Updated 10 July 1995
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?
Rene Descartes's answer, for example, was that animals were simply
machines; and human beings, if one were to set aside their possession
of an immaterial soul, might also simply be considered as machines.
His famous dualism, however, saved human uniqueness. Michel de
Montaigne and his followers took an opposite tack, often asserting the
superiority of beasts over humans, vaunting the naturalness of the
former. By the eighteenth century, Julien Offray de Mettrie sought to
end the debate by declaring that man was a machine, no different in
this respect from any other mechanical being. Needless to say, the
debate has continued to rage.
In the history of mechanical contrivances, it is difficult to know how
many of the automata of antiquity were constructed only in legend or
by actual scientific artifice. Icarus's wings melt in the light of
historical inquiry, as they were reputed to do in the myth; but was
the flying automaton, attributed to a Chinese scientist of c. 380 BC
actually in the air for three days, as related? (The same story is
told of Archytas of Tarentum.)1 The mix of fact and fiction is a
subject of critical importance for the history of science and
technology; for our purposes, the aspirations of semi-mythical
inventors can be as revealing as their actual embodiment in levers and
gears.
Chinese and Greek traditions are especially rich on the subject of
automata. Indian and, somewhat later, Arabic sources are also copious.
Western-centered and limited as this article is, I am compelled to
note the preeminence of Chinese science and technology in this area.
Joseph Needham has made this fact evident in his monumental work,
Science and Civilization in China.
The wealth of mechanical toys cited in ancient China is awesome. In
addition to the flying machine mentioned earlier, mechanized doves and
angels, fish, and dragons abounded; automated cup-bearers and wine
pourers were prominent; and hydraulically-moved boats, carrying
figures of singing girls, animals, and men in motion are said to have
amused the emperors. Of particular interest are the chariots that
moved of themselves-auto-mobiles-attributed by legend to the scientist
Mo Ti in the fourth century BC. Were they actually wheelbarrows, or
"pedicarts"? A mechanical man of jade is reported, as well as all
kinds of wooden dolls, gold Buddhist statues, and puppet orchestras.
"What is man?" asked such automata, by their actions. "Man is the
mechanician" is the most obvious answer. Are humans also machines?
Needham cites a long passage, which I repeat here, that vividly gives
us the flavor of automata development in China and raises the
questions of humans' dual nature. The passage, from the Lieh Tzu,
whose probable date is the third century BC, tells of how
King Mu of Chou made a tour of inspection in the west...and on his
return journey, before reaching China, a certain artificer, Yen Shih
by name, was presented to him. The king received him and asked him
what he could do. He replied that he would do anything which the king
commanded, but that he had a piece of work already finished which he
would like to show him. `Bring it with you tomorrow,' said the king,
`and we will look at it together.' So next day Yen Shih appeared again
and was admitted into the presence. `Who is that man accompanying
you?' asked the king. `That, Sir,' replied Yen Shih, `is my own
handiwork. He can sing and he can act.' The king stared at the figure
in astonishment. It walked with rapid strides, moving its head up and
down, so that anyone would have taken it for a live human being. The
artificer touched its chin, and it began singing, perfectly in tune.
He touched its hand, and it began posturing, keeping perfect time. It
went through any number of movements that fancy might happen to
dictate. The king, looking on with his favourite concubine and other
beauties, could hardly persuade himself that it was not real. As the
performance was drawing to an end, the robot winked its eye and made
advances to the ladies in attendance, whereupon the king became
incensed and would have had Yen Shih executed on the spot had not the
latter, in mortal fear, instantly taken the robot to pieces to let him
see what it really was. And, indeed, it turned out to be only a
construction of leather, wood, glue and lacquer, variously colored
white, black, red and blue. Examining it closely, the king found all
the internal organs complete-liver, gall, heart, lungs, spleen,
kidneys, stomach and intestines; and over these again, muscles, bones
and limbs with their joints, skin, teeth and hair, all of them
artificial. Not a part but was fashioned with the utmost nicety and
skill; and when it was put together again, the figure presented the
same appearance as when first brought in. The king tried the effect of
taking away the heart, and found that the mouth could no longer speak;
he took away the liver and the eyes could no longer see; he took away
the kidney and the legs lost their power of locomotion. The king was
delighted. Drawing a deep breath, he exclaimed, `Can it be that human
skill is on a par with that of the great Author of Nature?'
"Anyone would have taken it for a live human being"-here we have one
of the key phrases. The robot makes advances to the ladies and incurs
the King's wrath, presenting a sexual threat which is so prevalent, as
we shall see, in fears about automata. In the sentence "Can it be that
human skill is on a par with that of the great Author of Nature?" is
sounded what in the West we know of as the Promethean theme.2
The Greeks, too, were absorbed with automata of one kind or another.
The Delphic oracles spoke through a wind-operated "voice," and the god
Hephaestus is said to have forged a sort of robot of bronze, named
"Talos," to guard Crete. Indeed, statues and effigies were themselves
god-like: that is, filled with the voices of the gods. We catch this
sense of the statue as divine in the writing of Callistratus, in the
fourth century AD, about an ivory and gold statue of the god
Asclepius: "Shall we admit that the divine spirit descends into human
bodies, there to be even defiled by passions, and nevertheless not
believe it in a case where there is no attendant engendering of evil?
...for see how an image, after Art has portrayed in it a god, even
passes over into the god himself! Matter though it is, it gives forth
divine intelligence."3
A true history of automata would give all the details, and would cover
the ground systematically.4 I wish merely to highlight the topic, and
to pick it up again in more modern times. Note Needham's concluding
comment that when the Chinese and European traditions of mechanical
toys "came together in the middle of the thirteenth century, the
European tradition did not show up to much advantage. The triumphs of
the European `Gadget Age' were yet to come."5
In the thirteenth century in Europe, for example, we find reports of
exemplary mechanical doves and angels made by Villard de Honnecourt.
In the fifteenth century, the mathematician and astronomer Johannes
Muller constructed an eagle and a fly that astounded his
contemporaries. The twentieth-century historian of science Pierre
Duhem has proposed a tentative explanation: "The fly, for instance,
would beat its wings by means of springs concealed within it, and make
the tour of a dinner-table suspended from a hair invisible to the
guests, finally approaching the hand of Regiomontanus [Muller] because
of a magnet secretly held by him."6
In this account, Muller seems as much magician as mechanician. The
connection is not accidental, according to Francis Yates and others,
who posit a "Hermetic Tradition" in Renaissance science. Yates's
argument, for example, is that "the Renaissance magus was the
immediate ancestor of the seventeenth-century scientist." In turn, the
Renaissance magus "had his roots in the Hermetic core of Renaissance
Neo-Platonism."7
It was especially Marsilio Ficino, along with Pico della Mirandola,
who revived and carried forward the Hermetic tradition into the
Renaissance. Ficino translated the collection of treatises that
supposedly were written by Hermes Trismegistus, whom he believed to
have been a real Egyptian priest and who gave an account, like Moses,
of man and the cosmos. In the Hermetic story of creation, however, man
is given permission by the Father not only to dominate over the
animals, but also to share in the demiurgic powers: that is, to create
and animate artificial beings, as we would call them, or, in my terms,
machines. Thus, in the Hermetic Asclepius, as Yates informs us, "The
Egyptian priests...are presented as knowing how to capture the
effluxes of the stars and through this magical knowledge to animate
the statues of their gods."8
Alchemy was the Hermetic science par excellence. Mere matter could be
transformed, for example, into gold, but life also could be distilled
from the alchemist's retorts. The other means of creating life out of
inanimate matter was through cabalistic conjurations. Small wonder
that an air of mystery and magic hung over the Renaissance magus, who
rapidly also gained the taint of charlatanism. John Dee, the
Elizabethan scientist, is a prime example of the confusion of magic,
"chemistry," and mechanics. Called the "great conjurer" for his magic
summoning of angels, he was also suspect for his mechanical powers. In
vain he protested: "And for...marvelous Actes and Feates, Naturally,
Mathematically, and Mechanically wrought and contrived, ought any
honest Student and Modest Christian Philosopher, be counted and called
a Conjurer?"9
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 Neuchatel.) 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.
