Artificial Life: Reactions
against Technology
COMP 1631
Ancient Myths : Artificial Life
• Vulcan
Greek god Hephaestus (or Vulcan), who is said to have fashioned
two living female statues out of pure gold.
• Pygmalion
mythical artist who sculpted the statue of a beautiful woman,
subsequently fell in love with it and convinced the gods to give it life.
• Golem
clay figure said to have been shaped by a medieval rabbi to protect his
people from their oppressors. The golem was animated by certain holy
words which, when placed in its mouth (or written on its forehead,
depending on the version of the story) brought it to life. It was deactivated
by removing the words.
Automaton
•
As Europe entered what is known as the
Industrial Age, people became more fascinated
than ever before with the idea of artificial life.
After all, now that they had mastered mechanics,
what could humanity not create?
•
Automata, animated representations of living
creatures, were popular in richer households in
the 18th century.
Maillardet's Automaton
• Henri Maillardet was an 18th century
mechanician who worked in London producing
clocks and other mechanisms. He spent a period
of time in the shops of Pierre Jaquet-Droz, who
was in the business of producing automata that
could write and draw. It is believed that
Maillardet built this Automaton around 1800. He
made only one other Automaton that could write;
it wrote in Chinese and was made for the
Emperor of China as a gift from King George III
of England.
Maillardet's Automaton
Maillardet's Automaton
• The memory is contained in
the "cams," or the brass disks
• As the cams are turned by the
clockwork motor, three steel
fingers follow their irregular
edges. The fingers translate
the movements of the cams
into side to side, front and
back, and up and down
movements of the doll's writing
hand through a complex
system of levers and rods that
produce the markings on
paper.
The Turk
• In 1769, Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen
produced a chess-playing Turkish gentleman,
soon to be known as the Turk
• The life-sized automaton sat at a large cabinet
with a long pipe in one hand, consistently
beating its living opponents at chess with the
other. Such notables as Edgar Allen Poe sought
for years to uncover the trick behind the chess
player
The Turk
• The Turk in all his glory
Frankenstein
Interest in artificial life began to appear in literature. Mary Shelley's
classic novel Frankenstein, written in 1818, while not about a robot
as we understand the term (Dr. Frankenstein's monster being
assembled from used human, rather than metal, parts) did reveal a
growing public awareness of the roles that science and technology
were beginning to play in the world.
It also reflected popular concerns about that technology, which can
still be found today. For example,Frankenstein's apparent theme of
the unwary scientist invading God's territory by creating life
eventually inspired many horror films, many of which end with the
doleful phrase "... there are some things Man was not meant to
know ... " Author Isaac Asimov later coined the term "Frankenstein
complex" to describe this fear of new technologies, especially of
robots and their ilk.
Robots
• The Czechoslovakian playwright Karel Capek
invented the word that would thereafter define our
concept of artificial life. In the 1973 edition of the Oxford
English Dictionary the entry for "robot" reads as follows:
• Robot (ro-bot) 1923 (Czech, f. "robota" = compulsory
service)
A. One of the mechanical men and women in the play R.U.R.
(Rossum's Universal Robots) by Karel Capek; hence a living
being that acts automatically (without volition).
B. A machine devised to function in place of a living agent; one
which acts automatically or with minimum of external impulse.
Capek’s Robots
• Capek's robots have the appearance, and all the
capabilities, of their masters - with two important
exceptions:
– the ability to reproduce
– what the author enigmatically terms a "soul"
• (Capek did, interestingly enough, foretell a problem with
robots that scientists are wrestling with today programming.)
• "They've astonishing memories, you know," explains one
of Capek's scientists in R.U.R. "If you were to read a
twenty-volume encyclopedia to them, they'd repeat it all
to you with absolute accuracy. But they never think of
anything new.")
Robots in Film
• When movies were themselves a new technology, German director
Fritz Lang created a powerful political vision of the future that is now
considered a classic of the silent film era: Metropolis (1927).
• In the year 2027, according to Lang, humanity has spilt
into two distinct classes: the privileged owners and the
downtrodden workers, the latter led by the heroine
Maria. Upon the instigation of master industrialist
Frederson, a scientist creates a female robot to lead the
rebellious workers into a premature and therefore
disastrous revolt. While that robot is quickly turned,
through a rather magical process, into an exact duplicate
of Maria, its first appearance is breathtaking: a shining
metallic figure that slowly finds itself capable of
movement, and through movement, life.