Babbage Meets Darwin: Mechanisation and Evolution in the 19th Century

Abstract

By the climax of the British Industrial Revolution in the 1840s, the idea of machines making other machines was no longer quite such an “unexpected property” as it was when Paley wrote Natural Theology just decades earlier. Indeed, around this time we start to see more anxiety about the potential consequences of machine selfreproduction as the idea begins to seem a little less far-fetched.