Jaques Vaucanson, Canard digerant, from Le monde des automates (1928).
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. Those I have chosen, however, are classic
examples (Asimov's are currently becoming so) and illustrate different
aspects of the human encounter with the mechanical "other." Andersen's
tale hinges on clockwork mechanisms; Shelley's Frankenstein-perhaps
the dominant Western metaphor for the fourth discontinuity, straddling
both biological and mechanical fears-holds an importance which is
self-evident and thus deserves extended treatment; Baum's Oz stories,
which obsessively reflect a childlike curiosity about "life," are
hardly as innocent as they appear; Capek's R.U.R. gives birth to the
term "robot," and voices the fear of robots taking over-a fear echoed
today in countless films about menacing androids; and Asimov's varied
cast of robots allows us to explore many of the intellectual
dimensions of the predicted coming of a robotic age.
Let us begin with Hans Christian Andersen's "The Nightingale," a
famous tale from the nineteenth century. It reflects both the
scientific concern with automata and the Romantic revulsion towards
the mechanical Newtonian world view. Newton had imagined the universe
as a clockwork. The clock, with its intricate, precise, and more or
less unfailing machinery, symbolized the new age of scientific method
and industrial discipline. It also prompted additional speculation
about the relation between the internal "works" of human beings and
clocks.
In Andersen's tale, we are presented with a "real nightingale" and one
that requires a "watchmaker."11 The tale itself is a simple one. The
real nightingale charms a Chinese emperor and his peasants alike. Its
song brings tears to their eyes. Subsequently, an artificial
nightingale appears, even handsomer than the real one because it is
ornamented with precious stones. It appears to sing as well and more
repeatedly, and is as well received as the original. Banished, the
real bird flies away. After a year, however, the artificial
nightingale begins to break down, and cannot be fully repaired. A few
years later, the emperor lays dying, and only the nightingale's song
can save him. But the artificial bird has now completely wound down.
Suddenly, the live nightingale appears, sings to the emperor, and he
comes back to life.
In Andersen's telling, the tale has a poignancy and meaning that
cannot be conveyed in a precis. Examined closely, the short story also
takes on unexpected ambiguities. The compelling note is the constant
comparison between human-made and "natural" things: at the beginning,
the croaking of frogs is mistaken for church bells by the courtiers,
the nightingale's song for glass bells. The artificial bird and the
real nightingale cannot sing well together, "for the real Nightingale
sang in its own way, and the artificial bird sang waltzes."12 At
first, the palm seems to go to the mechanical contrivance for "three
and-thirty times over did it sing the same piece, and yet was not
tired." Praising it, the artificer explains how "with a real
nightingale one can never calculate what is coming, but in this
artificial bird everything is settled."
In fact, the artificial bird is neither untiring nor settled. It
breaks down, and cannot be repaired. In contrast, the nightingale goes
on living, as if for eternity. (While I do not know exactly how long a
nightingale can live, I suspect not too many years; of course, new
ones can be produced, but so can machines.) Thus, the qualities
normally assigned to animate (living) objects and inanimate (non
living) objects are reversed: it is the animate that endures. This
theme is reiterated at the end, when the real nightingale, symbolizing
the forces of life, banishes death: in the words of the emperor, "I
banished you from my country and empire, and yet you have charmed away
the evil forces from my couch, and banished Death from my heart!"13
Through this short story, Andersen is saying that the difference
between humans and automata is simple and straightforward: one
represents life and the other death, cold and mechanical. It is the
Romantic lament. As the nightingale tells the emperor at the end, "I
will sing of those who are happy and of those who suffer. I will sing
of good and of evil that remain hidden round about you."14
Though Andersen's answer to his question about humans and automata is
seemingly an untroubled one, it is really surrounded by ambiguous
thoughts and feelings. (Andersen had an unhappy youth and occupied his
time in solitude by constructing puppet theaters.) His tale is not
calculated to satisfy those who felt, and feel, themselves deeply
puzzled and disturbed over the mysteries of life and mechanism.
The artificial nightingale is a clockwork figure. Mary Shelley's
Frankenstein draws on other sources: it reaches back to the Hermetic
tradition, to which it adds the threatening aspect of the legendary
golem. Badly written, stilted, a pastiche of styles and inspirations,
the book nevertheless exercises an uncanny power over us. It is an
alchemist's brew of ideas, whose very formlessness allows us to
instill in it all the shapes and forms of our own imagination.
Frankenstein's monster looms over our most primordial fears and
desires, hulking above our ambivalent feelings toward animals and
machines, symbolizing the way in which they take on a "life" of their
own.
Mary Shelley had no formal education. Nevertheless, being the daughter
of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, she moved into a circle of
advanced thought. Influenced by the enlightenment of her time, she
also breathed the air of mysticism and romanticism that emanated from
the Gothic novels of Walpole and Rutledge, and the poetry of Samuel
Taylor Coleridge. Her peculiar genius was to connect the ancient myths
with early nineteenth-century science.
The Hermetic tradition seemingly had blessed humans' participation in
the demiurge, and looked benignly on their efforts to give life to
inanimate statues. In Frankenstein, a dark shadow creeps over these
efforts: Cornelius Agrippa, Paracelsus, and Albertus Magnus,
"canonical" figures in the Hermetic tradition, are all mentioned as
the hero's inspirations, but they are shown as Mephistopheles-like
figures, leading him to perdition. It is a golem, not the statues of
Hermes Trismegistus, that here becomes animated.
Golems may have originated as wooden or clay models of human beings
that were placed in graves to act as servants of the dead.15 In
Europe, they take on an especially legendary form in the sixteenth
century. The golem, a shapeless mass of clay, could be given form by
conjuration: in this case, Jewish cabalism. A rabbi pronounces holy
words, and writes on the creature's forehead "Emeth," meaning "truth"
in Hebrew, thus endowing it with life. By erasing the "E," the word
becomes "Meth," which means "death," and the creature disintegrates.
(In another version, the rabbi writes "Shem" [the name of God], but
the process is the same.)
The golem is supposedly man's servant. He exists to protect his maker.
But in the legends, the golem almost always also threatens its master
running out of control, falling on him, or going berserk-and must
finally be destroyed. (The most famous golem is that in the service of
Rabbi Loew, in early seventeenth-century Prague.)16
Mary Shelley doesn't make overt reference to the golem tales; but
they, along with the Hermetic tradition, lie behind her story. Further
influences crowd in. Her rationalist father, William Godwin, had
written a book, Lives of the Necromancers, which, though not published
until 1834 (by Mary), reflected earlier conversations between him and
his daughter about Agrippa, Paracelsus, Albertus Magnus, the
Rosicrucians, and other cabalistic and magus-like sources. Another
current of thought-contemporary science, especially chemistry and
electricity-came into play in Mary's mind through her husband, Percy
Bysshe Shelley. Though a poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley was fascinated by
science. Like Godwin, he had read Paracelsus (who, incidentally, was
famous for having claimed that he could create "a little man or
homunculus"). As a boy, Shelley had also become intrigued with
chemistry, and his rooms at Eton are said to have resembled an
alchemist's laboratory. He was also exposed, according to one scholar,
"to androids, or mechanical toys that functioned like humans-a product
of the scientific genius of Adam Walker, to whose lectures he had
listened."17
At Oxford, Shelley also experimented with electrical machines, air
pumps, galvanic batteries, and other such paraphernalia. Though Lord
Byron probably encouraged Mary Shelley to read Sir Humphry Davy's
Elements of Chemical Philosophy (1812) at the time she began the
composition of Frankenstein, it was her husband, Percy, who really
served as the lightning rod, connecting the ancient alchemists and the
modern genie of science in her thought. Indeed, it was Percy who urged
her on with the book, helped her write it, penned the preface, and
secured its publication.
