The Man-Machine and Artificial Intelligence

[Dave Monroe]

the man-machine and artificial intelligence
Bruce Mazlish

For thousands of years humans have wrestled with the
question of their "human" nature. In particular, they
have attempted to define themselves in relation to the
animal kingdom. Yearning either to take on some of the
superior attributes of other animals or to rise above
their own animal nature by becoming angelic, humans
have mostly sought to define themselves as a special
sort of creation.

Humans have also created machines; and their new
creations, in turn, have raised the question of
whether animals are merely a variant of the machine
and whether the machine, as a kind of monster, can
turn against its creator and either "take over" or
make humans over into its own image.

These concerns about man's animal and mechanical
nature came forcefully together in the West in the
seventeenth century and did so in terms of a debate
over what was called the animal-machine. Were animals
mere machines, and were humans the same-that is,
man-machines?

[...]

In the Hermetic tradition of the Renaissance, the
ancient fascination with automata took on new life.
Magic and mechanics were intertwined, and an air of
fear and wonder hovered over the statues and angels
conjured out of the earth and air: are they alive and
real, or not? Are humans, indeed, mechanicians, who
can breathe life into what they have created, thereby
imitating their own Creator? Or are they merely
machines themselves, working on mechanical principles?
In the Hermetic tradition of the Renaissance, these
questions are close to the surface, though enveloped
in mythical and magical shapes.

A century or two later, having passed through the
cleansing and brightening waters of Baconian and
Cartesian thought, the automata giving rise to these
questions took on, seemingly, a more secular, more
reasoned form. In the eighteenth century, one of the
most skilled technicians was the Frenchman Jacques de
Vaucanson. He produced a duck which, we are told,
"drank, ate, digested, cackled, and swam-the whole
interior apparatus of digestion exposed, so that it
could be viewed; [a] flute player who played twelve
different tunes, moving his fingers, lips and tongue,
depending on the music; [a] girl who played the
tambourine, [and a] mandolin player that moved his
head and pretended to breathe."

Even more spectacular were the automata of Pierre
Jaquet-Droz, a Swiss, who "in 1774...created a
life-sized and lifelike figure of a boy seated at a
desk, capable of writing up to forty letters." (He
still functions at the History Museum in Neuchâtel.)
Droz created another figure called the "Artist," in
the shape of a boy that could draw up to four
different sketches, improving on the average work of
his human counterpart.10

These mechanical figures were bathed, at the time of
the Enlightenment, in the pure light of reason, and
discussion of them took place in unambiguous
"scientific" terms. We have already listened to some
of the discourse, ranging from Descartes to La
Mettrie. Underlying this discussion, however, as I
shall try to show, ran the fears of the automata, for
they posed an "irrational" threat to humans, calling
into question their identity, sexuality (the basis of
creation?), and powers of domination.

Automata provoked not just fears, but also the promise
of creative, Promethean force. The tension between
these two aspects of the automaton-at play in various
examples of the genre-is most interesting. I shall try
to explore the human ambivalence toward automata in a
selected group of examples: the "Nightingale" of Hans
Christian Andersen's Fairy Tales, the creature in
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, the "Tiktok" of the Oz
stories, the R.U.R. of Karel Capek, and assorted
robots of Isaac Asimov.

I could have chosen innumerable other examples, for
tales of the automata are legion....

[...]

http://www.stanford.edu/group/SHR/4-2/text/mazlish.html

Jacques Vaucanson, Canard digérant, from Le monde des
automates (1928)

http://www.stanford.edu/group/SHR/4-2/images/MAZLISH1.GIF

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