Who Can Replace Man By Brian Aldiss Summary

Sometimes relying on something to do a job for you isn’t the best decision to make. In the story “Who Can Replace Man?” by Brian Aldiss, machines are doing all work for mankind. Almost all humans are dead. Human society is conveyed throughout the story’s portrayal of the machine society in many ways. Human’s lives when machines have taken over, are much different and dangerous than they are now. In “Who Can Replace Man”, something shown about humans is that they can be much weaker than technology if technology gets strong enough. At the end of the story, when they think all mankind is deceased, they find a human that is still alive. The man shows how weak humans become when machines have basically taken over the whole world. The text shows how weak humans have become by telling what the man at the end of the story looked like. It says, “He was small and wizened, with ribs sticking out like a skeleton’s and a nasty sore on one leg. He shivered continuously,” (Aldiss, 149). This shows me that once technology takes over, humans won’t be able to do anything for themselves. The man in the story was too weak to take care of himself and take care of what he needed to.

They seem to be lazy because they leave all of the work for the machines to do. Humans had given all of the work to the machines that they had done before technology came along. The author states, “Morning filtered into the sky, lending it to the gray tone of ground below. The field-minder finished turning the topsoil of three-thousand-acre field” (Aldiss, 140). This scene shows me that what the machines have been doing, isn’t healthy for the earth and has been damaging it. If humans saw what was happening everywhere because of technology, mankind may have started taking care of what was happening around