Written in 1909, this short story describes a future in which humanity lives underground, isolated in individual rooms, with practically every need fulfilled by a gigantic interconnected AI machine.

People:
– Communicate through screens rather than meeting physically.
– Receive information and entertainment on demand.
– Depend on machines for food, transportation, communication, and daily necessities.
– Become increasingly incapable of functioning without the system.
– Lose the ability to appreciate direct human interaction.

The Machine effectively becomes the infrastructure of civilization.

And here’s the really interesting part: people eventually worship the Machine and cannot imagine life without it.

Predicted outcome: Technological dependency, social isolation, loss of independent thinking, and catastrophic consequences when the infrastructure fails.

Considering the internet, smartphones, cloud computing, social media, and now AI assistants, this story is extraordinary.

(spoilers next)
The machine gradually starts malfunctioning; people dismissed it as minor technical glitches; they don’t have the capability to repair it; they refuse to believe a machine so advanced can go wrong. The machine is significantly more advanced than any human being or group of beings.
Worse, nobody knows or understand how the machine is built or coded, they forgot how to code since the machine took over essentially; nobody knows how to do printf() or why they would need that.
Eventually, the machine begins failing catastrophically, as the machine was keeping people alive (communication, life-support, food, etc) nobody understands how to fix the machine it’s too advanced and humans have long lost the ability to do anything technical, something that was offloaded to the machine for a very very long time (much like writing cobol now if you may)
In the end of the book, people recognize that humanity’s dependence on technology has become its undoing.

Now consider this was written in 1909!!! Hope you enjoyed reading my comment!