Davy's Elements, which hinted at the possibility of discovering a life
force-a subtle universal fluid or vital magnetism-dealt with recent
researches into galvanism and electricity. Luigi Galvani's work, or
what I like to call the "galvanic twitch" (whose movement through
nineteenth-century thought has still not been sufficiently traced),
had demonstrated the identity of electrical and chemical forces-that
is, their interconvertibility. It also suggested that galvanic
electricity could bridge the gap between the animate and inanimate;
the frog's leg made to twitch seemed to lead to Aldini's experiment in
which a shock applied to a recently hanged man produced an effect
that, as he wrote, "surpassed our most sanguine expectations, and
vitality might perhaps have been restored if many circumstances had
not rendered it impossible."18
Percy Bysshe Shelley was probably also influenced by the climate of
opinion embodied in the term Naturphilosophie, though it remains
something of a will-o'the-wisp in the history of science except among
specialists. An important movement of thought in the early nineteenth
century, it has generally been treated with scorn, as befitting a kind
of mystical attitude to nature. Though it emphasized vitalism and
holism against the dominant materialism and analysis of contemporary
Western science (hence, the scorn), both types of philosophy sought to
depict the universe as unified and falling under one connecting net of
forces, and thus, laws. In any event, Natuphilosophie propagated the
idea of the interconvertibility of forces, linking the animate and
inanimate through galvanism, magnetism (in the form of Mesmerism, it
becomes "animal magnetism"), and electricity. Thus animating forces
could be made to run between the poles of life and death.
The Galvanic twitch. Twitching frog's legs lead from Galvani to
Aldini's experiments, thence to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and the
supposed creation of life by means of a spark infused into inanimate
materials (Courtesy Burndy Library, Dibner Institute, MIT, Cambridge,
MA.)
Mary Shelley's knowledge of these developments in science was a
hodgepodge; she only dimly and intuitively grasped their meaning. But,
like the ancient alchemists, she thought she knew enough to attempt
their transmutation into the gold of art-and succeeded, creating an
immortal work of fiction, Frankenstein. In 1816, on the edge of Lake
Leman, Geneva, Switzerland, the shreds and tatters of true science
were combined with the myths of antiquity.
We can reconstruct Frankenstein's composition. Byron and a friend, Dr.
John Polidori, had joined Mary and Percy. Outside their villa a storm
rages; the friends amuse and terrify themselves by telling ghost
stories. Byron then proposes that each write his or her own. That
night, Mary has a nightmare in which, as she tells us, "I saw the
hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of
some powerful engine, shows signs of life, and stir with an uneasy,
half vital motion." From this nightmare, Frankenstein is born.19
I have given some of the background to Mary Shelley's book because to
do so illustrates vividly the range of human curiosity, embodied in
scientific inquiry and legendary stories, concerning the creation of
life from inanimate material. "More, far more will I achieve,"
exclaims Frankenstein, "treading in the steps already marked, I will
pioneer a new way, explore unknown powers, and unfold to the world the
deepest mysteries of creation."20 In penetrating these mysteries, the
book resurrects and reclothes a number of humanity's deepest concerns
about automata: for example, the servant-machine rising against its
master, the fear of the machine reproducing itself (fundamentally, a
sexual fear, as the example of Caliban in Shakespeare's Tempest
reminds us, and as we shall see in our further account of Mary
Shelley's book), and the terror, finally, of humans realizing that
they are at one with the machine-monster.
Such is the fundamental attraction and meaning of Frankenstein. But
little attention has been given to the actual details of the novel,
which has now passed into folklore. For this reason, I will instance
material that may be familiar to scholars of the book but not
necessarily to the general reader.
First, the name Frankenstein is often given to the monster created,
rather than to its creator; yet, in the book, Frankenstein is the name
of the scientist, and his abortion has no name. Second, the monster is
not a machine but a "flesh and blood" product; even a student as
informed as the distinguished historian Oscar Handlin makes the
typical quick shift when he says, "The monster, however, quickly
proves himself the superior. In the confrontation, the machine gives
the orders." Third, and last, it is usually forgotten or overlooked
that the monster turns to murder because his creator, horrified at his
production, refuses him human love and kindness. Let us look at a few
details.
In writing her Gothic novel in 1816 to 1817, Mary Shelley gave it the
subtitle, "The Modern Prometheus." We can see why if we remember that
Prometheus defied the gods and gave fire to humankind. Writing from an
early nineteenth-century Romantic perspective, Mary Shelley offers
Frankenstein as an example of "how dangerous is the acquirement of
knowledge." In this case, specifically, the capability of "bestowing
animation upon lifeless matter." In the novel we are told of how,
having collected his materials from "the dissecting room and the
slaughterhouse," Frankenstein eventually completes his loathsome task
when he infuses "a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at
my feet." Then, as he tells us, "now that I had finished, the beauty
of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my
heart." Rushing from the room, Frankenstein goes to his bedchamber,
where he has a most odd dream concerning the corpse of his dead mother
(the whole book as well as this passage cries out for psychoanalytic
interpretation) from which he is awakened by "the wretch-the miserable
monster whom I had created." Aghast at the countenance of what he has
created, Frankenstein escapes from the room and out into the open.
Upon finally returning to his room with a friend, he is relieved to
find the monster gone.
To understand the myth, we need to recite a few further details in
this weird story. Frankenstein's monster eventually finds his way to a
hovel attached to a cottage, occupied by a blind father and his son
and daughter. Unperceived by them, he learns the elements of social
life (the fortuitous way in which this occurs may strain the demanding
reader's credulity), even to the point of reading Paradise Lost.
Resolved to end his unbearable solitude, the monster, convinced that
his virtues of the heart will win over the cottagers, makes his
presence known. The result is predictable: horrified by his
appearance, they duplicate the behavior of his creator and flee. In
wrath, the monster turns against the heartless world. He kills, and
his first victim-by accident-is Frankenstein's young brother.
Pursued by Frankenstein, the creature eventually confronts its
creator. The monster explains his road to murder and, in a torrential
address, appeals to Frankenstein:
I entreat you to hear me, before you give vent to your hatred on my
devoted head. Have I not suffered enough that you seek to increase my
misery? Life, although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is
dear to me, and I will defend it. Remember, thou hast made me more
powerful than thyself; my height is superior to thine; my joints more
supple. But I will not be tempted to set myself in opposition to thee.
I am thy creature, and I will be even mild and docile to my natural
lord and king, if thou wilt also perform thy part, the which thou
owest me. Oh, Frankenstein, be not equitable to every other, and
trample upon me alone, to whom thy justice, and even thy clemency and
affection is most due. Remember, that I am thy creature; I ought to be
thy Adam; but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drives from joy
for no misdeed. Everywhere I see bliss, from which I alone am
irrevocably excluded. I was benevolent and good; misery made me a
fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.
