ABSTRACT
In 1798, the radical philosopher and supporter of the French Revolution William Godwin (who was also the infant Mary Shelley’s father) imagined a future filled with machinery.
Already, Godwin reveals, mechanical improvements were seen as a threat to traditional jobs:
A utopian future in which human labor is taken over by machines (robotic plows!) seemed reasonable to many progressive thinkers in the era of the French Revolution.
