In Our Time - Automata

Episode Date: September 20, 2018

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the history of real and imagined machines that appear to be living, and the questions they raise about life and creation. Even in myth they are made by humans, not born. The classical Greeks built some and designed others, but the knowledge of how to make automata and the principles behind them was lost in the Latin Christian West, remaining in the Greek-speaking and Arabic-speaking world. Western travellers to those regions struggled to explain what they saw, attributing magical powers. The advance of clockwork raised further questions about what was distinctly human, prompting Hobbes to argue that humans were sophisticated machines, an argument explored in the Enlightenment and beyond.The image above is Jacques de Vaucanson's mechanical duck (1739), which picked up grain, digested and expelled it. If it looks like a duck...with Simon Schaffer Professor of History of Science at Cambridge UniversityElly Truitt Associate Professor of Medieval History at Bryn Mawr CollegeAnd Franziska Kohlt Doctoral Researcher in English Literature and the History of Science at the University of OxfordProducer: Simon Tillotson

This is the BBC. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoyed the programs. Hello, in the 10th century, life-like golden lions guarded the Byzantine court, moving and roaring. Western visitors had no idea how these worked, but guessed they were enchanted.

Ingenious machines such as these, called automata, challenged what it meant to say that something was alive, and when such devices took human form, they questions what it meant to be human. Were we machines too in some way? If not, how are we different? The answers to that changed over time, but what remained constant was an uneasiness

that machines made to imitate humans and be our servants might become our masters. With me to discuss ideas about early automata, a Simon Schaffer, Professor of History of Science at Cambridge University, Elitur, Associate Professor of Medieval History at Brinmore College, and Francesca Cult, Doctor for Research

in English literature and the history of science at the University of Oxford, Simon. What's our definition of automata for this programme? So literally, automata means self-moving devices, but it's a very fluid term, as no doubt will find out. It distinguishes itself from, for example, a much more recent term robot that wasn't coined until the 20th century

and points attention not towards self-movement, but towards work, towards labour. It also distinguishes itself from computers, from items that have artificial intelligence. So early automata are not distinguished by the fact that they have reason, but by the fact that they perform, that they move, and that they move, as we'll see, under their own steam. It obviously, as always, so often, Simon, it's started with the Greeks, and so often you're going to tell us how. The first texts we have about anything that resembles Automata are by Hero of Alexandria, who lived in the first century of our era, in Alexandria, so in Hellenistic Egypt, and his writings are absolutely extraordinary. They include everything from machines of war and architecture and religion to, at least in the West, the first description of a vending machine without which modern life would have no meaning at all.

What Hero is getting at in his writings is the extraordinary capacity of mechanics to impress us and deceive us. and make us wonder about where power is in the world. His writings didn't reach Western Europe until really the 1500s, but they did so, and this is very important, through the Arabic tradition. Before we get to the Arabic tradition, can you say a bit more about this remarkable fellow? Do we have any examples, any traces, any other diagrams but his own to take us back to that time? Hero describes machines that can make the doors of a temple open, apparently without any human intervention whatsoever.

The congregation then enters the temple. And then within that space, the audience can then be impressed by a whole series of moving statues and moving devices that seems to be impressed. by a whole series of moving statues and moving devices that seem to be performing some kind of play but on their own without any human being intervening whatsoever. Why wasn't this taken up at the time?

You'd have thought that they thought, this is whoopee, we'll have this at all our festivals. I think that's a wonderful question because it has always seemed to mean that it was taken up at the time. And as is often the case in technology history, in the history of machinery, cunning engineers don't necessarily write. So the bias of historians towards written records tends to distract the tradition away from what it is that can survive and what it is that is plausible.

So one of the things about the history of automata that I think is fascinating is that one can indeed find out an enormous amount about the plausibility of past engineering by following the recipe and then having enough faith in the permanence of ingenuity to suppose that something that could be built was built. Can we take this even further?

