Qual história de ficção científica tratou primeiro da questão de um programa de computador que governa a sociedade?

Talvez "A máquina para"(1909) de EM Forster? Embora a" máquina "não seja realmente um computador eletrônico (porque ainda não havia sido inventado), ela tem a mesma função que um computador mestre que governa a sociedade.

The story, set in a world where humanity lives underground and relies on a giant machine to provide its needs, predicted technologies such as instant messaging and the Internet.

Duas décadas depois de "The Machine Stops", de EM Forster, esse pode ser um exemplo mais claro de uma sociedade governada por uma máquina.

1930: Paraíso e Ferro, um romance de Miles J. Breuer, MD, publicado pela primeira vez em Amazing Stories Quarterly, Verão 1930, disponível no Internet Archive. Está situado numa misteriosa ilha das Caraíbas. Citando de Everett F. Bleilerrevisão de Ficção científica: Os anos Gernsback:

The people who watched ineffectually while Davy saved Mildred are all highly cultured, pleasant, sophisticated, beautiful people who live a life of utter ease and perpetual entertainment. The arts are cultivated remarkably, and athletic skill is high. Life seems edenic and beautiful. Everything anyone could want, including luxuries, is available on demand, without money. The only work involved is an occasional day of "supervision." Technology is remarkably high, with automated cars, automated housing, and much else.

Yet there is something very wrong in the City of Beauty. Beneath the insouciant airs and the indolent dawdling there is a note of suppressed panic, a powerful tabu against talking of certain things, and a helpless feeling of inevitability when incidents such as Mildred's "accident" take place.

Davy, who is intelligent, is more and more bewildered as his stay on the island lengthens. He learns that there is no traffic whatever with the outside world (except for Kramer's occasional trips), and that even to mention it is tabu. The people, descendants of gifted, artistic people who settled the island two generations ago when Kramer was young, will not discuss the outside, nor even their own world. He is repeatedly told that the walls have ears.

Davy, after several "accidents" nearly kill him, comes to the conclusion that on the other end of the island, where there is a tabu area called the City of Smoke, there is a ruling caste that has created the reign of psychological terror and that it is responsible for mysterious disappearances, as individuals are seized by machines and raced away to the City of Smoke. He is only partly right, of course.

Let us skip over adventures against individual machines that have evil designs on Davy: Davy penetrates the City of Smoke, which is an incredible assemblage of automated industrialism, and finally learns the truth. Kramer had early developed the concept and technology of automation that finally produced the City of Smoke and by extension the City of Beauty. Involved is an advanced technology that supports invisibly the carefree activities of the City of Beauty. But the machines developed beyond Kramer's intentions and after a time became autonomous, with a gigantic computer (my term) that now rules the island. All the service machinery in the City of Beauty is bugged, visually and aurally, and the machines haul away those who show signs of not accepting the situation. The machine leadership, desiring to understand human emotions, has even taken to vivisecting humans considered rebellious. Davy narrowly escapes such a fate in the City of Smoke.

As Kramer fears, it is only a matter of time before the machines realize that they need not serve the humans at all. Indeed, by the end of the story, the machine rulers have recognized that they are superior to men and have decided to expand beyond the island into the outer world and take it over.