ABSTRACT
More than a hundred years ago, E. M. Forster (1909) wrote a story called ‘The Machine Stops’. He imagined a world that was controlled by a single computer system known as ‘the Machine’. Slowly, technicians were phased out as the Machine took care of its own maintenance. Eventually, sub-systems began to fail because there were no longer any technicians who knew how to repair them. People learnt to lower their expectations. The Machine had taken the place of God, so there was no criticism.