Eventually, the monster extracts from Frankenstein a promise to create
a partner for him "of another sex," with whom he will then retire into
the vast wilds of South America, away from the world of men. But
Frankenstein's "compassion" does not last long. In his laboratory
again, Frankenstein indulges in a long soliloquy:
I was now about to form another being, of whose dispositions I was
alike ignorant; she might become ten thousand times more malignant
than her mate; and delight, for its own sake, in murder and
wretchedness. He had sworn to quit the neighborhood of man, and hide
himself in deserts; but she had not; and she, who in all probability
was to become a thinking and reasoning animal, might refuse to comply
with a compact made before her creation. They might even hate each
other; the creature who already lived loathed his own deformity, and
might he not conceive a greater abhorrence for it when it came before
his eyes in the female form? She also might quit him, and he be again
alone, exasperated by the fresh provocation of being deserted by one
of his own species.
Even if they were to leave Europe, and inhabit the deserts of the new
world, yet one of the first results of those sympathies for which the
demon thirsted would be children, and a race of devils would be
propagated upon the earth who might make the very existence of the
species of man a condition precarious and full of terror. Had I right,
for my own benefit, to inflict this curse upon everlasting
generations?
With the monster observing him through the window, Frankenstein
destroys the female companion on whom he had been working.
With this, the novel relentlessly winds its way to its end. In
despair, the monster revenges himself by killing Frankenstein's best
friend, Clerval, then Frankenstein's new bride, Elizabeth. Fleeing to
the frozen north, the monster is tracked down by Frankenstein who
dies, however, before he can destroy his dreadful creation. It does
not matter; the monster wishes his own death and promises to place
himself on a funeral pile and thus at last secure the spiritual peace
for which he has yearned.
It is important to be acquainted with the myth of Frankenstein as
actually written by Mary Shelley. For most of us, Frankenstein is
Boris Karloff, clumping around stiff, automatic, and threatening: a
machine of sorts. (My students tell me this image is hopelessly out
of-date; for them Frankenstein is Gene Wilder in Mel Brooks's film
Young Frankenstein.) We shall have forgotten completely, if ever we
knew, that the monster cum machine, is evil, or rather, becomes evil,
only because it is spurned by humans.
Implicit in Frankenstein is the question of an essential
discontinuity. If humans insist on their separateness and superiority
with regard to machines (as well as other animals), viewing them as
threatening new "species," rather than as a part of their own
creation, will they, indeed, bring about the very state of alienation
that they fear? Do differences between humans and machines-and it
would be a reductio ad absurdum to declare that there are none-add up
to a discontinuity? Although Frankenstein's creation is, in fact, a
monster, its existence raises the same fundamental "mysteries" as if
it were a machine; such are the amorphous connecting powers of myth.21
Mary Shelley, of course, was writing about creation before Charles
Darwin; her "mysteries" are without the benefit of his great work on
what he called the "mystery of mysteries." Another Darwin, however,
not Charles, was summoned directly to Mary's assistance: Erasmus
Darwin, Charles's grandfather. In the preface to Frankenstein
(actually written by Percy) the opening lines state that "the event on
which this fiction is founded has been supposed by Dr. Darwin, and
some of the physiological writers of Germany, as not of impossible
occurrence."22 Later, in her introduction to the 1831 edition, Mary
recalls how she, her husband, and Lord Byron discussed "the nature of
the principles of life, and whether there was any probability of its
ever being discovered and communicated. They talked of the experiments
of Dr. [Erasmus] Darwin...who preserved a piece of vermicelli in a
glass case, till by some extraordinary means it began to move with
voluntary motion."
In Frankenstein, much ambivalence pervades the scientific quest. "What
had been the study and desire of the wisest men since the creation of
the world was now within my grasp," we are told by Frankenstein, but
it involves him in a loathsome search through "vaults and charnel
houses." When he triumphantly announces that he has become "capable of
bestowing animation upon lifeless matter," he must surround it with
the disclaimer "I am not recording the vision of a madman."23 His
demurral aside, Frankenstein not only symbolizes the "modern
Prometheus," overreaching himself, but also has come to epitomize the
"mad scientist," whose hubris has removed him from the circle of
humanity. If humans are created in God's world, the monster is spawned
in the laboratory. Man, the evil scientist, has taken God's place.
Moreover, the scientist has also taken the place of woman. She has
been displaced from the acts of conception and birth. It is the man,
Frankenstein, who creates sexlessly. In the novel, sexuality is a
threatening force. (In Mary's own life, sex meant death: her mother
had died giving birth to her, her best friend had died in childbirth,
and so forth; thus the biographical details are important to our
understanding her fiction.) If the monster is allowed to breed, it
will take over from mankind. In aborting the birth of a mate, as we
have seen, Frankenstein reveals not only his revulsion to sexuality,
but also his racist fears: a "race of devils" is how he describes the
potential new species.
Mary's father, William Godwin, had also envisioned the end of
sexuality in his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. As he wrote
there, "The whole will be a people of men, and not of children [that
is, men will live more or less forever]. Generation will not succeed
generation."24 Diminished sensuality would ensure that the end of
generations would also mean the end of the act of generation. Thus,
Godwin foresaw a timeless, unchanging utopia where creation had taken
place once and for all. Indeed, it was against this illusion that
Thomas Malthus wrote his essay, Population, insisting that sex-that
is, procreation-was one of the necessary postulates of human
existence, the other being the necessity of food. If not prevented by
moral restraint, procreation leads, in turn, to the threat of
overpopulation. When we deal with Charles Darwin, we shall note how
reading Malthus helped spark into life Charles Darwin's great theory
of evolution by natural selection, giving humans a new, scientific
account of genesis.
Mary Shelley, however, echoes her father's hopes and fears. She
substitutes the test-tube for the sexual act in Frankenstein. What is
more, without a real father and mother, the creature thus conceived is
without nurturance and development. "No father had watched my infant
days," he laments to Frankenstein, "no mother had blessed me with
smiles and caresses." Like a fairer creature, Minerva, from Jove's
forehead, the monster has sprung full-grown (and larger than man). He
is, as a result, (because of lack of development) inhuman. Made
animate by his scientific creator, he is still like an automaton,
ultimately lacking in the qualities that would bridge the
discontinuity between him and humans.
In Frankenstein, man, in disgust and fear, rejects his own creation.
In doing so, he rejects a part of himself, his "double" (recognized
unconsciously by readers who refer to the monster as "Frankenstein"),
for both Frankenstein and the monster are destroyed at the book's end.
Left behind them, in the shape of the gargoyles of the mad scientist
and the golem-automaton run amok, is a new-old commandment: "thou
shalt not create matter in thine own image."
Frankenstein still gives rise to a frisson in modern man, but it has
not put a stop to his mechanical ambitions. In fact, the automaton
frequently has been domesticated in the form of the robot, and often
given a friendly, serving face. One such figure is found in the Oz
books for children. He is called Tik-tok, and first appears in Ozma of
Oz (1907). In this seemingly simple book, many of the fundamental
questions surrounding man, animals, and machines are dealt with
disarmingly.
L. Frank Baum, the author, seems to have had a genial obsession with
the idea of human identity.25 An American Andersen of sorts, he
modernized the timeless. Though in such tales the threatening
characters previously were monsters-the giant in "Jack and the
Beanstalk"-here they are often humanized and humorous machines.
Harmony reigns in the land of Oz among humans, animals, and machines,
and even witches are gently laughed away.
