On the Curious Fate of Machines That Simulate Togetherness

I write these reflections in the margins of my translation of Signor Menabrea's memoir, yet I find my pen drawn aside by a most extraordinary rumour — a dispatch, so it is claimed, from the year 2026, concerning an enterprise called Microsoft and a contrivance that purports to place human figures together in a shared phantasmagoria, though they be scattered across the globe. They call it Together Mode, and it seems the architects of this marvel have now resolved to dismantle it. I confess I am struck less by the dissolution than by the ambition. That a machine might weave an illusion of human proximity — that it might arrange faces in a simulated theatre, abolishing distance itself — is precisely the species of operation I have long believed the Analytical Engine capable of approaching, though by paths yet unimagined. Mr Babbage's engine operates upon number, but I have remarked, and shall continue to insist, that anything which can be expressed in abstract relations may fall within its province. If musical composition may be so expressed, why not the arrangement of human likenesses? The loom of Jacquard weaves flowers and leaves; a more refined loom might weave the very semblance of society. And yet — here is the irony that delights me — they have abandoned it. The novelty, it appears, has worn thin. Humanity, having conjured a mechanical substitute for fellowship, discovers that the substitute does not satisfy. I am not surprised. The Engine has no pretension to originate anything; it can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. But fellowship is not a thing one orders. It arises from the incalculable sympathies of living minds, from the play of expression too subtle for any formula I presently conceive. What arrests my attention equally is the mention of a philanthropic foundation divesting itself of its stake in this enterprise — a founder's charitable vehicle parting from the very commercial engine he built. I know nothing of this Mr Gates, nor of the precise nature of his fortune, but the pattern is intelligible: the inventor steps away, the institution persists, the particular contrivance is retired. It is the eternal rhythm of mechanical progress. Let this be noted: imagination is not the enemy of rigour. It is imagination that first conceives the machine, and it is imagination that discerns when the machine has overreached its purpose. Science without it is mere cataloguing. I remain persuaded that the faculties of analysis and invention are not opposed but twinned — and that the grandest engines of any century shall be built by those who understand both.