I was having a perfectly reasonable cup of tea this morning when a rather peculiar thought struck me: what would people have made of artificial intelligence before we’d even sorted out the combustion engine?

Picture, if you will, the year 1885. Karl Benz has just cobbled together his Patent-Motorwagen, Queen Victoria is having a thoroughly Victorian time of it, and someone comes along claiming they’ve built a thinking machine.

“Preposterous!” they’d cry, adjusting their top hats indignantly. “Machines can’t think! Next you’ll be telling us carriages can run without horses!”

the audacity of artificial thinking

The thing is, we’ve become frightfully accustomed to the idea that intelligence requires a brain, preferably one housed in something that needs feeding and has opinions about the weather. Before we’d even conceived of horseless carriages, the notion of brainless intelligence would have seemed about as likely as a fish riding a bicycle-which, incidentally, would have been another impossible thing until someone invented the bicycle.

Consider the poor Victorian gentleman, struggling to comprehend a world where:

  • Carriages might propel themselves (how vulgar!)
  • Messages could travel without a horse and rider (what sorcery!)
  • Machines could perform calculations faster than his accountant (unemployment crisis!)

Now imagine explaining to this chap that one day, machines wouldn’t just calculate-they’d write poetry, paint pictures, and probably have stronger opinions about the Oxford comma than most of his contemporaries.

the great mechanical horse replacement scandal

When the combustion engine did finally turn up fashionably late to the party, it caused quite the stir. Horses, who had enjoyed a monopoly on transportation for several millennia, suddenly found themselves rather surplus to requirements. The poor dears went from being essential infrastructure to nostalgic decoration faster than you could say “Model T Ford.”

But here’s the delicious irony: we spent decades teaching machines to replace horse power, and now we’re teaching them to replace brain power. It’s rather like upgrading from a horse-drawn carriage to a rocket ship, only to discover the rocket ship can also write your correspondence and probably has better handwriting than you do.

what the victorians would make of chatgpt

I suspect a Victorian encountering modern AI would go through the traditional five stages of technological grief:

  1. Denial: “This is clearly some elaborate parlour trick involving a very small person hiding in the machine.”

  2. Anger: “It’s unnatural! God intended thinking to be done by people, preferably people with proper breeding and a decent education!”

  3. Bargaining: “Perhaps we could use it just for the really tedious calculations? Surely it can’t compose a proper sonnet?”

  4. Depression: “If machines can think, what’s the point of human intelligence? We’ll all be obsolete by Tuesday!”

  5. Acceptance: “I say, this mechanical brain has written rather a good limerick about my horse.”

the uncomfortable truth about progress

The uncomfortable truth-uncomfortable for horses, anyway-is that we’ve always been rather ruthless about replacing things that served us well. We traded horses for engines, candles for electric lights, and carrier pigeons for telegrams. Each time, we thought we’d reached the pinnacle of human achievement, only to discover we’d barely scratched the surface.

Now we’re trading human intelligence for artificial intelligence, which feels rather more personal than replacing a horse. After all, most of us were quite attached to our intelligence, limited though it may have been.

a modest proposal for our ai future

Perhaps we should take a leaf from the horses’ book. They didn’t fight the combustion engine-they simply reinvented themselves as recreational companions and occasional racing entertainment. Humans might do well to consider a similar career pivot.

Instead of competing with AI at thinking (a battle we’re destined to lose with the same dignity as horses competing with motorcars), perhaps we should focus on the things machines find puzzling: procrastination, getting unreasonably emotional about sports teams, and the peculiar human ability to make tea exactly wrong despite having made it correctly thousands of times before.

in conclusion

Artificial intelligence isn’t the first technology to make its predecessors redundant, nor will it be the last. The Victorians couldn’t have imagined a world without horses, just as we struggle to imagine a world where machines do most of our thinking.

But if history has taught us anything, it’s that humans are remarkably adaptable creatures. We survived the agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution, and somehow made it through the invention of social media. I suspect we’ll muddle through the AI revolution with our characteristic combination of panic, ingenuity, and cups of tea.

After all, if there’s one thing machines still can’t do properly, it’s make a decent cup of tea. And until they sort that out, we humans still have a fighting chance.

Written by a human (for now), with only moderate assistance from a spell-checker, and absolutely no horses were harmed in the making of this post.