We see these elements at play in all of Baum's Oz books, but
especially in Ozma of Oz, one of his most delightful excursions into
our subject.26 Dedicated to all boys and girls, it starts with Dorothy
Gale of Kansas on a boat, then being washed overboard and clinging to
a chicken-coop, whose only other occupant is a hen named, by Dorothy,
Billina. Unexpectedly, the hen can talk, and when Dorothy says, "I
thought hens could only cluck and cackle," the hen replies, "I've
clucked and cackled all my life, and never spoken a word before this
morning, that I can remember. But when you asked a question, a minute
ago, it seemed the most natural thing in the world to answer you. So I
spoke, and I seem to keep on speaking, just as you and other human
beings do. Strange, isn't it?" Thus, at the beginning of the book, the
question of the defining quality of language-humans have language, and
hens generally don't-is put before us.
We are, of course, in fairyland (though first the chicken-coop must
wash ashore in the land of Ev and of Oz). The point of fairyland,
however, is to define "real land" by comparison. When Dorothy urges
the hen to eat the egg it has laid, because "You don't need to have
your food cooked, as I do," the hen indignantly cries, "Do you take me
for a cannibal?" When Dorothy, pursuing the subject, says how dreadful
her companion's eating habits are-"Why, eating live things, and horrid
bugs, and crawly ants. You ought to be 'shamed of yourself!"-the
unflappable hen responds, "Goodness me!... Live things are much
fresher and more wholesome than dead ones, and you humans eat all
sorts of dead creatures." To Dorothy's denial, Billina instances
lambs, sheep-and even chickens. Dorothy's triumphant rejoinder is "but
we cook 'em." When the hen questions whether there is any difference,
the little girl answers, "A good deal...I can't just 'splain the
diff'rence, but it's there. And, anyhow, we never eat such dreadful
things as bugs!" The hen's cackling reply leaves Dorothy thoughtful:
"But you eat the chickens that eat the bugs.... So you are just as bad
as we chickens are."
We seem to be in the presence of a jovial Claude Levi-Strauss. Humans
are cannibalistic animals that cook their food and feel superior to
other animals. Speech, however, allows them to examine their own
actions. Baum is helping children grope toward a sense of what it is
to be human, and different from hens and other animals.
A creature called "The Wheeler" serves as an intermediary between
animals, such as Billina, and machines. "It had the form of a man," we
are told,
except that it walked, or rather rolled, upon all fours, and its legs
were the same length as its arms, giving them the appearance of the
four legs of a beast. Yet it was no beast that Dorothy had discovered,
for the person was clothed most gorgeously in embroidered garments of
many colors, and wore a straw hat perched jauntily upon the side of
its head. But it differed from human beings in this respect, that
instead of hands and feet there grew at the end of its arms and legs
round wheels (30).
Here, clothes seem to be the defining quality of a human,
differentiating it from both a machine and an animal.
It is Tik-tok, the Machine Man, however, who occupies the central
place in what comes to be a kind of comical Cartesian discourse.
Dorothy finds a key that unlocks a door in a rock where she sees
the form of a man-or, at least, it seemed like a man, in the dim
light. He was only about as tall as Dorothy herself, and his body was
round as a ball and made out of burnished copper. Also his head and
limbs were copper....`Don't be frightened,' Billina calls out. `It
isn't alive' (54).
Reassured, Dorothy remembers the Tin Man, and makes a comparison. "But
he [the Tin Man] was as alive as we are, 'cause he was born a real
man, and got his tin body a little at a time-first a leg and then a
finger and then an ear-for the reason that he had so many accidents
with his ax." Her conclusion is that, in contrast, the copper man "is
not alive at all."
Tiktok, the Machine Man. Illustration by John R. Neill, from L. Frank
Baum, Ozma of Oz (1907). Dorothy explores, with the direct naivete of
a child's eye, the difference between humans and machines.
He is a robot. The card around his neck defines him as a "Clock work"
that "Thinks, Speaks, Acts" (if you wind him up). He "Does Everything
but Live"(55). Everything, that is, except eat, feel either sorrow or
joy, be kind (or unkind), or sleep (these, at least, are the specific
differences alluded to in the book). When, however, the Scarecrow
claims that, unlike Tik-tok, he has brains, Tik-tok replies, "Oh, yes,
I have. I am fit-ted with Smith and Tin-ker's Improved Com-bi-na-tion
Steel Brains. They are what make me think"(114-115). Like the animal
Billina, the machine Tik-tok has language and brains.
What, then, distinguishes "him" (it?) from humans? The answer seems to
reside in the specifics cited, revolving especially around emotions:
that is, consciousness of a state of feeling. Also, according to Baum,
Tik-tok suffers from the defect of always having to be rewound (but
this is merely a technicality-after all, humans have to eat).
Another mechanical figure in the book, "The Giant With the Hammer,"
appears not to suffer from this latter defect (in fact, he seems to
continue until turned off by a key). On the other hand, unlike Tik
tok, he has no thinking or speaking attachment. A gigantic "man" made
out of plates of cast iron, he stands astride the only road into the
Kingdom of the Nomes, pounding the earth so that all are too scared to
go past. But his very strength-his unwearying mechanical regularity
proves his weakness, and allows him to be defeated. As the Scarecrow
points out, all that the members of Dorothy's party have to do is run
under the hammer when it is lifted, and pass to the other side before
it falls again.
Tik-tok itself is an utterly unthreatening robot. He exists only to
serve Dorothy, which he does. In the illustrations, he looks like a
copper Humpty-Dumpty. Even the Giant with a Hammer is little to be
feared, for he can easily be outwitted because of his mechanical
qualities. Automata, in Oz, are domesticated creatures, different from
hens and other animals, but no less under human-in fact, a child's
domination.
Robots, however, do not occupy only the sunny fields of Oz in our
imagination. They also often take on dark, threatening shapes, such as
we have seen in Frankenstein. Their more modern incarnation, in Karel
Capek's R.U.R.,-which introduced the term "robot" into popular usage
reflects similar fears.27
Like its Shelleyan predecessor, Capek's play R.U.R. (1921; performed
in America in 1922), is a poorly written hodge-podge of mostly
improbable ideas. (Perhaps this is because a crude style matches the
crudeness of its creatures, or because the Gothic is necessarily
crude.) In any case, Capek-a Czech-obviously wrote with one eye on the
Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, though one cannot be sure of his actual
attitude toward that epochal event. Between Act I, which is about the
manufacture of robots, and Acts II and III, when they revolt, there is
a dichotomy. Yet the play is effective and has come to symbolize much
of our feelings about robots.
The play opens when Helena, a beautiful young girl, comes to visit on
an island the factory of Rossum's Universal Robots, which is managed
by a man, Domin. He immediately falls in love with her and, on her
promise not to divulge it, tell her the true story of the invention.
(The process itself is secret, preserved in only two copies.) Rossum,
he says, was a "great physiologist," who "attempted by chemical
synthesis to imitate the living matter known as protoplasm until he
suddenly discovered a substance which behaved exactly like living
matter." As Domin explains, "This artificial living matter of his has
a raging thirst for life. It didn't mind being sewn or mixed
together."28 Thus, old Rossum set about to imitate nature: first, an
artificial dog, which took him several years and "resulted in a sort
of stunted calf," and then the manufacture of a man.
The dog anticipates or is derivative of Pavlov's; the man reminds us
of the creature in Frankenstein. Rossum is obviously cast in
Frankenstein's image. Domin sardonically calls him "mad...the old
crank wanted to actually make people"(13). Rossum's "bungling attempt"
occupied him for ten years-"It was to have been a man, but it lived
for three days only." Then, we are told, "up came young Rossum, an
engineer.... When he saw what a mess of it the old man was making, he
said, `It's absurd to spend ten years making a man. If you can't make
him quicker than nature, you might as well shut up shop'"(14).
