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.

• Golemclay 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

FrankensteinInterest 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.