From the presentation on the back cover:

Samuel Butler (1835-1902) was an English author, philosopher, and translator of the Homeric epics, who lived in the Victorian era. He was a multifaceted personality and a restless spirit in a transitional period of epoch-making social, economic, and cultural changes that took place during the Industrial Revolution and laid the foundations of today’s technological system, which dominates on a global scale. Butler, with exceptional insight during an early era, addressed the problem of the relationship between man and machine, without sharing the uncritical optimism regarding the promises of technological development in a century when most technological innovations took place, and he articulated very early reflections that today are common ground regarding the evolving "fifth technological revolution," which promises the unification of man, nature, and technology and the creation of the Posthuman.

The central question Butler poses is what is the difference between man and machine, and consequently what will be their relationship in the future, given the continuous evolution of technology and man's increasing dependence on it. Many decades would pass before the most advanced for his time questions he raised and his very early concerns became the subject of systematic treatment by leading thinkers of the 20th century, such as Lewis Mumford and Jacques Ellul – as well as our own Spyridon Kyriazopoulos – and by activists with explicit commitment against the industrial-technological system, like Ted Kaczynski.

Butler’s thought, however, retains its freshness in our era, as it is precisely at the heart of today’s discussion about the future ultimately reserved for us by modern technological civilization and the intense concerns manifested in our time about the establishment of a technological dystopia; a discussion at the core of which lies the vital question: What is, ultimately, man? Or, to put it differently, from the perspective of a materialistic era of generalized nihilism that has already committed the "death of God": in what way does man differ from the machine?

Indicative excerpts:

“Day by day, however, machines gain ground in relation to us. Day by day we become more enslaved to them. More and more people are bound daily to them as slaves to care for them, more and more people dedicate every day all their forces to the development of mechanical life. The outcome of the whole affair is simply a matter of time, but the fact that this time will come when machines will have actually dominated the world and its inhabitants is something that no truly philosophical man can for a moment doubt.”.

“[...] I will repeat that I fear no existing machine; what I fear is the exceptional speed with which they are transformed into something very different from what they are today. No category of beings in any past era has evolved so rapidly. Should we not watch this evolution with vigilance and control it as much as we still can? And is it not necessary for this purpose to destroy the most advanced of the machines used today, although it is acknowledged that they are harmless by themselves? ”