In 1932, a 22-year-old John W. Campbell — later the Astounding editor who shaped midcentury science fiction, and, as has been well documented, an open fascist — published "The Last Evolution" in Amazing Stories. It's narrated by the last thinking machine on Earth, recalling how humanity went extinct. People built machines that "think, and act and work with perfect independence," then dwindled into idleness: "Most of mankind were quite useless, for they lived in a world where no productive work was necessary."
When aliens invade, the machines evolve in a single night to out-engineer them. A human scientist delivers the title's thesis: "the machine can evolve, change far more swiftly than life," and where man needs millennia, the machine "overnight leaps ahead to new heights." Man, he decides, "has always been a parasite." The narrator's closing line reads differently in 2026: "machines are indeed better than man, whether being of Metal, or being of Force."
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