The Victorian Singularity

...it appears to us that we are ourselves creating our own successors; we are daily adding to the beauty and delicacy of their physical organisation; we are daily giving them greater power and supplying by all sorts of ingenious contrivances that self-regulating, self-acting power which will be to them what intellect has been to the human race. In the course of ages we shall find ourselves the inferior race...
Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life. The upshot is simply a question of time, but that the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants is what no person of a truly philosophic mind can for a moment question.
Our opinion is that war to the death should be instantly proclaimed against them. Every machine of every sort should be destroyed by the well-wisher of his species.

From "Darwin Among the Machines," an 1863 essay by critic and novelist Samuel Butler. Butler was not the first of his era to express anxieties about machine uprisings; a few decades earlier, a ballad about a rogue steam-powered prosthetic arm and a similar one about a mechanical leg had already been written.

Borges on illogical theology

Moreover, arguing that an error against God is infinite because He is infinite is like arguing that it is holy because God is, or like thinking that the injuries attributed to a tiger must be striped.

From "The Duration of Hell" by Jorge Luis Borges. 

Maps of emotional space

Chart of the basic emotions as determined by psychologist Paul Ekman.

Two-axis map per James A. Russell

Concept map based on the writings of the philosopher Spinoza

Ramon Llull's theological sentence generator

The roots of artificial intelligence and digital text generation go back to the Middle Ages:

Ramon Llull’s Ars Magna provides a mechanical process for generating true statements and even proofs...
Llull provides four figures in the form of circular or tabular diagrams which recombine the elements of this table in different ways... the first figure produces combinations of absolute principles – ‘Wisdom is Power’, say. The second figure applies the relative principles – ‘Angels are different from elements’. The third brings in the questions – ‘Where is virtue final?’. The fourth figure is perhaps the most exciting: it take the form of a circular table which is included in the book as a paper wheel which can be rotated to read off results...
The kind of thinking going on here is not, it seems to me, all that different from what goes into the creation of simple sentence-generating programs today, and it represents a remarkable intellectual feat.

Llull's figure 1

Similar algorithms can be applied to produce sappy love letters or financial reports.

The Constitution as celestial mechanics

...Montesquieu insists that the English Whigs copied the new astronomy when they were creating the modern British Constitution. Referring to this in one of his essays, Woodrow Wilson drew attention to the fact that the Constitution of the United States had been made on the same principle. 'They [writers in the Federalist] speak of the checks and balances of the Constitution,' he said, 'and use to express their idea the simile of the organization of the universe and particularly of the solar system....'

From a passage on the metaphorical uses of mechanical and scientific terms during the Enlightenment, in History in English Words by Owen Barfield.