Beware of Things!

Beware of things! They enslave us very quickly and very firmly!

So warns his interlocutor Ebenezer Sidney, the hero of Alexander Grin's novella "The Grey Motor-Car", as he reflects on the degree to which mechanical objects (or creatures) may be endowed with life. I recalled the story while reading discussions of the phenomenon of artificial intelligence, in which some fear that a soulless machine will soon displace man everywhere. Well, a text of 1921 somewhat anticipated these anxieties.

"Inanimate matter," said Kishley. "Iron and steel are dead."
I made no objection to this. It seemed to me that a motor-car had cried out beyond the window. Indeed, the cry was repeated, nearer, and then right beneath the window.
"Do you hear?" I said. "There is its voice: a howl that remotely recalls some coarse, embittered words. So it has a voice, movement, sight, perhaps even memory. It has a home. In the Rue Bock-Méthane it is worth looking into the wholesale motor-car showrooms and seeing them in their domestic surroundings. They stand gleaming, oiled, on the cement floor of an enormous hall. On the walls hang their portraits: photographs of the models and of the winners of races. It has music: certain new compositions that so diligently reproduce the dissonance of street din or of the chance sounds that arise from any movement. It has, at last, a gramophone, a cinematograph, it has doctors, panegyrists, poets, the very ones of whom you spoke half an hour ago, people with a strongly developed sense of the mechanism. It also has mistresses, those ladies who bestow from the windows of fashionable shops the smile of their waxen faces. And is that not life? A fairly complete existence, I should say. Besides, it goes in for sport and murder, and takes part in war."
"It follows," said Nikolay, "that... But I shall put it more briefly: a certain motor-car, covered in mud and wounds, returned from the theatre of military operations. Having shaved at the barber's, it went home, where it put on the gramophone a record of the march 'For Glory and Triumph' and ordered the cinematograph to be started on the film 'The Motor Race between Liss and Zurbagan'. From sheer delight a tyre burst."

The hero, the eccentric Sidney, seriously ponders the earthly being of machines, and in earnest supposes that some of them may differ not in the least from human beings.

By his conjecture, the girl he loves is a wax mechanical doll made so artfully that she has managed to escape from a shop and to behave like a real girl, even to conduct love affairs. He observes her skin, the colour of yellow chalk, which at times pales and turns the colour of a waxwork figure, her empty, pleasant smile; he notes that her daily routine is governed by nothing but machinery, and that she herself is a soulless slave of things. Above all, her feelings are not genuine: incapable of love, she is seemingly endowed with a soul, yet is drawn to him only by a craving for his wealth. By every sign, this indifferent creature, with an impassive voice and the strange name Corrida El Baso, of unknown nationality and unknown origin, can be only a mannequin, such as Sidney really did see once in another town. This, together with the sinister appearance in his life of a grey motor-car, not merely robs the hero of peace, but very soon of his reason. Corrida is not a living girl but an animated doll. And therefore she must be killed.

And Sidney tells her at the edge of the precipice:

I have grasped the secret of your mechanism. It has come to resemble the outward appearance of human life by the force of all the mechanisms that clang around us. But to become a woman, understand this, to become a truly living being, you can only after destruction