What did they understand by automata? When the people went into the temple that Simon has described, what did they think they were seeing? You know, that's a great question and I think it really depends on what kind of people were talking about because the engineers, of course,

understood exactly what was happening, anybody who knew how these were made. But the idea was that they could be moving by a variety of different forces, including supernatural forces as well as physical ones. And it's, I think, important... Sorry, was the idea of those who made these things that people should think they're moved by?

supernatural forces? Not necessarily. And it seems that Hero actually wrote his text in part to teach people about the principles of mechanics. And I think also it's important to note that we have even earlier Greek evidence for thinking about these objects that goes all the way back to Homer in the 8th century BC. And that even in the 4th century BC, there's the story of Architas, who was a colleague of Plato, who made a steam-powered bird, a pigeon or a dove. And so there was no sense that it was powered by demons, but merely that the capabilities for people who understand natural forces and are able to make things very cleverly can, in general. amazing inventions. But as Simon pointed out and said they didn't reach the West until 1500 years later, more or less,

but they did go into the great Arabic civilization from the late 7th century, early 8th century onwards. How did they get there? So the areas that where Greek knowledge had remained relevant came under Muslim political control in the 7th, 8th, 9th centuries. And so the texts like Hero's text, for example, his works, were not just translated into Arabic, but of course also amended, challenged, expanded upon, etc. And so the kind of knowledge that was required to make these objects

remained vibrant and continued to, grow in areas under Muslim political control, as well as areas that remained under Greek-speaking political control. It's interesting to me that why these people took such an interest and developed as we're going to tell in a minute to so brilliantly. And the West sort of left it alone. Do you have been now sort of on the scrap of paper? I think in part, you know, it has to do with, again, sort of the knowledge of, you know, Greek and Greek the text, those particular texts, but also the caliphs in Baghdad and later in other places were profoundly interested in the learning that had come from, that were in the places that had come under

their political control. So not just, so Sasanian Persia as well as Greece and Greek texts. So they were profoundly interested in these ideas and in these texts as a way to legitimate and legitimate their own political authority in a lot of times. But quite early it becomes performance spectacular. Harun al-Rashid sends a president to Charlemagne, the Emperor 800. And these feather birds fly out of the clock and mechanically present for us and tell the time. So it's going. And then we come to this great man, Jasari, in the 12th century.

who you all write about with awe the number of things he invented, his book on ingenious mechanics. Can you tell us something about him and how he pushed it all forward? So he, like earlier writers in Arabic, was a courtier. He was working at a court

where there was interest in these objects. And so he took work that had been written in the court of the Caliph in Baghdad several centuries before and then improved upon it and expanded it so that his inventions were even more spectacular and more complicated as well. And these involved things like programmable fountains that could, you know, have jets come at particular times or particular directions, as well as very elaborate water clocks that could tell time

in sort of multiple timescales. And then mechanical servants who would serve wine and or Sherbert or some other drink and then offer you a towel to wipe your hands or your mouth. But he wrote it down. He illustrated it. So unlike the Greeks, as it were, this was written down and it was taken up by his fellow people in his cultural domain. Yes. And since the 9th century,

there had been an interest in having these kinds of objects installed in largely sort of courtly settings, palaces, et cetera, and in some cases at mosques or adjacent to them, clocks especially, so that these were seen as very important manifestations of the political power of the ruler, as well as the kinds of, you know, a demonstration of the skill of the artisans that he had under his control. Francesca Colt, what broad questions have automata provoked over the years? Well, since the beginning, really?

Well, really, since the beginning. It's interesting that Ellie brought up the politics because, of course, there's the automata, the actual manifest machines that we can make. But on the other hand, there's also the ideas that surround automata making. And as Simon just mentioned, there's some distinctions that have to be drawn

between automata and robots and AI, artificial intelligence, and so on and so forth, especially in an age where, you know, cinema screens are flooded with ideas of AIs and AI revolutions and things like that and it's actually quite useful, untangling the historical ideas behind that.

And let me, for instance, look at the history of automata making. It doesn't begin with engineering the perfect humanoid automata that could readily take over the world. It often begins with the making of a single body part or imitating a single function of the body. Like the flute in one case. Like the flute, for instance. people like Jacques de Vaucon saint or for instance Ada Lovelace were very interested in making a single body part.

