conscious and turning on humanity, but what if they just malfunction, or break down over time?
Religious Devotion to the System
To the layperson facing technology today, a feeling of spiritual deference has become the default, unconscious and pervasive.
Apple stores feel like churches.
One need only scan the public transport in a modern metropolis like Hong Kong, or anywhere, to witness the collective hypnosis. Look up from your phone sometime and it’s easy to see.
The dystopian scene playing out daily in our public spaces cuts to the core of how we understand our identity as human beings. Yet, hours and days go by, without the self-reflection needed to wake us from techno-somnambulism.
The Machine feeds us and clothes us and houses us; through it we speak to one another, through it we see one another, in it we have our being.
The Machine is the friend of ideas and the enemy of superstition: the Machine is omnipotent, eternal; blessed is the Machine.
... Humanity, in its desire for comfort, had over-reached itself. It had exploited the riches of nature too far. Quietly and complacently, it was sinking into decadence, and progress had come to mean the progress of the Machine.
We used to go to places of worship to feel this sense of rapture.
In the story, the mother and son interact via video call. Remember, it was written in 1909.
But Forster’s insight about the perils of seeking common ground through the medium of the Machine is now our daily reality. Flat dimensions, pixelated sound, absence of nuance, pervasive distraction.
It’s why virtual collaboration and work from home was never destined to work.
It’s why we secretly resent our devices but cannot express the frustration we feel.
And still few dare to admit that to assert resistance feels futile.
He broke off, and she fancied that he looked sad. She could not be sure, for the Machine did not transmit nuances of expression. It only gave a general idea of people—an idea that was good enough for all practical purposes, Vashti thought.
The imponderable bloom, declared by a discredited philosophy to be the actual essence of intercourse, was rightly ignored by the Machine, just as the imponderable bloom of the grape was ignored by the manufacturers of artificial fruit. Something "good enough" had long since been accepted by our race.
Something good enough has been accepted by modern humanity. Will it always be so?
Learned Aversion to Nature
The repulsion toward the natural world, and even toward tangible physical reality is jarring, and difficult to relate to. It feels extreme.
But then, the hundreds of millions of people living in cities of concrete and steel are already removed from the natural world. It is the predominant underlying context of our modern psychology.
“I dislike seeing the horrible brown earth, and the sea, and the stars when it is dark. I get no ideas in an air-ship.” ... [Vashti] directed the attendant to cover the window, claiming, 'These mountains give me no ideas.'“
Then, there is the obsolescence of physical touch, which also seems outrageous.
But only until we look at the family dining beside us, and see none of them talking or even making eye contact with each other. Screens are already our preferred partners.
People never touched one another. The custom had become obsolete, owing to the Machine.
When Vashti swerved away from the sunbeams with a cry, the attendant behaved barbarically — she put out her hand to steady her.
'How dare you!' exclaimed the passenger. 'You forget yourself!' The woman was confused, and apologized for not having let her fall.
The Machine has become the constant interlocutor for all human experience.
This is why, in the story, humans’ sense of physical touch, affection, communication skills, have all atrophied. They relate only through buttons and control panels, and the Machine knows their routines and their preferences.
There is therefore, a rejection of direct experience, in preference for the mechanically mediated experience.
In our world, it manifests as a yearning for instant gratification, for feeding the sensory impulses immediately, without delay or effort, even if the object of desire is synthetic.
Perversely, we feel entitled to have our desires satisfied at the moment they arise. Or even before we are aware of them.
On some level the senses know no difference between the physical reality of the external world, and the assembled perceptual reality in the mind. We have been tricked, and the chemical reward centers just do what they’ve been programmed to do.
“Beware of first-hand ideas! First-hand ideas do not really exist. They are but the physical impressions produced by love and fear, and on this gross foundation who could erect a philosophy?
Let your ideas be second-hand, and if possible tenth-hand, for then they will be far removed from that disturbing element — direct observation.”
If you feel troubled by our the status quo of human-machine relationships, you’ll want to check out the original Robot-Apocalypse, which is also the origin story of the term “robot” which means serf, or poor worker.
One from the Ink & Time archives on Humanoids past and future…
Immediacy and the Elimination of Effort
The automated life cannot be said to be a life well lived. Yet we strive to maximize the efficiency, convenience, and expediency of all, and are usually unsure exactly why.
We are a product of a machine mentality.
“There were buttons and switches everywhere — buttons to call for food, for music, for clothing. There was the hot-bath button, by pressure of which a basin of (imitation) marble rose out of the floor, filled to the brim with a warm deodorized liquid. There was the cold-bath button.
There was the button that produced literature. ... The room, though it contained nothing, was in touch with all that she cared for in the world.”
One day soon there will be a button to press for literature. And that will come on demand, designed perfectly to your taste, before you knew it was what you were seeking.
That button will be the death of curiosity.
Today, the proprietors of comfort, so-called, selling the snake-oil of a frictionless life, maximizing convenience, eliminating struggle, will not stop, relentless, even unto the last tap of the direct chemical wellspring of the brain.
The Annihilation of Distance
Kuno is the rebel who remembers human scale movement. He exists within a society trained to operate within a perfect feedback loop engineered seamlessly into the immediate environment of their sterile little pods.
Most live contentedly, as everything comes to them. No need to go out to things.
“'Near' is a place to which I can get quickly on my feet, not a place to which the train or the air-ship will take me quickly. ... Man is the measure. Man’s feet are the measure for distance, his hands are the measure for ownership, his body is the measure for all that is lovable and desirable and strong.
And there is a quaint reminiscence of when people used to go out to see and do things. It has been long lost, and is considered old, barbaric even.
The system had been in use for many, many years, long before the universal establishment of the Machine. And of course she had studied the civilisation that had immediately preceded her own—the civilisation that had mistaken the functions of the system, and had used it for bringing people to things, instead of for bringing things to people.
Those funny old days, when men went for change of air instead of changing the air in their rooms!
We too are in danger of lurching into an existence where all our desires are fed to us…
Synthetically, through fiber optic pipes, to our beloved screens, or mainstreamed into our eyeballs, and our most intimate sense doors.
Although The Machine Stops reads like an old outdated, even primitive, skeptical story about the menacing nature of technology, still it holds troubling relevance for us today.
The time to read and think is now. Not when the Machine creates everything for you.
What’s your view? Are we already tethered to The Machine?
Ink & Time brings you long lost stories from authors whose ideas shaped our society, but sadly have fallen out of popular recognition, often at least in part because of our fascination with gadgets and inability to read with sustained attention.
We’re here to change that.
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