Automata

The idea that we might be able to produce an artificial intelligence or perhaps even a conscious machine has had a long history. Harking back to the time of Descartes there was a great deal of activity in producing hydraulic automata for the pleasure gardens of the wealthy. These were hydraulic devices which, for example, might respond to a person stepping on a specially constructed flagstone in a garden pathway by triggering a cupid sculpture to spray water over that person.

Using hydraulic and clockwork models many automata were produced emulating in some way the activities of animals or humans. Many of the mechanical devices of the 17th and 18th centuries echoed aspects of human and animal motion and behaviour. The mechanistic view of the world developed greatly and natural philosophers felt that all human behaviour could be explained by mechanical models. In 1680 an Italian, and student of Galileo's, Giovanni Borelli, published De Motu Animalium (On the motion of animals) a study of the mechanical action of the muscles. In France in 1748 de la Mettrie's L'Homme Machine (Man a Machine) was published in which he claimed that all human behavior including the mind had mechanical explanation. This work was burned as atheistic and is still considered by historians of science as unecessarily extreme. [for example see C. Singer A Short History of Biology, 1931, p357] One should note that there was also a great deal of opposition in some academic quarters to this mechanistic view which was expressed under the framework of 'vitalism'.

In the same period Vaucanson produced a number of quite successful toys which emulated some activity or another of an animal or bird. Sir David Brewster in his book Letters on Natural Magic provides a description of Vaucanson's duck:

It "exactly resembled the living animal in size and appearance. It executed accurately all its movements and gestures, it ate and drank with avidity, performed all the quick motions of the head and throat which are peculiar to the living animal, and like it, it muddled the water which it drank with its bill. It produced also the sound of quacking in the most natural manner. In the anatomical structure of the duck, the artist exhibited the highest skill. Every bone in the real duck had its representative in the automaton, and its wings were anatomically exact. Every cavity, apophysis, and curvature was imitated, and each bone executed its proper movements. When corn was thrown down before it, the duck stretched out its neck to pick it up, it swallowed it, digested it, and discharged it, in a digested condition. The process of digestion was effected by chemical solution, and not by trituration, and the food digested in the stomach was conveyed away by tubes to the place of its discharge." [Brewster, 1868, p321]

The possibility of the automaton has enticed engineers in the western world for many centuries providing many an exhibit at fairs and expositions and as a feature of tales and novels from the Golem to Frankenstein. The robot workers of Karel Capek's R.U.R and Fritz Lang's Maria in Metropolis provide memorable 20th century examples.