Ada Lovelace was obsessed almost with reproducing perfectly the wing of a bird. Now this was at the same time as the Bridgewater treatises were written, and Charles Bell wrote his famous essay on the hand, and how the hand and its ingenuity must be proof for God to have created the world. This is the time of William Paling and natural philosophy, and his idea of the world working like clockwork, God being the watchmaker of it all. I'm sort of prone to wanting a chronology.

I'm a bit worried. These ideas come in quite early. Are we talking about the Greeks still? Are we moved to the caliphates? Are we in the Renaissance? What are we talking about? Oh, we're talking about the 19th century. Ah, well, can we go back of it?

And when did ideas come forward that these things had a meaning beyond being toys and performance items? I think the idea is, really start in, well, as soon as we start writing about automata, the people who did start writing it down, not just the actual technology of it, but automata, for instance, appear in mythology. When we look into Greek mythology, for instance, into the myth of Prometheus, we very often think of Prometheus creating life where the automata or the lifemaking actually

comes in. However, when Prometheus is punished and chained to the rocks, the birds that come pecking his liver are the automata. And they are the slaves of Hephaestos, the old Vulcan, as the Romans called him. And the automata were his slaves. And they were performing specific tasks for him. And they had not just human capabilities. They had superhuman capabilities in their strength and in their force. Outside the performance function, which I'm stressed perhaps a little too much, though there was another function a work function, well they're not the robotic function. We have to keep that distinction. Well, they always thought, well the beginning where they thought it was the

slaves of humans rather than so that was the directing later people worried whether the humans were the slaves of the automata. How did it happen at that stage? I think at the early stages we're talking about automata appearing as slaves. However, as you can see, the dynamics very often changed because they're a reflection of power dynamics at the time. We have here a reflection of a

divine system against another system, a human system or a humanoid system. There are always power shifts of the humans and the automata, one being the slave, but there's always a point in time where it could very easily tip over. And I think this tension is present from very, very early on. Thank you, Simon. So we've got Patal-Jazzari, all these wonderful machines. They come to the worst, they think, goodness may, and they start doing it. But then the questions grow, and especially inside Christianity, inside this tightening grip that the church had on such a mass of people in an extraordinary way and impressing them, awe and wonder, and they took part in the awe and wonder business,

sorry, I don't to be rude, side of the church, didn't they? Can you develop that, please? Because I was alluded to there, Valpanchisca. Yes. it's easy to forget. It's very important to remember that medieval Christianity was full of automata.

That monasteries, churches, sites of pilgrimage, the church clocks, the great church clocks, like the Cathedral, Clark and Strasbourg and in many other places, were automata to such an extent that these would have been familiar objects,

familiar devices, to a very large proportion of the Christian population lay as well as the priests. Could you categorize a little? Yeah, and I think for two reasons. So think of

some examples. On the one hand, there are an enormous number of examples of automata in Christian stories told and written down in the Middle Ages. So,

it was extremely common to imagine that statues of Christ, crucifixes, or statues of the Virgin Mary, could move. And they moved, as it was said, miraculously. They intervened in our lives. They, for example, by moving, could beat up, expel, and get rid of demons. By moving, they could stop us thinking bad thoughts, notably about sex. There are lots of stories from the 1200s onwards about monks who, unfortunately thinking about women, encounter statues of the Virgin Mary, who intervene by movement and stop them having such thoughts. And this was also, secondly, a real experience in churches

and monasteries, by far the most famous example of this in Europe really, in this period, was at Boxley in Kent near Maidstone, where there was a rather large statue of Jesus Christ on the cross that could nod and move and weep and shake its head. And in order to experience all that, any pilgrim visiting the Cistercian site at Boxley would first of all have to go through a test and the test they'd have to go through itself involved an automaton of a boy saint whom you would try to make move and then if you couldn't move it you weren't allowed into the next stage if you could you were so it's really important to know that medieval Christianity hinges if you'll pardon the expression on the mechanisation of worship through automata.

