In New Zealand, the young Samuel Butler suggests the Darwinian rise of machines over man

The twenty-eight year old Samuel Butler, writing under the pseudonym "Cellarius," published in the Canterbury, New Zealand newspaper The Press, a long essay entitled "Darwin Amongst the Machines."  Butler's piece, which suggested that machines were evolving, too, "gaining ground on us every day," to the point where they would enslave man, was later included in his 1872 dystopia Erewhon as the chapter "Book of the Machines."  Darwin was offended. (By John Osborne)