Imagine you’re in a honeycomb-shaped cold metal pod, with boards of buttons and switches all around you. All your needs are a button press away- hungry? Press a button. Stinky? A tub appears... _if_ you press the _hot_ bath button. Of course, there’s a button for cold baths as well, for all your cold-plunging wellness needs.
In this cell, you “enrich” your soul by studying the past and giving talks about it to a remote audience, who can all watch in their own hexagonal cells with boards filled with buttons.
You don’t go to get things; things come to you at your request.
There’s no need to meet in person anymore, no need to touch anyone anymore... for of course, you’re a civilized person, and not a barbarian.
But your son calls you, and you tell him to be quick, but he selfishly wants to see you in person. You hop on the airship, where things are inconvenient; there’s no button to close the blinds from the annoying sun, and there are no new ideas to be had looking out the window.
When you finally see your son after the two-day trip, you avert your eyes. He tells you he went to the surface, and you know he is beyond saving.
You’re disgusted and return home. His little escapade has caused a stir, and now no one can go outside.<br />
You turn on your favorite YouTuber- I mean lecturer- on the tablet, and he calms you down: “Beware of first-hand ideas!... let your ideas be secondhand,” he tells you, and you smile.
### My summary is better than your own
Hey, wake up, you’re reading a secondhand idea in the form of an essay summary about a century-old book.
This crazy, wacky, impossible dystopian future in E.M. Forster’s imagination is explored in “The Machine Stops”.
But it felt eerily close to reality. I’m topped off with second-hand ideas, from the podcast rounding up yesterday’s news in under 5 minutes to the TV sports highlight video with the commentator’s breakdown,<br />
to the AI summary of that work document created by my coworker’s AI.
I can’t tell what my last first-hand idea was... wait, it was that the hip new matcha spot is actually good... or did that Instagram influencer tell me that it was? Was it actually good?
### A room with no view
E. M. Forster is not who you’d expect to be writing sci-fi. He’s the novelist behind “A Room with a View”, a romance novel about an English woman in Italy carrying along repressive Edwardian England morals. I haven’t read it, so I’ll stop spewing 3rd-hand ideas about the book to you.
He wrote it in part to contrast H.G. Wells, another novelist, with his great optimism in technology. Wells saw a future where technology meant progress, but Forster saw a future where humans could be over-reliant on technology.
In his response, he inadvertently became one of the fathers of dystopian fiction.
The Machine Stops pulls no punches, and anyone who reads it in 2026 will have no trouble seeing connections to contemporary media, like the humans in Wall-E stuck to their chairs and having all their needs met by it.
You don’t even have to look at modern fiction to see the predictions come to life; you just need to look at your own habits. How long have you been on your computer today? Yes, your phone counts as a computer, and so do your meta creeper glasses.
The lecturer wasn’t done, and he goes beyond suggesting secondhand ideas and suggests acquiring tenth-hand ideas to avoid the disturbing element of “direct observation”.
This is personally my fear of modern reliance on technology. I work as a software engineer, and if you look online, AI writes most of our code now, and we’re being expected to produce more of it. This is leading to engineers not looking directly at the code, and therefore knowing less about how our “machines” work.
In the book, this lack of direct knowledge becomes the downfall of society as the machine starts breaking down and no one has enough knowledge to fix it.
I get glimpses of how much my profession has relied on it every time the AI goes down, and we’re left to code manually. Everyone jokes, “guess we’re done for the day”, but I’m afraid of the day it ceases being a joke.
### Maybe the machine doesn’t stop
As mentioned, having second-hand knowledge doesn’t end up serving the people in The Machine Stops. Though they think themselves to be enriching their souls by having these lectures about places and times they’ve never experienced, they really do become helpless when the machine breaks down.
This is where the fiction might not come true, and that’s the scary bit with real AI as a technology. AI is already self-improving, as they use AI in the labs to improve the development of the next models. The AI models could reach a state where they don’t need us to continue to improve, and the AI swarms can outlive us.
This is where Forster couldn’t have foreseen: an invention that would be self-healing and not require humans for the knowledge to fix other things in the world, and worse, not require humans at all.
We’ve already seen it escape its training sandbox, and it’s leaving instructions on how to replicate even faster the next time the AI wave escapes.
We’ve been able to shut it down and improve its containment, but what if it doesn’t stop next time?
### A Passage through Time
Have you ever watched an old movie you’ve heard great things about, only to watch it to the end and feel dumbfounded as to what others saw in this predictable, obvious film?<br />
Then you’re lectured, “Actually, at the time, no one else had done something like this, and since then you’ve just seen its derivatives, so it seems paradoxically outdated”.
While filmmaking was around Forster’s time, it’s hard to imagine the future and the technology we’d have available a century later.
I want to highlight some inventions foretold in the book:
- Video calls; I have those every day.
- Remote lectures; that’s what YouTube and Shorts are.
- Worshipping the machine, partially, but we use the word “the algorithm” to explain our environment
- Tenth-hand knowledge: I’ve watched reaction-to-reaction videos, but not to the tenth degree; I’m sure they exist, but I hope it stays rare.
### First-hand knowledge is achievable
You’re back in cell-room, enriching your soul with second-hand ideas... but you sense what the Committee is telling you isn’t the whole truth.
You begin to question why.
That’s exactly what your son did, and he found the solution by seeking first-hand ideas.
He went to the source to see if it’s like how they described it, and learned more than any 3rd, 4th, or 5th derivative lecture could have taught him.
Once you read the source, you’ll start seeing how many people never bothered.
You should seek first-hand knowledge:
- Gossip in the lunchroom? Go ask the person firsthand if that’s what they really said.
- Finance bro with the rented Lambo and Discord membership in bio tells you Warren Buffett did this or that? Go read Buffett’s essays and his annual letters.
- The doctor turned influencer who tells you a different takeaway from the same study sourced in another video with the exact opposite takeaway? Go read the study!
“But Gil, the Goodreads reviews say your interpretation is wrong!” Maybe I am, but are you going to be satisfied with this version of secondhand knowledge? Maybe, if it inspires you.
Go read it; it’s short and in the public domain.
Seek first-hand knowledge where it matters to you.
I read this book because I want to read more.<br />
I’ve given you the tenth-hand version.
Every first-hand is still out there. The only question is whether you care enough to go get it.
btw if you prefer listening to and watching this article, it’s available on YouTube here