Since the existence of the human species, predictions have been a very important aspect of

their lives. The desire to know what will happen in the future dates back to ancient times.
The most famous nations whose prophecies are still read and discussed today are the
Mayans, Incas and Aztecs. Although they lived extremely barbaric and had customs that
make our blood freeze in our veins, their thinking was quite advanced.

Everything ever written and spoken is subject to various interpretations, many of which
will be completely wrong. Misinterpretations of prophecies are also common. They can
sometimes cause real chaos in the world, like the one about the end of the world did.
Imagination, along with human stupidity, is one of those things that we can claim has no
limits. Human kind has always been interested in the future. New inventions and
discoveries have been in the sphere of human interest since the beginning of time.

The twentieth century was marked by the greatest changes in society. There were many
ups and downs, wars, but what definitely marked the 20th century were numerous
inventions, which were created at the speed of light and changed suddenly, leaving
humanity in shock. New discoveries excited people and sparked their imaginations.
Suddenly, the man who was out of breath in front of the television that soon became a
normal occurrence, thought that the trip to space was not such an impossible mission.
These discoveries greatly influenced artists of all spheres of art. We will notice this
influence mostly in fine arts and literature. Writers were fascinated by the possible future
and often wrote about it.

The work I will talk about today is a short novel by the writer Edward Morgan Forster,
"The Machine Stops". This novel belongs to the science fiction genre and was first
published in 1909. The plot is set in the future, and the way people live in it is quite
shocking, especially for the time in which the work was written. Namely, in the world
presented in this story, people live alone in so-called capsules that are part of a large
machine located under the Earth. They are allowed to travel and see other people, but they
voluntarily do not want to do this because they live in fear of physical contact with others.
They get all their necessities from a machine, and they establish social contacts exclusively
through something that can most closely be compared to today's Internet. Such instant
communication, incomprehensible at the time the work was written, allowed people to
discuss ideas and knowledge. In this way, indirect communication is also reduced to
professional, while emotional and social needs are suppressed.

As in Orwell's 1984, in this work we have a rebel. It's about a guy named Kuno, and like
Vincent from the previous part I talked about, he notices the problems of the society in
which he lives. He succeeds in persuading his mother to visit him, and, much like Vincent
tried to explain to Julia, he tells her about his conclusions. He told her how he had visited
Earth and encountered people there who lived completely differently from what they were
used to. As would be the case with anyone who tried to escape the Machine, Kuno was
captured and returned to the Machine, and threatened with homelessness and death if he
tried such a thing again. His mother does not understand him and sees his rebellion as
futile madness.

Unlike Orwell's novel, this story does have a happy ending. At one point, the machine
started to break down, which at first its inhabitants did not understand, but saw these
breakdowns as a whim of the machine and worshiped it even more to make it happy. Upon
seeing this, Kuno cryptically said to his mother, "The Machine stops", however, she still
believed that the machine was just mad at them. However, the machine finally collapsed
and stopped working completely, and its inhabitants were set free.

The machine from this story was created by humans. At some point, they lost awareness of
the fact that the machine was their creation and worshiped it as some kind of deity. The
religion centered on the Machine was called Technopol, and communication between
people took place via the "Internet". All this suggests the age in which we are currently
living. He even talks with incredible precision about inventions that were unheard of back
in 1909. The very name of the religion, technopolis, is quite associated with something
technological, like the Internet. Like the Internet itself, social networks and various devices
through which we access them, the Machine in this work was made by man. Although those
devices that we originally invented to make our daily lives easier have not yet trapped us in
physically existing capsules, it seems that a certain type of capsule does exist. Those
capsules are the invisible, figurative ones. They are reflected in alienation, lack of empathy,
dumbing down and obsession with virtual reality. There are theories that in the future
robots will completely replace humans. Maybe they sound funny to us now, but the
technologies shown in this short novel certainly sounded incredible and far-fetched at the
time it was published. After all, it may not be robots that pose a real threat to us. It's no
secret that the evolution of humanity is planned and controlled, so it wouldn't be surprising
if sometime in the future there will be a society made up of metal robots, but also those
members of the human species who have acquired the properties of those metal machines
through evolution.