Frankenstein-Rossum and his "monstrosities" are pushed aside. Young
Rossum is an engineer, not a physiologist, who says to himself: "A man
is something that feels happy, plays the piano, likes going for a
walk.... But a working machine must not play the piano, must not feel
happy." As Domin concludes, "And to manufacture artificial workers is
the same thing as to manufacture...motors." (Later, the mechanical
metaphor is betrayed when we are told that "there are vats for the
preparation of liver, brains...and a spinning mill for weaving nerves
and veins" (19); consistency was not Capek's strong point.)
All that the worker need do is to work: hence, a robot (from the
Czech, robota, meaning work). The requirement is to reproduce "the
cheapest...worker with the minimum amount of requirements." It is as
if young Rossum were answering the desires of the classical economists
and their "iron law of wages." Only robots are not people.
"Mechanically," as Domin defines them, "they are more perfect than we
are, they have an enormously developed intelligence, but they have no
soul"(17). In fact, we are told that the cost of producing a robot has
been brought down within 15 years from $10,000 to $150!
Young Rossum, Domin goes on, "then proceeded [like his father, though
he has repudiated the old man] to play at being God." He tried to make
a superrobot. "Regular giants they were. He tried to make them twelve
feet tall. But you wouldn't believe what a failure they were"(19). In
this area Frankenstein seems to have done better.29
The robots are constrained not only by size, but by longevity. They
have only a 20-year life span. They do not, however, die-which
involves a consciousness of death-but simply "get used up." Though
they appear lifelike-the young lady, in an amusing bit, mistakes a
robot for a live human being, and the human for a robot-dissection
proves that they are not. They feel nothing (reminding us of
Descartes's views on animals-machines); consequently, one can be
accused not of "killing" them, but only of destroying a machine, just
as wringing the neck of a chicken is not murder. All is well and
peaceable in Rossum's factory.
Trouble enters this mechanical paradise, when, in Act I, Helena pities
the robots and wants to treat them as "brothers" and to "show them a
little love"-shades of Frankenstein! As befitting a play of 1921, the
language is also of "liberating" the robots: that is, the workers.
By Act II, Helena is married to Domin, ten years have gone by, and the
robots number millions and millions. One of the other humans in the
factory, Dr. Gall, under the influence of Helena, has begun to
introduce modifications into the manufacture of some of the robots:
pain, ostensibly so that they can withdraw their hand from dangerous
operations; irritability, so that they begin to show defiance; and
other such human attributes.
Capek's argument is really disingenuous. Humans are depicted as
"imperfect" machines. "For example," as an engineer explains, "from a
technical point of view, the whole of childhood is a sheer absurdity.
So much time lost"(42). Humans obviously also waste time with sex.
Their intelligence is less than what it might be. Hence, robots are
created that are more intelligent and powerful than humans, who have
no interest in sex, and are clearly superior. Yet, as soon as this is
done, it becomes obvious that Capek considers them less perfect than
men because they do not have feelings, such as love and fear.
The contradiction becomes clear as the play unfolds in the last two
acts. Owing to Dr. Gall and Helena's meddling, a new species of robot
is produced that soon starts to go "mad," and ends up in revolt
against man. As the robot leader declaims to Helena: "You are not as
strong as the Robots. You are not as skillful as the Robots"(91). To
her words about equality, he responds, "I want to be master. I want to
be master over others"(92). He proclaims to his fellow robots: "We
command you to kill all mankind. Spare no man. Spare no woman"(117).
The robots take over the island, and all humans are killed except one
"last man," Alquist. Indeed, humans have already, as Dr. Gall noted
earlier, "become superfluous"(98). The problem is, however, that the
robots, too, are about to die out, for they cannot reproduce
themselves. (In a moment of humanitarian fervor, Helena had destroyed
the copies detailing the secret process of creating the robots, so as
to prevent further manufacture and hence exploitation.) In the
Epilogue, the robots command Alquist to rediscover Rossum's secret.
However, much as he wishes to do so Alquist lacks the scientific
ability. He prays, "Lord...if there are no human beings left, at least
let there be Robots!-At least the shadow of man!"(164).
At this point, a miracle occurs. Two of Gall's newest robots, a male
and a female, enter. They are experiencing strange feelings-love,
sexual longing, it appears. Also, "laughter-timidity-protection"(154).
To test them, Alquist proposes to take one of them into the dissecting
room. When each is prepared to sacrifice him- or herself to save the
other, Alquist knows that a new race has been born. "Go, Adam, go,
Eve. The world is yours," he says in the last line of the play, "At
least the shadow of man!"
I find the whole play incredibly muddled. In the last act and the
epilogue, Capek is obviously writing as much about the workers'
revolution in Russia as about the robots' uprising in Rossum's
factory. On one hand, the play is a kind of Luddite-Frankenstein
protest against human hubris in the making of machines: Helena's human
maid, Nana, exclaims at one point, "All these new-fangled things are
an offense to the Lord. It's downright wickedness. Wanting to improve
the world after He has made it"(101), and we are not meant to snicker.
On the other hand, it seems to preach a certain idealism: that
machines can free men from toil and thus allow him to reach for
perfection. In Domin's proud, and possibly ironic, words, "He [the
human] will not be a machine and a device for production. He will be
Lord of creation"(52).
Capek's identification of the robots with the workers of the world,
led by Bolsheviks, is not without roots. Frankenstein's monster, too,
was frequently identified by nineteenth-century readers with the
rebellious masses. Thus, in the novel Mary Barton (1848), Elizabeth
Gaskell writes of how "the actions of the uneducated seem to me
typified in those of Frankenstein, that monster of many human
qualities" and Sir John Lubbock, a conservative scientist, speaking in
the House of Commons around 1870 against liberal reform, gave as his
reason that he "believed it would be impossible to control the
Frankensteins we have ourselves created."30 (Here they make the
typical slip of calling the monster by its maker's name.) Feelings
about the right ordering of the social world are thus projected onto
the subject of robots.
The social and psychological springs of R.U.R. do not mesh smoothly.
But even though its theme is unfocused, R.U.R. does successfully
reflect our primordial feelings about automata, as both promise and
threat. Capek's final message is ironic and ultimately baffling,
because he posits that the "new man" of the future is a robot-but one
that is just like a human in his feelings! Thus, Capek provides a null
response to both the threat and the promise. But what is memorable
about the play-or accounts of it-is the threat that, like
Frankenstein's monster, unless they are first destroyed or
emasculated, robots will usurp the world from humans.
R.U.R. was written before robots were used widely in industry and by
an author who shows no evidence of having thought much about the
science and technology animating them. Nevertheless, the play has
achieved canonical status. I, Robot, by Isaac Asimov, is a much more
thoughtful book-actually, a connected series of short stories-by an
informed author, at a time when the presence of robots is becoming
real; yet the book is mainly known only to sci-fi fans. It should be
read, however, by anyone interested in probing our contemporary
feelings toward robots.
Its protagonist is a woman psychologist, Dr. Susan Calvin (whose name,
surely, is intended to symbolize the Protestant work ethic); with one
or two exceptions, she is one of the few females in the book, with all
the other humans and the robots apparently male. So much for the sex
problem!
The first story, "Robbie," raises the familiar problems. Robbie is a
non-talking "nurse-maid" robot, for little Gloria. While the child
loves "him" and thinks of him as "a person just like you and me," her
mother is actually jealous of Robbie, fears the machine-"it has no
soul, and no one knows what it may be thinking"-and thinks "some
little jigger will come loose and the awful thing will go berserk."31
She insists the robot be removed and a collie dog substituted.
