What can a 130-year-old science-fiction novel teach us about human evolution, morality, artificial intelligence, and the future of humanity?
In this video, I review H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) and compare it with the 2002 film adaptation. The story begins with time travel and the unsettling realization that the past cannot be changed, then opens into larger questions about objective reality, evolution, and humanity’s division into the Eloi and Morlocks.
Those questions lead from Plato’s Republic and the intellectual climate of Wells’s era to Christianity’s teaching that every human being is made in the image of God. They also reach into the present, where artificial intelligence, transhumanism, and the possibility of merging humanity with machines are no longer confined to fiction.
More than a century after its publication, The Time Machine still asks a question we have not answered: Who decides what humanity should become, and by what moral authority?
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