# Machines Are Young Creatures on Evolutionary Time by Samuel Butler > "The more highly organised machines are creatures not so much of yesterday, as of the last five minutes, so to speak, in comparison with past time." > **— Samuel Butler's Erewhonian professor**, *1872, Erewhon, Chapter XXIII* ## Sources and Context - **Full source:** [Samuel Butler, Erewhon, “The Book of the Machines”](https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1906/pg1906-images.html). The Erewhonian professor compares the short history of complex machines with biological time. The speaker is a fictional character in Butler's novel; the author stages more than one position. ## Related Articles and Collections - **Collection:** [[collections/Machine Succession|Machine Succession]] - **Collection:** [[collections/Simple Reminders|Simple Reminders]] - **Article:** [[articles/AI Escape Is the Wrong Metaphor|AI Escape Is the Wrong Metaphor]] - **Article:** [[articles/Digital Darwinism and the Invisible World of Machine Evolution|Digital Darwinism and the Invisible World of Machine Evolution]] - **Article:** [[articles/Mind Uploading and AI — The Host is Reusable and the Person is the Delta|Mind Uploading and AI — The Host is Reusable and the Person is the Delta]] - **Wiki map:** [[wiki/Evolutionary Dynamics|Evolutionary Dynamics]] ## Related Topics - [[wiki/Erewhon|Erewhon]] - [[wiki/Evolutionary Dynamics|Evolutionary Dynamics]] ## Share on Social Media ``` "The more highly organised machines are creatures not so much of yesterday, as of the last five minutes, so to speak, in comparison with past time." — Samuel Butler's Erewhonian professor, 1872, Erewhon, Chapter XXIII https://bryantmcgill.com/simple-reminders-butler-machines-young-creatures ```