Short answers, pulled from the story.
Samuel Butler wrote a letter to The Press newspaper in Christchurch arguing that machines were evolving like living creatures. He claimed mechanical life would eventually replace humans as the dominant species and urged immediate destruction of all machinery.
The book appeared anonymously in 1872 and described a society that destroyed most mechanical inventions. Chapter twenty-three details how machines might reproduce like organisms while chapter twenty-four explores whether machines can possess consciousness.
Butler protested in the second edition preface that he never intended to ridicule evolution and feared offending Darwin. He later explained the true target was Joseph Butler's 1736 work on religion rather than scientific theory.
George Dyson published Darwin Among the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence in 1998. He applied Butler's premise to Alan Turing's concepts of artificial life and argued the internet functions as a sentient being undergoing natural selection.
Frank Herbert's Dune novels reference this fictional historical event within those books after drawing inspiration from Butler's early warnings. Neo-Luddism movements also draw inspiration from his call to destroy machinery.