The Dream of Mechanical Life

...Sneezes or coughs could be drowned out by the showman's fiddling with levers connected to fake internal machinery...

...There is something genuinely uncanny about puppets, automata, and ventriloquists' dummies—and that uncanni-ness remains in androids, robots, nanobots, and cyborgs...

...Most serious commentators, however, agreed that the Turk was controlled from inside the box on which he played...

...During the 1770s the Jacquet-IV Droz family exhibited a lady harpsichordist and two mechanoid toddlers that scribbled such sentiments as "cogito ergo SffrnA sum"—a nice play on Descartes's proof for the existence of human consciousness...

...Did its owners control its moves with puppet wires or magnets...

...In Behind Deep Blue: Building the Computer that Defeated the World Chess Champion, Feng-Hsiung Hsu insists the computerized victory represents "the achievement of the holy grail" to which machine builders had aspired since Kempelen...

...The human being as a "thinking thing" stands distinct from the "mechanical matter" that constitutes everything else in the world...

...Purchased and rebuilt by a local physician, the automaton was donated to the museum of Charles Willson Peale—the great American portrait painter who also ran an upmarket freak show—where the Turk was eventually destroyed by a fire that engulfed the establishment...

...In The Turk: The Life and Times of the Famous Eighteenth-Century Chess-Playing Machine, Tom Standage proffers the unvarnished history of an earlier era's most famous android...

...The Turk was different...

...If the Turk lacked the ferocity of the Punch and Judy show—also in its heyday during the eighteenth century—it spoke to more intellectual fears about human identity and its loss...

...The Turk's transatlantic prestige waned—if not so quickly as Deep Blue's—when its uniqueness was challenged by rival automata like the American Chess Player and the Automatic Whist Player...

...By contrast, the impassive Turk was eerily ratiocinative, limiting itself to the single sound of "check" (in whatever language was demanded by the countries where he played...

...The peak of all this may be the moment at which the inventor Ray Kurzweil asks, "As Machines become more like People, will People become more like God...

...In Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us, Rodney Brooks, the director of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT, dashes from Vau-canson's eighteenth-century Parisian duck to "Kismet," his own computerized mechanical head—with "large blue eyeballs, eyelids made of silver foil, bits of carpet for brows, twists of pink paper for ears, and red rubber tubing to make a mouth"—that is, Brooks claims, the word's first "sociable" robot, interacting "with people on an equal basis...

...She invokes Freud's notion of the Uncanny and, for good measure, throws in chapters on Edison's invention of a speaking doll that he was unable to market, the magical films of the innovative French movie director Georges Melies (who ended his life selling cheap toys in a Paris railway station), and a mini-history of the Dolls, a family of German midgets who performed at Coney Island and whose last surviving member she tracks down in Sarasota...

...By then, it was yesterday's news...

...Most clockwork automata were scarily hyperactive...

...A candelabrum resting on the box concealed the smell of burning wax within...

...Why did so many people pay so much money to see a supposed machine playing chess...

...Behind the eighteenth and early nineteenth century's fascination with automata, Standage discerns the makings not only of the industrial revolution but also of information technology...

...Famous adversaries included Napoleon (a poor player and a sore loser)and BenjaminFranklin...

...The Turk was built in 1770 for Maria Theresa, Empress of Austria, after Kempelen had been irritated at court by the self-congratulations of a visiting French conjuror...

...The sober chess-playing Turk represented the Uncanny for grown-ups, but an endless series of B-movies about evil puppets, largely pitched at children and teens, reveals how the Uncanny remains part of our collective unconscious...

...Standage tries to stick to the facts about the Turk (which are fantastical enough), but he also has to cope with the mythology that quickly accrued around the robot, not least the fictitious games against Frederick the Great and Catherine the Great...

...The myth of Francine shows how something uncanny swirled even around the reputation of Descartes, the arch-rationalist...

...Some automata actually talked, although Goethe remarked that Wolfgang von Kempelen's robot was "not very loquacious," even if it could "pronounce childish words nicely...

...Such melodrama, Standage recognizes, boosted the Turk's notoriety and thus comprised a legitimate (if untrue) part of its career...

...In its later years, the Turk even encountered the young PT...

...Kurzweil imagines nanobots—hyper-intelligent miniaturized robots—zipping around our brains and downloading our mental software onto new hard drives which will somehow become re-embodied as us...

...Over the side went the ghostly machine, and the ship was saved from the storm that Francine's black magic had provoked.The problem with this anecdote is that it is completely untrue...

...Because of the box's limited dimensions, a monkey, dwarf, child, or legless man were proposed as the Turk's animators...

...Only in 1834 did Jacques-Frangois Mouret, an alcoholic chess master, squeal to a Parisian tabloid for the price of a drink...

...A clever but crooked engineer named Johann Nepomuk Mael-zel toured with a mechanical trumpeter...

...contraptions...

...Neither Kempe-len (who constructed the ¦ Turk in 1770) nor Maelzel (who bought the Turk from fl Kempelen's son in 1804) publicly demonstrated the full inner workings of the Turk...

