Who Can Replace Man Brian Aldiss Analysis

There are a lot of differences between man and machine. But there aren’t as many differences as some may think. In the story “Who Can Replace Man” by Brian Aldiss, the machine society is eerily similar to the human society that we have today. The machines are reflecting what humans are like and how humans value things.

In the machine society the machines have brain classes. In the human society, they have social classes. The way the brain classes work for the machine society is that Class 10 is the lowest and Class 1 is the highest. Machines use these brain classes to determine other machine’s worth and value. If a machine has a low class brain, it will be of little to no value to machines with higher class brains, therefore, in the higher

Humans are very selfish and only want things that benefit them personally. That being said, when a human can no longer provide or do anything for another human, they often leave them because they have nothing to offer. They also do that in the machine society, such as when one of the machines fell and the other machines could not get him up, so they left the machine behind because it couldn’t help them anymore. ““Therefore I shall lie here and rust,” the penner cried, “although I have a Class Three brain.” “Therefore you will be of no further use,” agreed the operator, and they forged gradually on, leaving the penner behind.” (Aldiss, 149). The machines left the penner to rust because it was no longer useful to them. This is very similar to what humans do to other humans when they are no longer useful.

These similarities between human society and machine society lead me to believe that the author wrote “Who Can Replace a Man” with the intent of reflecting what the machines in the story did to what humans do still to this day. Although there are also numerous differences between human and machine, there is no doubt that the machines are mirroring the