And it was deception. It was absolutely deception, at least so I believe. Inside these virgins were, inside these virgins were nuns with pulleys. Literally. And the engineering was extraordinarily ingenious. Let's not forget that as well. On the one hand, for example, there were increasingly sophisticated devices. that enabled these statues to weep.

You would use containers of liquid, vinegar, water, enamel, which often had fish in them. As the fish moved, the droplets would appear and coerced down the faces of the statues. You had, at least from the 1300s, the transference of mechanical wheelwork

from clocks to church statues. Ellie, can we turn to the idea of the preternatural? How did that relate to automata in the Middle Ages? So one of the things that's really interesting, as you've alluded to before, is that these objects were totally commonplace in the Arabic-speaking world and in the Greek-speaking world, but virtually unknown in the sort of Latin Christian West until the very end of the 13th.

century. And so these objects became known in the Latin Christian West through diplomatic gifts like Harun al-Rashid's clock or travel narratives when people would go to foreign courts, encounter these objects, and write about them. And because the ability to make these complex machines didn't exist at that time in, say, the 10th century, the 11th, 12th century, in the Latin Christian West, they were interpreted according to a different epistemic framework in which the preter natural is very important. And the idea behind the preter natural is that often what was considered natural was what was regular, what happened ordinarily in the sort of regular course of nature. But there are things that happen that are beyond or outside of that regular boundary of nature.

They're not supernatural. They don't owe their causation to God or a saint, you know, working. But they are surprising and sometimes quite troubling. So some examples could be anything from the birth of conjoined twins, an unusual celestial occurrence, magnetism, as well as the inherent but not immediately obvious capabilities in natural objects. So that was how often these kinds of things were interpreted so that when Latin Christians came into contact either with these actual objects or encountered stories about them in text, the causes of them could be manifold. It could be demons.

It could be occult's powers of. of gemstones, celestial conjunctions, or miraculous events. Francesco, one of the recurring reactions to automata is that people see them can't trust their senses. What examples do we find of that? Well, this is quite interesting, because we're talking about automata also as a reflection of our self-understanding.

And when we look at how automata function and we understand how we build them and they're reflecting physical functions and bodily functions and so on and so forth. An idea that completely threw that in the 19th century was the exploration of the unconscious and that there is things in us reacting to what we see that we cannot control.

And there's a really famous story in German literature by E.T.E. Hoffman, the Sandman, about the Sandman, which is a story about a young student who falls in love with an automaton lady. And he goes mad from his love for her. because he misinterprets visual data. This is quite interesting because the automaton is the absolute imitation

of perfect human workings. She sings perfectly, she dances perfectly, and it's the human that is malfunctioning. And this is at a time where people like Descartes are writing, that the distinguishing feature of humans is reason. But in what place does this put us when a human cannot exert its fruit? reason and is actually destroyed by the deception of an automaton. Where does that put us in

comparison to the automaton? So an automata are really interesting and interrogating our self-understanding of how we think humans should function, how humans actually function, and how we define a malfunction and where that puts a malfunctioning human on a scale of what is human and what is not. We're coming to the time, Simon. I'm sorry, after you. So I just wanted to build on that to just say that even in the medieval period, because there were so many possible causes for what could be making the automata work, it meant that you couldn't really be sure what you were seeing. And added to that is the fact that oftentimes you would have mechanical birds, for example, that might be displayed alongside. actual live birds. And the goal was to make the observer

distrust their senses for a second. Is that a bird? I think it's a bird. Oh, it's not a bird. And so those kinds of reactions just underscore how difficult it is to do that. That's a one then I wanted to go to Simon.

Which is great because E. T.A. Hoffman's story, the Sandman, is exactly the tale that inspired Siegmund Freud to write his famous essay on the uncanny, the uncanny, the uncanny resemblance between life and something that's not life, but quite like it, is really relevant in the whole automaton context. But at this time in Enlightenment, Simon, getting into ideas put forward by Descartes and Leibniz, as if machines can be like us, are we not machines?