Gloria is inconsolable. Her father arranges for a tour of the premises
of U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men, Inc., to show his daughter that
Robbie is just a machine. When she breaks away to embrace Robbie, whom
she sees on the assembly line, she steps in the path of a huge,
lumbering tractor. While her father and the others are unable to act
fast enough-"The overseers were only human, and it took time to act"
but Robbie, acting "immediately and with precision," saves his little
playmate (28). All is forgiven, and Gloria has her mechanical friend
to take home.
A contrived tearjerker, the story is effective. It introduces us to
our own fears, in a homey, humdrum way. We are told that the event
occurred in 1998; as the stories continue, by 2002 mobile speaking
robots have been invented, and, between 2003 and 2007, most of the
world governments-presumably pressured by the mothers of innumerable
Glorias-have banned robot use on Earth for any purpose other than
scientific research.
As further protection, all robots are bound by "The Three Laws of
Robotics":
1-A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a
human being to come to harm.
2-A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where
such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3-A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection
does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
The remaining stories explore variations on one or more of these laws,
their applications, and possible violations. Asimov is an interesting
logician and rings the changes nicely. In the story "Reason," the
robot Cutie pursues logic to its Cartesian conclusion, announcing "I,
myself, exist, because I think"(51). Hubris overtakes this robot, who
subsequently announces its conversion to the religion of "The Master":
The Master, [it tells the two humans who are in charge of it,] created
humans first as the lowest type, most easily formed. Gradually, he
replaced them by robots, the next higher step, and finally he created
me, to take the place of the last humans. From now on, I serve the
Master (53).
The rebellious delusion, however, turns out to be harmless, because
Cutie still operates dials and graphs correctly, though claiming it
does so in obedience to the Master; and, obedient to the Second Law of
Robotics, does not harm humans. As one of its two tenders remarks,
"what's the difference what he believes"(63). The incipient danger has
been nicely damped down.
It breaks out again in a story in which a robot lies, against the
strictest injunction. Finally detected by Dr. Calvin, using a clever
piece of logic, it is destroyed. The dark shadow of the robot,
however, has grown more menacing. In another story, a robot faced with
conflicting demands behaves just as a human might: it suffers a
nervous breakdown. Yet, Asimov tries to keep clear the distinction
between humans and machines: the machine, he declares, is an "idiot
savante-it doesn't really understand what it does-it just does
it"(129).
The penultimate story, "Evidence," poses the "difference" question
most squarely. Is the lawyer Stephen Byerley, running for high
political office, a man or a robot who looks exactly like a man? His
opponent accuses him of being inhuman, and offers as proof that he
never is seen eating. Byerley responds that his habit of eating in
private is probably neurotic, but not inhuman. The test finally comes
in a public debate when a man emerges from the audience, taunts
Byerley, and says "Hit me," pointing out that a robot can't violate
the First Law and harm a human. Byerley punches him, thus proving his
"humanity," and, of course, wins the election.
Only, as it turns out (though Dr. Calvin alone comes to know), Byerley
actually is a robot. Created by a crippled human to perform in his
place, Byerley has simply struck another robot, cleverly planted in
the audience to rise and challenge the original humanoid robot. When
Dr. Calvin's colleague is queried about the possibility of such a
humanoid robot, he reluctantly admits that
by using human ova and hormone control, one can grow human flesh and
skin over a skeleton of porous silicone plastics that would defy
external examination. The eyes, the hair, the skin would be really
human, not humanoid. And if you put a positronic brain, and such other
gadgets as you might desire inside, you have a humanoid robot" (159
60).
Asimov is not dismayed by this possibility. Like his fictional
creation, Dr. Calvin, Asimov believes that robots are "a cleaner
better breed than we are"(9). They are decent and logical entities,
who as civil executives and "World-Co-ordinators"-Byerley, for
example-will run the world and bring peace and prosperity to mankind.
Whereas "humans are fallible, also corruptible," machines are only
subject to mechanical failure, not wrong results: that is, if fed the
correct data.
Like everyone writing about robots, however, Asimov is also
ambivalent. Humans, he seems to be saying, still possess a creativity
denied to machines.
The Machine is only a tool after all, which can help humanity progress
faster by taking some of the burdens of calculations and
interpretations off its back. The task of the human brain remains what
it has always been; that of discovering new data to be analysed, and
of devising new concepts to be tested (187).
Yet, on the very last page of I, Robot, the machine appears as
Providence, superior to humans but clever enough to hide its
superiority so as not to injure human pride. (Earlier, we have seen
Cutie making an open avowal of superiority-a clear sign of a kind of
madness.) The books ends with Asimov's message:
How do we know what the ultimate good of Humanity will entail? We
haven't at our disposal the infinite factors that the machine has at
its! Perhaps, to give you a not unfamiliar example, our entire
technical civilization has created more unhappiness and misery than it
has removed. Perhaps an agrarian or pastoral civilization, with less
culture and less people would be better. If so, the Machines must move
in that direction, preferably without telling us, since in our
ignorant prejudices we only know that what we are used to, is good-and
we would then fight change. Or perhaps a complete urbanization, or a
completely caste-ridden society, or complete anarchy, is the answer.
We don't know. Only the Machines know, and they are going there and
taking us with them (192).
It is a wishy-washy conclusion to an intriguing group of stories, in
which Asimov cleverly explores both our logical and illogical
attitudes toward robots. I have not mentioned, for example, his
handling of the "Fundamentalists," who would destroy all machines, or
his assumption that in the mid-twenty-first century, robots are still
under the control of private, capitalistic enterprises, competing
unscrupulously with one another (the cost of a robot is, in this book,
$30,000). Overall, however, the book is a provocative rehandling
generally optimistic-of the themes we have been pursuing from
Andersen's nightingale through Capek's Rossum's robots.
In spite of the length of this article, I have only touched on the
wealth of literature relating to automata. The subject seems to crop
up everywhere, in almost everything one reads. Some light on its
ubiquity may be shed by "The Uncanny," a strange and difficult paper
by Sigmund Freud.32 Here Freud points to what may be involved,
psychologically, in the fear of the inanimate-of automata. Discussing
E.T.A. Hoffman's story, "The Sandman" (later part of Offenbach's
opera, Tales of Hoffman), Freud argues that the feeling of the uncanny
arises where we are in doubt as to whether an apparently animate
being-an automaton-is really alive, or not.
We need not follow Freud in his specific and tortuous analysis of the
story in terms of castration fears, or in his general analysis of the
uncanny in terms of animistic mental activity. For our purposes, we
need only be inspired to realize that automata, mechanical dolls, and
machines of all sorts awaken special undefined fears in us. Does the
machine represent a part of ourselves of which we are afraid? Do we
project into it our secret, and most forbidden, desires? A moment's
reflection on our feelings toward robots, Pygmalion-like statues, or
Frankenstein monsters (though this is, as stressed, in fact a flesh
and-blood creation) will confirm the extent of our emotional
involvement, even if not its exact nature.
With this as a psychological context, I can use the examples given in
this chapter to make the following general points. What are variously
called automata, or androids, or robots, are conceived by man as
originating either at the hands of gods (for example, the Delphic
oracles), or by man using magic (for example, the automata or golems
of the Hermetic tradition), or by man using science (for example, the
clockwork nightingale, Frankenstein's monster, and Capek's and
Asimov's robots). (It would be nice to think of this as a
chronological progress, but ancient Chinese scientists obviously used
clockwork, and the followers of Hermes Trismegistus used magic very
early on; what we find, therefore, is a recurring juxtaposition of the
animating forces.) The created figures are either primarily biological
or mechanical; flesh and blood or clockwork-machines, animated by a
spark or wound up.
