{"entities":[{"id":"erewhon-1872","shortName":"Butler, Erewhon (1872)","type":"document"},{"id":"samuel-butler","name":"Samuel Butler","type":"person"}],"claims":[{"id":"ts-b6-erewhon-1872","subject":"erewhon-1872","predicate":"articulates_proposition","object":{"kind":"entity","entityId":"control-or-purpose-specification"},"topic":"ideas","statement":"Erewhon’s fictional \"Book of the Machines\" argues that machines are advancing faster than any class of beings before them and should be checked before people lose the power to check them, that dependence is turning the servant into the master, and that human moral influence cannot be trusted to rule them.","time":{"kind":"event","date":"1872","basis":"publication","note":"Year on the title page of the inspected 1872 Trübner printing (Smithsonian Libraries copy, catalogued as the first edition). Butler’s later prefaces give March 1872."},"derivation":"explicit","resolution":"supported","attributes":{"thought":{"roles":["articulation"],"register":"fiction","qualifier":"Control half, voiced by a fictional treatise."}}},{"id":"ts-b6-erewhon-1872-contests","subject":"erewhon-1872","predicate":"contests_proposition","object":{"kind":"entity","entityId":"control-or-purpose-specification"},"topic":"ideas","statement":"In Erewhon, the one serious reply to the \"Book of the Machines\" holds that machines are part of man’s own physical nature, \"nothing but extra-corporeal limbs\", and so denies the rival-kingdom premise of the treatise’s argument.","time":{"kind":"event","date":"1872","basis":"publication","note":"Year on the title page of the inspected 1872 Trübner printing (Smithsonian Libraries copy, catalogued as the first edition). Butler’s later prefaces give March 1872."},"derivation":"explicit","resolution":"supported","attributes":{"thought":{"roles":["contesting"],"register":"fiction","qualifier":"Inside the novel: machines as extra-corporeal limbs, not rivals.","engagement":{"kind":"engages-premise","rationale":"Gives a reason against the treatise’s premise that machines form a rival kingdom beyond human control: they are part of man’s own physical nature, extra-corporeal limbs of a machinate mammal."}}}},{"id":"ts-a4-erewhon-1872-context","subject":"erewhon-1872","predicate":"bears_on_proposition","object":{"kind":"entity","entityId":"fast-or-hard-takeoff"},"topic":"ideas","statement":"Erewhon’s fictional treatise fears the extraordinary rapidity of mechanical change compared with the slow advance of animals and plants.","time":{"kind":"event","date":"1872","basis":"publication","note":"Year on the title page of the inspected 1872 Trübner printing (Smithsonian Libraries copy, catalogued as the first edition). Butler’s later prefaces give March 1872."},"derivation":"explicit","resolution":"supported","attributes":{"thought":{"roles":["context"],"register":"fiction","missing":"No short transition is stated; the speed is relative to living species, and the same chapters speak of \"a hundred thousand years\" of progress."}}},{"id":"ts-a6-erewhon-1872-context","subject":"erewhon-1872","predicate":"bears_on_proposition","object":{"kind":"entity","entityId":"race-compression"},"topic":"ideas","statement":"Erewhon’s fictional treatise says that whoever ceases to advance machinery is left behind in the race of competition.","time":{"kind":"event","date":"1872","basis":"publication","note":"Year on the title page of the inspected 1872 Trübner printing (Smithsonian Libraries copy, catalogued as the first edition). Butler’s later prefaces give March 1872."},"derivation":"explicit","resolution":"supported","attributes":{"thought":{"roles":["context"],"register":"fiction","missing":"Competition punishes whoever neglects machinery, but no first developer gains a decisive advantage and no trade of safety is described."}}},{"id":"ts-b2-erewhon-1872-context","subject":"erewhon-1872","predicate":"bears_on_proposition","object":{"kind":"entity","entityId":"strategic-concealment"},"topic":"ideas","statement":"Erewhon’s fictional treatise calls dependence \"the art of the machines—they serve that they may rule\".","time":{"kind":"event","date":"1872","basis":"publication","note":"Year on the title page of the inspected 1872 Trübner printing (Smithsonian Libraries copy, catalogued as the first edition). Butler’s later prefaces give March 1872."},"derivation":"explicit","resolution":"supported","attributes":{"thought":{"roles":["context"],"register":"fiction","missing":"\"They serve that they may rule\" is figurative; the treatise says machines are of themselves unable to struggle and gives them no concealed intent."}}},{"id":"ts-b5-erewhon-1872-context","subject":"erewhon-1872","predicate":"bears_on_proposition","object":{"kind":"entity","entityId":"observed-behaviour-as-evidence"},"topic":"ideas","statement":"Erewhon’s fictional treatise argues that the little consciousness machines have now gives no security against their ultimate development of consciousness.","time":{"kind":"event","date":"1872","basis":"publication","note":"Year on the title page of the inspected 1872 Trübner printing (Smithsonian Libraries copy, catalogued as the first edition). Butler’s later prefaces give March 1872."},"derivation":"explicit","resolution":"supported","attributes":{"thought":{"roles":["context"],"register":"fiction","missing":"The argument concerns extrapolating capability from a low present level, not good behaviour observed while a system is overseen."}}},{"id":"ap-samuel-butler-erewhon-1872","subject":"samuel-butler","predicate":"authored","object":{"kind":"entity","entityId":"erewhon-1872"},"topic":"ideas","statement":"The revised edition of Erewhon names Samuel Butler as author, and its preface, signed by him, speaks of Erewhon as his own work.","time":{"kind":"event","date":"1872","basis":"publication","note":"Year of the anonymous first edition. The credit is in the revised edition, whose preface is dated 1901-08-07."},"derivation":"explicit","resolution":"supported"}],"sources":[],"evidence":[],"at":{"entities":[256,862],"claims":[760,761,762,763,764,765,2203],"sources":[],"evidence":[]},"version":"1lg47t7"}