And that is developing, isn't it, as an argument? Yes, one of the most important things that happens around automata is, in our early modernity, is that the ubiquity of these kinds of devices, both in writing, but also in the real world, at courts, in churches, in fairgrounds, and above all, I think, in clockwork, convinces philosophers of two apparently contradictory principles. On the one hand, writers like Descartes, Hobbes, Leibniz, become convinced and seek very actively to convince their readers that almost nothing that's happening in the world around us is different from what you see an automaton doing. And that animals themselves are automata.

Well, certainly for Descartes, animals are automata. because animals don't have reason. I thought it's because they didn't have a soul. Well, that's what souls give you. Oh, I see. If you have reason, then you have a soul. I think, therefore I am. That's us.

Not animals. That's us. There's obviously a contradiction in the word animal, which means something with a soul, and Descartes has a hard time with that. But his claim is, and it's a radical claim, it's a very difficult claim to think through

that what is going on in the visible world that we experience around us is nothing but mechanics and in the case of animals all that is going on is mechanics. What distinguishes humans

he says is that there's this point, this unexended point that we have that lives inside us temporarily which is the soul. And when the machine

gives up, the soul decides to leave, not the other way round. What's radical about Descartes is that first our mechanics fail, and then our soul decides to depart. Descartes is this wonderful story about looking,

or terrible story, depending on your attitude, about living in Amsterdam, looking through the window, watching people go by, and not being able to tell whether he's watching automata or Dutch people. And that ambiguity becomes characteristic of the agony of the automaton. Can we take that a bit further even, Annie? What ideas did the automata throw up about the differences between life and death?

In the medieval period, they were used to think through, the boundary between alive and dead. So in several different versions of the story of Troy, for example, Hector's corpse, after he has been killed in combat and his body desecrated, Priam goes and begs for his body back from the Greeks, that his body, his corpse, becomes what we might now consider to be a kind of cyborg hybrid in which he becomes part mechanical. Fluids course through his body, through metal tubes that sort of circulate, and they keep him from being completely dead. He has the appearance of being totally lifelike. And this is really important because the Trojans want to display his body in the open without any corruption.

So it looks as though he is eternally alive. And essentially that the way in which he becomes part mechanical erases his actual death and keeps him as a sort of eternal savior figure for the Trojans. Jessica, when did we have this almost this sense of threat that Tompeter might bring to human race? So when did that gather force? I think it really started gathering force at the 18th century. When we first started having ideas about making machines that could reliable automata, that could reliably perform tasks that humans were formally required for.

We mentioned Jacques de Vauconcent earlier today, who is famous for his duck automaton, he's famous for his floatist automaton, but another idea that he had was a water-powered loom. and when we fast forward to the 19th century to the point where we have automated looms like the Jacques-Arts looms and things like that, that completely change the manufacturing system, the way we make things,

where we have huge halls full of looms that are programmable that now have to be serviced by humans, that attracted a huge amount of interest from philosophers such as Marx and Engels, who travelled to Manchester to examine those machines and to see what's the power dynamics between that, and they were horrified by what they saw. They saw children crawling into machines,

being ripped apart, having their fingers ripped off by machines and said, oh, this is horrible. This is like a man-eating moloch, a biblical deity, that feeds on children and says, and this is exactly the moloch that inspires stories like H.G. Welses, the time machine where we get the molocks, the monsters living underground that consume people, You get Fritz Lang's metropolis of the machinery underground

that suddenly the scales are tipping. But this is something that is perceived acutely in the industrial revolution by the uprisings against machines, the people that started smashing machines that started going against them, when this suddenly tips over into a fear of machines. What part does Frankenstein play in this, Simon? Mary Shelley's. So I think it's extremely significant.

