The Machine Stops
At the narrative level, the two main protagonists are Kuno and his mother Vashanti. While Vashanti is quite pleased with the life she is living within the machine, Kuno wants to explore the world outside of the machine. At the beginning, Kuno wants Vashanti to visit him, but she does not understand why. She is perfectly content in her little cell; everything is provided by the machine. After asking countless times, Kuno finally convinces his mother, and she starts her journey to visit him. During her journey, we learn that people have developed new ways of interacting with each other. Once Vashanti arrives at his son’s home, we learn that Kuno will be homeless (in this story, it means death) because he broke the machine’s law.
During his story, we deeper level of the story is revealed: If man is not careful, we will allow ourselves to adapt the the machine and its standards, instead of the machine adapting to man. As the story continues, the machine makes radical changes to the laws, and man accepts and gives reasons on why it is acceptable. Man even openly starts to pray to the machine, and continue to do so as they are killed by the machine their ancestors built.
This story is a warning on how man needs to control technology before technology controls man. I agree with the story. If we understand the technology we create, we do not need to pray to it. Technology must not be seen as this ‘thing’ that is unreachable. If men created it, man can do with it as he wants. There is no hiding that man, to this day, still conforms to technology, but we must not let it fully take over us. We cannot accept the limitations of technology as something set in stone, but rather as a hurdle that must be jumped.
Another great point in the story is that it is a necessity to have people who understand how the technology works. If we create something useful, we need to write documentation so others understand how to modify the technology to fit their needs. If the technology breaks down, man should be able to fix it, instead of having society break down.
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