What I found interesting in Gaby Wood’s article was that it addressed the fact that experimentation with robotics still going on today, and is a huge field of technological research. We have been reading articles which notate the early development of automata, and how these moving representations of humans have been essential to the development of mechanist philosophy and to research which aims to make sense of human physiology. Wood describes the robots at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (founded in the 1950s) as ‘concrete puzzles, dreamed up in order to answer questions about human beings.’ (xxiii) Even in the 21st Century, we are using automata to understand humans; the connection between the man and the machine is ever present.
In this article Wood pinpoints the development of ways of interpreting the human body upon scientists’ discovery of reflex-action; that the mind does not control all actions of the body but muscles are able to trigger movement of their own accord. Wood highlights that Mettrie was therefore able to argue that the body is a ‘self-winding machine, a living representation of perpetual motion’ and therefore, technically an automaton which is defined as ‘something which has the power of spontaneous motion or self-movement’ (Oxford English Dictionary).
It was this specific likening of the body to automata that Vaucanson exemplified in his flute playing automaton, whose ability to do so relied on a ‘mechanism to correspond to every muscle’(22). In this construction of the automata, Vaucanson has created a complete mimesis of every movement a man would make upon playing the flute. Wood argues that this machine version of the human body is able to achieve perfection, as seen in Vaucanson’s automaton musician which could play the instrument faster than any human and never get tired. This highlights the superiority of mechanical vs. biological muscle. However, sound of the flute player was not quite right, due to the hardness of the wood. He resolved this by making the automaton’s fingers out of skin. This seems a step too far- blurring the boundaries between man and machine- literally borrowing from man.
Vaucanson went on to develop weaving machines, which would serve to replace humans in factories as more effective means of production. This illustrates the shift in the development of automata alongside the Industrial revolution, where creators of automata were staring to develop beings which could efficiently work as manual labour. Schaffer explores this notion in ‘Enlightened Automata’, as, ‘the culture that viewed labour as machines’ became ‘one that saw machines as sources of power’ (135), and further developments of automata, such as the Turk which could play Chess, were inspirations to those working to develop factory machines- as complex working systems achieving human action. The development of factory machines has continued up until this day, and we live alongside these and numerous other technological developments without question. However it was strange reading about the robots which are being created at MIT, perhaps because of their likeness to humans (Freud’s notion of the uncanny). It seems there is a division between automata that are created for specific purposes in aiding men (or as extensions of man’s ability) such as the weaving machines, and those which are constructed as a means of replicating and mechanising the functions of the human body, perhaps only to get a better understanding of them. In the early stages of automata, there was a fear of failing to distinguish humans from automata, encouraging the line of questioning between the moving object and the living, which we have often discussed in class. This very question seemed ridiculous; of course we would be able to tell the difference between human and machine, but, as Sian points out, if they are able to create a robot that has emotion, which was seemingly the last human aspect which robots do not possess, then it seems more possible than ever that this could occur, and it seems more than reasonable that humans, ‘at the sight of every artificial life worried about the authenticity of their own.’ (Wood, xxvii)
Jo N xx