to say nothing else that Frankenstein is first told by Mary Shelley the same year as Hoffman wrote the Sandman and 1816 the year without a summer and Frankenstein speaks to the

question of automata in many different ways the most obvious way it does is that Frankenstein has no mother and the idea that it's possible to build a living being

as a man without the aid of woman through a kind of bad form of reproduction is no doubt extremely important for the moral and physical and political dilemmas

that automata raise. Frankenstein plays with a double myth one of the myths it plays with is the myth of Pygmalion that is to say what the male gaze does in the story of Pygmalion, my fair lady, is that it's the male gaze that brings women to life. The exact opposite of that is the Gorgon, the Medusa. What the female gaze does

is to turn men into stone. So there's a gender politics that Mary Shelley is playing with in Frankenstein that I think is always there in automaton stories. engineers can make something that looks like life and they do so in ways that either replace or displace the politics of the female but they also bring catastrophe upon the human race. Sorry, you would say something. Which is interesting because that reference is also the Prometheus myth and the name, because Frankenstein, the modern Prometheus, also plays with the meaning of the name Prometheus being the god of foresight, which is distinctly lacking in some ways, or distinctly limited.

Can we have your, would you like to develop what Simon said? I think one of the things that I find really interesting is that so many of these kinds of stories appear so early. And there are examples, for example, in Tristan and Isolda, in the 12th century version by Thomas of Britain, Tristan has a sort of source of make a lifelike golden statue of Isolda that takes the place for him of his beloved in every way. And that is seen as a marker of Tristan's insanity from the love potion and also the way that it has corrupted him, so morally and corrupted his judgment. Do you think that we've imagined that the automata can do more than they can do?

I think there's definitely a fear underlying this and I think this is why it's really important to distinguish the automaton and the automaton we can make from the idea of the automaton because picking up on this idea of foresight this is of course something that's afforded to the literary writer that he can take the ideas that surround the idea of what we can make

where we might possibly go and speaking of things that have been done with automata and what they were built for also reflecting on our own ideas of what we should and shouldn't be doing. Did anybody make a distinction between ingenuity and intelligence, saying these were very ingenious machines? In fact, a few of the great writers, including Al Jazeera and I believe way back in Greek, taught about ingenious mechanics,

but they didn't have intelligence, they didn't have intellect. Was that distinction made early on? I think this is a distinction that comes especially to bear when we talk about the power dynamics between autumn, the automaton and the automaton makers, because that's inherently tied to what we make automaton be capable of. So once we create something that's capable of intelligence, what responsibility comes with that? That's a really big question in Frankenstein. But also when we get to later fiction, like Asimov's stories about robots, the creation of the law of

robotics. Simon tells us at the top that robots weren't to do with the automata. Well, I think there's, it's interesting because we have all of those different words, but they're sort of blurry around the edges and ideas sort of fluently develop, especially in the minds of the people imagining where technology could go in the future. But I think there are definitely some underlying ideas that definitely mature and develop, but return in different shapes. Simon?

Yeah, I think that one of the most important displacements we've already done, discussed it is the moment where it comes to seem that laboring human beings are automata and that automata are alive like we imagined humans are. So there's a very dramatic exchange of properties which we can associate with forms of industrialization and exploitation in which the machines become alive and they challenge what it is to have reason and to have will and to have vitality. And increasingly the absorption of the laboring human body within the industrial productive system means that what humans are doing is increasingly behaving like machines. That exchange of properties very often, certainly in the 18th and 19th,

century in Europe is thought about with the figure of the automaton. And there's the Turing remark, isn't it, which is key to all this? Yes, I think that... Can you just tell the distance what that is? Yes, so in 1950, Alan Turing publishes a paper of absolute genius on what it is for machines to be intelligent. And he invents something called the imitation game, which is a game, in which it is the job of a distant judge to tell which of two humans the judge is communicating with a man or a woman is in fact a man.

