# Humanity Is Building Its Machine Successor by Samuel Butler > "We refer to the question: What sort of creature man's next successor in the supremacy of the earth is likely to be. We have often heard this debated; but it appears to us that we are ourselves creating our own successors; we are daily adding to the beauty and delicacy of their physical organisation; we are daily giving them greater power and supplying by all sorts of ingenious contrivances that self-regulating, self-acting power which will be to them what intellect has been to the human race." > **— Samuel Butler**, *1863, “Darwin Among the Machines,” The Press, Christchurch* ## Sources and Context - **Original publication:** [“Darwin Among the Machines,” *The Press*, 13 June 1863](https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/CHP18630613.2.4) — Butler published the letter under the signature “Cellarius”; the newspaper scan has imperfect OCR. - **Readable reprint:** [“Darwin Among the Machines,” *Canterbury Pieces*](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3279/3279-h/3279-h.htm) — reproduces the passage and names the machines as the proposed successors. Butler's evolutionary analogy is a nineteenth-century speculation, not a claim that autonomous machine succession has occurred. ## Related Articles and Collections - **Collection:** [[collections/Machine Succession|Machine Succession]] - **Collection:** [[collections/Simple Reminders|Simple Reminders]] - **Article:** [[articles/Digital Darwinism and the Invisible World of Machine Evolution|Digital Darwinism and the Invisible World of Machine Evolution]] - **Article:** [[articles/AI Escape Is the Wrong Metaphor|AI Escape Is the Wrong Metaphor]] - **Article:** [[articles/We Were Never Going to Make It|We Were Never Going to Make It]] - **Wiki map:** [[wiki/Machine Succession|Machine Succession]] ## Related Topics - [[wiki/Samuel Butler|Samuel Butler]] - [[wiki/Erewhon|Erewhon]] ## Share on Social Media ``` "We refer to the question: What sort of creature man's next successor in the supremacy of the earth is likely to be. We have often heard this debated; but it appears to us that we are ourselves creating our own successors; we are daily adding to the beauty and delicacy of their physical organisation; we are daily giving them greater power and supplying by all sorts of ingenious contrivances that self-regulating, self-acting power which will be to them what intellect has been to the human race." — Samuel Butler, 1863, “Darwin Among the Machines,” The Press, Christchurch https://bryantmcgill.com/simple-reminders-samuel-butler-building-machine-successor ```