However created, whatever the material, they all pose the same
compulsive question: how do they differ from humans, or, more simply,
what is a human? This is the "uncanny" feeling analyzed by Freud. So,
too, they all arouse in us the same range of ambivalent reactions: the
sense of a perfection and infallibility to which we aspire-the angel
in us-and the sense of the destructive and degrading in us-the ape in
us.
Something new is now emerging: the robot as an industrial reality.
Still, the same feelings seem to be attached to it. Thus we are told
that when a Japanese worker was crushed in a robotics accident,
arising from his being in a restricted area and failing to notice that
he was in the automatic path of a transport robot (and no "Robbie" to
rescue him!), the incident was reported in the press as "though it had
been a robot uprising."33 Will these feelings change as familiarity
breeds boredom? In the movie 2001, Hal the computer rebels; will the
memory fade from our dreams?
The fact is that our feelings toward the robot-automaton are caught up
anew in our feelings toward its new version, the computer. The robot
now becomes the tool-really, the body-by which the computer-a "brain"
can "move" and take on "animated" form. Automata now take the shape of
artificial intelligence machines.34
Notes
This essay is adapted from Chapter 3 of my book, The Fourth
Discontinuity: The Co-Evolution of Humans and Machines (New Haven:
Yale UP, 1993). Thanks to Yale UP for granting permission for the
adaptation. I would also like to acknowledge the assistance provided
by Guven Guzeldere, without whom this article would not have appeared
in its present shape. Thanks also to Stefano Franchi and Laura Kerr
for editorial help.
1 See Joseph Needham, Science and Civilization in China, vol. 4, part
2 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1975) 54. This book is a mine of
information on the subject of automata, as well as on its more general
subject. Further on automata, compare Albert Chapuis and Edouard
Gelis, Le monde des automates (Paris: Chapuis, 1928).
2 Needham, vol. 2, 53. Comparison with statements by LaMettrie spring
quickly to mind.
3 Quoted in Julian James, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown
of the Bicameral Mind (Boston: Houghton, 1976) 336.
4 For one such attempt, though a brief one, see John Cohen, Human
Robots in Myths and Science (London: Allen & Unwin, 1966).
5 Needham, vol. 2, 165.
6 Quoted in Needham, 164.
7 Francis A. Yates, "The Hermetic Tradition in Renaissance Science,"
Art, Science, and History in the Renaissance, ed. Charles S. Singleton
(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1967) 258, 255.
8 Yates, 257.
9 Quoted in Yates, 259.
10 Radu Florescu, In Search of Frankestein (Boston: New York Graphics
Society, 1929) 233. This is a marvelous work, well printed and
illustrated, and, at the time I bought it, a wonderful buy. Compare
the article by Michael Uhl, "Living Dolls," Geo (July 1985), and its
quotation of one observer who delicately noted that Vaucanson's duck
duplicated the process of digestion in full view of the spectators,
"ending the digestion process as naturally as it began"(86). Thus,
long before Pavlov, the idea of a viewable pouch in the stomach was
employed, not in a dog, but in an automaton.
11 In the seventeenth century, Sir Kenelm Digby, member of the Royal
Society, had already declared that birds were machines, whose motions
when feeding their young or building their nests were no different
from the striking of the clock or the ringing of an alarm. See Keith
Thomas, Man and the Natural World (New York: Pantheon, 1983) 35.
12 Folk-lore and Fable: Aesop, Grimm, Andersen, The Harvard Classics,
ed. Charles W. Eliot (New York: P.F. Collier, 1909) 325. The next
quotation is from page 326.
13 Eliot, 328.
14 Eliot, 329.
15 There is some evidence for this origin in Needham, 157.
16 See Florescu, 223-225, for this and other details.
17 Florescu, 329.
18 Giovanni Aldini, On Galvanism (London, 1803) 194. Quoted in Michael
Kita, "Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: Two Contexts," unpub. ms. I owe to
it inspiration for some of the above, and what follows on
Naturphilosophie.
19 See Florescu, 65 ff., for his tracking down the possible influences
on Mary, who supposedly visited a Castle Frankenstein in the Rhine
country, inhabited in the eighteenth century by a Konrad Dippel, an
alchemist accused of strange experiments.
20 Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (New York: Dell, 1975) 46.
21 In fact, Mary Shelley herself, in a subsequent novel, The Last Man
(1826), makes the connection when she writes about man as an
"automaton of flesh...with joints and strings in order." Quoted in
William A. Walling, Mary Shelley (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1972)
93.
22 Shelley, Frankenstein, 7. The next quotation is from page 12.
23 Shelley, Frankenstein, 51.
24 William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, and Its
Influence on Morals and Happiness, 3rd ed., vol. 2 (London, 1798) 528.
25 Baum's own identity is not as simple as it might at first appear.
Some writers on Baum see him as a social critic and a populist; see,
for example, Henry M. Littlefield, "The Wizard of Oz: Parable on
Populism," American Quarterly 16.1 (Spring, 1964). For an overall
treatment, see Raylyn Moore, Wonderful Wizard Marvelous Land (Bowling
Green, Ohio: Bowling Green UP, 1974), who suggests that "for the first
time in the history of the fairy tale, Baum produces monsters which
are mechanical, in whole or in part"(143). For a number of critical
essays on Baum, see Michael Patrick Hearn, ed., The Wizard of Oz by L.
Frank Baum (New York: Schocken Books, 1983); also Martin Gardner, "The
Royal Historian of Oz," Order and Surprise (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus,
1983).
26 L. Frank Baum, Ozma of Oz (Chicago: Reilly & Lee, 1907). All
further references to this edition are cited within the text.
27 In the New York Times, February 11, 1982, there is a claim that
"robot" was a term coined by Karel's brother, Josef.
28 Karel Capek, R.U.R., trans. Paul Selver (Garden City, NY:
Doubleday, 1923) 10-11. All further references to this edition are
cited within the text.
29 In fact, neither Frankenstein nor God could have created a 12 foot
man, for it violates a known law concering size and shape, wherein
volume grows more rapidly than surface. For details, see Stephen Jay
Gould, "Size and Shape," Ever Since Darwin (New York: Norton, 1977).
Domin himself has a glimpse of this fact when he adds, "For no reason
at all their limbs used to keep snapping off"(16).
30 See Florescu, 14.
31 Isaac Asimov, I, Robot (New York: Fawcett Crest, 1970) 16. All
further references to this edition are cited within the text. (The
title might be intended to suggest either an ironic or an egoistic
identification with the author, who is frequently cited as "I.
Asimov.") Asimov's more recent book The Robots of Dawn (New York:
Ballantine Books, 1983) is, unfortunately, not quite up to the
standard of its predecessor, being rather repetitious and crude in its
attempts at salaciousness. I, Robot, itself, however, is a classic.
32 Sigmund Freud, "The Uncanny," Standard Edition, vol. 17.
33 New York Times Magazine, January 10, 1982: 62.
34 In the fourth chapter of my book, The Fourth Discontinuity, I
follow up on these points with a discussion of the Industrial
Revolution, considering it as a quantum leap in the relationship
humans have with machines. In its first phase in the early nineteenth
century, artificial intelligence machines as such do not figure in
production. Instead, the machine basically replaces manual labor.
However, as I show later in chapter seven on Babbage, the artificial
intelligence machine is conceptualized and even developed by him, in
his arithmetical mill, around 1822-1832, as part and parcel of the
mechanizing impulse of the Industrial Revolution. It takes about a
century and a half, however, before the computer and the robot (our
modern automata) emerge as prime "movers" in the continuing industrial
revolution, substituting for brain as well as brawn.