Now, take away the woman and replace the woman by a machine. If the machine can convince the judge that it is the man, that machine is intelligent, that machine is intelligent. That's an extremely interesting definition of what machine intelligence is. Machine intelligence is if you can build a machine that can replace a woman who is trying to persuade a judge that she is a man. That's why I think the stories of Pygmalion and the Medusa live absolutely in the story of what machine intelligence is. is not the first person, not at all, and he knows this very well, to think the problem of how a machine, an automaton precisely, could convince you at a distance that it has the great distinguishing human property in intelligence. Descartes had already raised that question and the capacity of a machine to convince you that it is thinking is, precisely the capacity of the machine

to convince you that it's a human. Sorry, you want to take up something. I just wanted to take up the last couple of points and say that in the medieval period, we see this gap between what can actually be done and what is imagined and it's flipped in which, for example,

there's a tale in the story of Percival in which a ruler has two automata guarding standing outside his court, and what they do is discern whether anyone who wants to enter into his palace, if they are noble or if they're common, and if a woman is a virgin or not, and they cannot be tricked. And so there, it's the opposite. They are the kind of perfect

servants that can't be suborned, they can't be tricked, they can't be bribed. And that's a sort of different kind of fantasy. Does that, yes. But an idea that definitely reverberates in modern text, especially when we think about modern science fiction films, thinking of the Blade Runner films, the most recent sequel of Blade Runner, Blade Runner 2049. There's the idea of the woman automaton

sort of treading the lines of being an automaton and being an actual female. That's an idea that keeps coming back to this day. Do you think it's still around, very lively, this idea of the power of the automator to change, place in the picking order? I think it's very, very present indeed in culture now. And for several different reasons.

One is the bad conscience about the dependence of the intellect on labour, which goes back to the Greeks in the Western tradition. We always need to remember that Greek writers were writing from inside a slave society. So the bad conscience about that dependence is often transfigured mechanically. But what presses now, most, it seems to me, is what is the definitional character of the human? Intelligence, emotion, passion. If all of those things can be reproduced mechanically, what is it that makes us human beings? Well, thank you very much.

Simon Schaffer, Francesca Colt and Elitrate. Next week we'll be talking about the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffo, who stood up against anti-Semitism and the rise of the Nazis and politiciel Hitler. That's next week. Thank you for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. One thing I wanted to just bring up is how, going back to this idea of these objects as sort of objects about patterns,

in the sort of ancient and medieval period. The first objects to be built in Europe were at a palace chateau called Esdain in what is now northern France. And that was about 1295 or so. And initially, in that first iteration, they were musical birds, artificial birds, etc., quite refined, shall we say. About 150 years later, when the Duke of Burgundy decides who now owns the chateau, that he wants to renovate and refurbish these objects, they take on a totally different cast. He installs way more automata and that do things like soak you with water, dump flour on you, dump dirt on you, hit you in the head. And for the purpose of mocking and humiliating courtiers.

And so it's a different way of exercising power, but absolutely an exercise of power all the same. We rushed over it, probably my fault at Perneska, but the connection between automata and Freud, you would begin to develop that. Freud's idea of the unconscious, and we sort of was aligned to the development of automata. Well, it's quite interesting,

because the idea of the unconscious comes up way before Freud, and Freud is very aware of that he draws on earlier texts of the unconscious. And what's quite interesting, roughly half a century before Freud, the idea of the so-called unconscious reflex action of the mind gets going. And we start thinking about what is actually our reason, what is how does thought form? And what was really disturbing to many people who thought that reason is the distinguishing feature of human is that there might be some unconscious action actually interfering with what we think are actual conscious actions.

And so this is very interesting because it's almost like a giveaway that something is produced into our mind automatically that we cannot control. What's very interesting about this is, of course, dreaming. And we talk about dreaming as an automatic action we cannot control that brings out something in us that is inherently true. That's a true or truth that we like to admit that we're constantly battling with. And when we suddenly see an automata, we see a reflection of herself, but we are also intimately aware of our shortcomings when we see this recreated ideal of ourselves. And that's why the automaton or the perfect reproduction of a certain function of human beings can be so unsettling. I think one theme that comes through there, which we didn't have time to get onto,

is what you might call the global geography of automata. so it always strikes me and we've all worked on this that it's very impressive it's very striking indeed that for Western Europeans automata come from the east

they are profoundly oriental devices in all sorts of ways now partly that's true and we did talk about that they come from Egypt they are massively developed, theorized, written about in Central Asia and our Middle East, in Baghdad or Anatolia in the case of Tazari.

