Robot Visions

Nor did these imaginings concern only the increased physical power of inanimate objects, but even increased mental power of objects which were still viewed as essentially inanimate. Artificial intelligence is not really a modern concept.

Hephaistos, the Greek god of the forge, is pictured in the Iliad as having golden mechanical women, which were as mobile and as intelligent as flesh-and-blood women, and which helped him in his palace.

Why not? After all, if a human smith makes inanimate metal objects of the base metal iron, why should not a god-smith make far more clever inanimate metal objects of the noble metal gold? It is an easy extrapolation, of the sort that comes as second nature to science fiction writers (who, in primitive times, had to be myth-makers, in default of science).

But human artisans, if clever enough, could also make mechanical human beings. Consider Talos, a bronze warrior made by that Thomas Edison of the Greek myths, Oaedalus. Talos guarded the shores of Crete, circling the island once each day and keeping off all intruders. The fluid that kept him alive was kept within his body by a plug at his heel. When the Argonauts landed on Crete, Medea used her magic to pull out the plug and Talos lost all his pseudoanimation.

(It is easy to ascribe a symbolic meaning to this myth. Crete, starting in the fourth mille

From the start, then, the machine has faced mankind with a double aspect. As long as it is completely under human control, it is useful and good and makes a better life for people. However, it is the experience of mankind (and was already his experience in quite early times) that technology is a cumulative thing, that machines are invariably improved, and that the improvement is always in the direction of etherealization, always in the direction of less human control and more auto-control-and at an accelerating rate.

As the human control decreases, the machine becomes frightening in exact proportion. Even when the human control is not visibly decreasing, or is doing so at an excessively low rate, it is a simple task for human ingenuity to look forward to a time when the machine may go out of control altogether, and the fear of that can be felt in advance.

What is the fear?

The simplest and most obvious fear is that of the possible harm that comes from machinery out of control. In fact, any technological advance, however fundamental, has the double aspect of good/harm and, in response, is viewed with a double aspect of love/fear.

Fire warms you, gives you light, cooks your food, smelts your ore-and, out of control, burns and kills. Your knives and spears kill your animal enemies and your human foes and, out of your control, are used by your foes to kill you. You can run down the list and build examples indefinitely and there has never been any human activity which, on getting out of control and doing harm, has raised the sigh among many of, “Oh, if we had only stuck to the simple and virtuous lives of our ancestors who were not cursed with this new-fangled misery.”

Yet is this fear of piecemeal harm from this advance or that the kind of deep-seated terror so difficult to express that it finds its way into the myths?

I think not. Fear of machinery for the discomfort and occasional harm it brings has (at least until very recently) not moved humanity to more than that occasional sigh. The love of the uses of machinery has always far overbalanced such fears, as we might judge if we consider that very rarely in the history of mankind has any culture voluntarily given up significant technological advance because of the inconvenience or harm of its side effects. There have been involuntary retreats from technology as a result of warfare, civil strife, epidemics, or natural disasters, but the results of that are precisely what we call a “dark age” and the population suffering from one does its best over the generations to get back on the track and restore the technology.

Mankind has always chosen to counter the evils of technology, not by abandonment of technology, but by additional technology. The smoke of an indoor fire was countered by the chimney. The danger of the spear was countered by the shield. The danger of the mass army was countered by the city wall.

This attitude, despite the steady drizzle of backwardist outcries, has continued to the present. Thus the characteristic technological product of our present life is the automobile. It pollutes the air, assaults our eardrums, kills fifty thousand Americans a year and inflicts survivable injuries on hundreds of thousands.

Does anyone seriously expect Americans to give up their murderous little pets voluntarily? Even those who attend rallies to denounce the mechanization of modern life are quite likely to reach those rallies by automobile.

The first moment when the magnitude of possible evil was seen by many people as uncounterable by any conceivable good came with the fission bomb in 1945. Never before had any technological advance set off demands for abandonment by so large a percentage of the population.

In fact, the reaction to the fission bomb set a new fashion. People were readier to oppose other advances they saw as unacceptably harmful in their side effects-biological warfare, the SST, certain genetic experiments on micro-organisms, breeder reactors, spray cans.

And even so, not one of these items has yet been given up.

But we’re on the right track. The fear of the machine is not at the deepest level of the soul if the harm it does is accompanied by good, too; or if the harm is merely to some people-the few who happen to be on the spot in a vehicular collision, for instance.

The majority, after all, escape, and reap the good of the machine.

No, it is when the machine threatens all mankind in any way so that each individual human being begins to feel that he, himself, will not escape, that fear overwhelms love.

But since technology has begun to threaten the human race as a whole only in the last thirty years, were we immune to fear before that-or has the human race always been threatened?

After all, is physical destruction by brute energy of a type only now in our fist, the only way in which human beings can be destroyed? Might not the machine destroy the essence of humanity, our minds and souls, even while leaving our bodies intact and secure and comfortable?

It is a common fear, for instance, that television makes people unable to read and pocket computers will make them unable to add. Or think of the Spartan king who, on observing a catapult in action, mourned that that would put an end to human valor.

Certainly such subtle threats to humanity have existed and been recognized through all the long ages when man’s feeble control over nature made it impossible for him to do himself very much physical harm.

The fear that machinery might make men effete is not yet, in my opinion, the basic and greatest fear. The one (it seems to me) that hits closest to the core is the general fear of irreversible change. Consider:

There are two kinds of change that we can gather from the universe about us. One is cyclic and benign.