Automata, or robots, if you will, have fascinated philosophers since
Descartes, who used them as a sort of mirror in his reflections on human
reason (animals were automatons, humans were endowed with a rational
soul). There is a delightful documentary with Prof. Simon Schaffer of
Cambridge on the clockwork and automata of the 17th Century. The
documentary begins with the words, "It is often said that to understand
something, you should build it". About 29 minutes in, Prof. Schaffer
presents a truly remarkable automaton- a little boy at his writing desk
built by Swiss clock-maker Pierre Jaquet-Droz. Says Schaffer, "The aim was, I think, to
mechanize reason, and automate the passions."
These words, and
the documentary as a whole, offer a wonderful window into the origins of
something that has been at the heart of the Western project ever since-
to produce a mechanical understanding of the world, and of the mind.
Information theory and cybernetics have blurred the line between
mechanistic and organistic visions of the universe, and of the mind, but
the project to understand the mind, by building one, is at the very
heart of the information (r)evolution itself, while the replication of the
body and its motions- and thus of the worker, lies at the heart of the
industrial revolution.
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