We didn't talk at all, which is embarrassing, about Chinese automata. Or India. And there you have fantastically sophisticated developments of automatic machines, very often at Coort, with very wealthy patrons and extremely ingenious engineering, very often, certainly in the Chinese case, and to a large extent in the South Asian case, mixing up clockwork with hydraulics, the two great early modern medieval systems of powering automata.

So that it's worth remembering, and it's very important right now, at least I suppose it is, that the only thing Europeans made that the Chinese were remotely interested in buying or getting until way into the 1800s were automata. Clocks. Clocks, above all. And they were called sing-songs.

So that Birmingham and Manchester and London and Lyon and Paris and Nuremberg could not sell anything into China to pay for silk or tea or porcelain except clockwork automata. Those were the things that the Chinese genuinely appreciated. And that had a huge effect on global trade. So most of the luxury goods in 18th century Britain

are paid for either with cash directly or with automata. When you went to Canton in the 1700s, what you'd find were this amazing display of mainly London and Birmingham-made automata and a huge amount of European cash. And one thing I wanted to bring up, going back on Simon's earlier point about now, about when these first, when these objects are first thought about with the ancient Greeks, they're writing from a, this is that they're a slave society. and I think now one of the things that automata raised for us as well as their associated objects like robots are questions about autonomy because now we think it is monstrous to deprive an autonomous being of its liberty and autonomy.

But that wasn't the case for the ancient Greeks or even medieval people. and early moderns. So I do think that the valences around autonomy and self-determination take on a different cast in the 21st century, for example, that's very different from what they have earlier, even if the issue of autonomy or that theme is still critically important. And that's great because stories about automata are incredibly self-referential. when we talk about them, the Greek mythology came up a lot and the names of Prometheus and all of this. Also the name of Christian mythology of Maria, they keep returning in automaton history.

The automaton in Metropolis that seduces the upper classes is called Maria. When we go to the remakes of the alien films, the AI that's struggling there with his own identity, whether he can actually be human. This whole sequel is called Prometheus. So automata, in their self-referferential, of past discourses of automata have become almost a vessel for modern mythologies as any one point in time. Do you think it's still developing the sophistication and reachable?

Absolutely. I mean, I think part of it is because of the extraordinary sophistication of self-moving engineering and our interaction with devices which mix up automatism and AI. Oh, and machine learning. And machine learning and so on. Part of it is, again, something we didn't have time to talk about at all, is the relation with the argument about design, which for Darwin and evolution is the bottom line argument. It's probably the single most important challenge that Darwin faces and has to deal with, because what he has to deal with is this very perverse situation in which Darwin, more than any other 19th century, writer is arguing

that every natural system we see around us is perfectly adapted without it being designed. So it's as if we live in a natural world. How hard is it to make this argument?

It's one of the many reasons to admire him. We live in a natural world in which every natural system looks as if it's been built for the purpose that it discharges and none of them have. I think our producer is aching to get in and bring you all to hold, sadly.

Yeah, I'm not going to pass the curing test by offering you tea or coffee. Coffee. Coffee. Coffee. Coffee. Tea, please. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson. This is a story about a man called Otto von Wechter. He was Austrian, a lawyer, a husband, a father, and a very senior Nazi. It's a story of life and business.

love and of a curious death. You could say it's a sort of mystery story. Otto Wester is a Nazi you've never heard of because he escaped justice. I'm Philippe Sands and I'm going to take you on an unexpected journey to find out what actually happened to Otto Wester. It's a journey that goes right to the heart of something called the Ratline, the Nazi escape route out of Europe that started in 1945. Along the way, we're going to meet an unlikely cast of Nazis, fascists, assassins, spies, sons of spies, lovers, murderers, and an elderly man who lives alone in a castle steeped in family secrets, who I've come to know rather well. To subscribe, just search for intrigue, the ratline, wherever you get your podcasts.