The Singularity we Fear

Morlocks, Eloi and

the post-human future
by John MacBeath Watkins
An American soldier named Morlock was recently charged with murder. My immediate reaction to this

was, "The army is hiring Morlocks? Didn't H.G. Wells mention something about them killing and

eating people from a different ethnic group in the far distant future?"

As of this writing, Spec. Jeremy Morlock has not been tried, so I will suspend judgment on

him. But by my usual serpentine path through the labyrinthine ways of my mind, this led me to the

literary archetypes behind some of the current iterations of technological optimism. Ray Kurzweil, for

example, thinks it reasonable to suppose he might live hundreds of years as humans transcend biology.

He supposes that there will be technological 'haves,' possessed of superior intellect and able to live for

centuries, and 'have-nots,' the latter failing to transcend biology and merge with machines.

Morlocks and Eloi. The Morlocks are able to work the technology, while the Eloi wander

around being pretty and useless. Power in such a situation would naturally be in the furry hands of the

technologically savvy Morlocks, who come to see the Eloi as a different species, useful only as cattle.

The best science fiction is the literature of ideas. Wells saw the world around him becoming

more and more dependent on technology, and foresaw a day when those who mastered it could

dominate those who did not. The technology has changed, the post-human future has a different flavor,

but Wells, a child of the British Empire who had knowledge of what happens when those possessing

superior technology meet the 'have-nots,' looked on that divide with foreboding.
 Actually, the meetings between technological haves and have-nots has seldom been as benign as

the balance between the Morlocks and Eloi. At worst, it could go the way modern humans invading

Europe went for the Neanderthal, or the way the European settlement of Tasmania when for its

aboriginal inhabitants. There comes stage where the gulf gulf is so wide that those possessing superior

technology fail to see those without it as human.

Which brings us to the archetype of the superman. Intellectuals have long been fascinated by

this idea, which justifies regarding those with superior intellect and education as more deserving than

the less intellectually fortunate. Long before Ayn Rand, before Nietzsche had published a word,

Dostoevsky explored the superman idea in Crime and Punishment. Raskolnikov wants to believe that

he is the superman, not subject to the same moral constraints as other people. His crime seems

senseless, a murder aimed only at proving that he is free of these constraints.

The book does a wonderful job of exploring how destructive this idea is to Raskolnikov's

humanity and his sanity. The cost of seeing himself as the superman is to deprive both himself and his

victim of their humanity. He recovers his humanity by falling in love and confessing his crime.

Perhaps those who dream of post-human superiority should read and contemplate that book

before embracing their Morlock future.