...But the Turk's popularity derived from its challenge to the widespread belief that the human intellect could not be simulated by a machine, particularly in a game whose complexity seemed to exceed the prescient craft of any toy designer...

...The flow of books on this and related topics seems almost endless...

...Casters allowed the showman to swivel the box convincingly...

...The best explanation was printed in 1821 by Robert Willis, grandson of George III's most famous "mad-doctor" and future professor of applied mechanics at Cambridge...

...Mightn't the Turk, indeed, prove La Mettrie's premise...

...Freud was right...

...In Edison's Eve: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life, Gaby Wood takes us from eighteenth-century road shows (including an excellent chapter on the Turk) to workshops on robotics at MIT and at Waseda University in Tokyo...

...For Garry Kasparov, the Russian chess master who lost to IBM's computer Deep Blue in 1997, some of the same challenges were on the line...

...Behind Deep Blue is, alas, a dull book in which the Taiwanese leader of the team that devised the winning program describes his quest in mind-numbing, narcissistic detail...

...In Edison's Eve, Gaby Wood begins her discussion of Descartes by repeating the famous anecdote about the life-size clockwork puppet that the Frenchman made of his dead daughter Francine...

...In the keynote essay in Are We Spiritual Machines...

...One replicant in the film declaims "Cogito ergo sum" amidst a room jam-packed with eighteenth-century style automata...

...Today, only the mechanoid toddlers of the Jacquet-Droz family perform on Cartesian cue in Switzerland, the country that invented the cuckoo clock...

...In 2000, the photographer Peter Menzel and the journalist Faith D'Aluisio put together a volume called Robo Sapiens: Evolution of a New Species, a sort of Life magazine tour of recent attempts at robots, cyborgs, and artificial intelligence...

...There is no doubt that the Turk was a hoax, although collectors of eighteenth-century clockwork (and scholars of Poe) still argue about just how a human could fit inside the figure to manipulate its mechanical limbs...

...And "Rick Deckard," the name of the novel's hero, will also remind sharp-eared readers of "Rene Descartes...

...Almost lifelike, these uncanny doppelgangers challenge our humanity, but we are often driven, particularly as children, to own or to watch them...

...Tricked out in a turban and flowing oriental robes, it was called the "Turk," and it vanquished many of the era's chess masters in swiftly played games...

...With his definition of the cogito, Descartes had proved to many seventeenth-century savants that thinking is the essence of what it means to be human...

...Barnum, who learned some valuable lessons in publicity, and the young Edgar Allan Poe, who wrote the most famous of the many essays that endeavored to expose how the hoax worked...

...There's something that feels slightly dated—1950s science-fictiony, like Isaac Asimov's I, Robot—about the dream of computers coming alive...

...Inside the box Kempelen had constructed a compartment to hide a human chess player while the showman opened doors to dupe audiences with glimpses of phony, fold-up mechanical paraphernalia...

...This deluxe humanoid was discovered, during a storm, by sailors on the ship that was carrying the philosopher to his new job (and final resting place) with Queen Christina of Sweden...

...Among the lawsuits he left behind was one from Napoleon's family, which had bought the Turk from him and unwisely lent it back...

...With the Turk as centerpiece of an elaborate roadshow, however, Maelzel achieved international fame...

...Wood points out that the word "android" was actually coined during the eighteenth century...

...But Are We Spiritual Machines...

...In Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism, Steven Connor tackles a seemingly limited topic, but he incisively transforms it into a meditation on what it means to be human, ranging from Delphi and the Witch of Endor through early modern witch-hunts and Kempelen's talking automaton, and down to Edgar Bergen and Charlie MacCarthy...

...Matters were different in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries...

...A learned and gorgeously illustrated anthology of the many permutations of these themes may be found in Barbara Maria Stafford and Frances Terpak's Devices of Wonder: From the World in a Box to Images on a Screen...

...These were remarkable Hugh Ormsby-Lennon teaches eighteenth-century literature at Villanova University...

...In his essay on "The Uncanny," Sigmund Freud dwells on the psychological disturbance provoked by automata, dolls, and puppets...

...In fact, the cleverly constructed box concealed a full-sized human who was often a chess master...

...Buried in the usual psychiatric mumbo jumbo are Freud's typically brilliant insights, here into our love-hate relations with such figures...

...A system of magnetic devices under the chessboard allowed the operator to follow play, which he (or occasionally she) replicated underneath on a miniature board illuminated by a candle...

...The controversies created by La Met-trie's Man, A Machine demonstrate the extent to which eighteenth-century automata raised questions about our relations with God...

...Kurzweil microwaves Victoria Nelson's New Age slop about "divinized humanity...

...Indeed the two men acted instead as consummate showmen when supervising the Turk—preferring to let audiences imagine that their prodigy had outstripped the powers of human cognition embodied in those he played against...

...is a chimera...

...When the Turk appeared in 1770, commentators agonized over its mechanistic challenge to a god-given cogito, whether construed as soul or mind...

...Cleverly, Standage postpones an explanation of the hoax until well into his short but absorbing book...

...Still, the Enlightenment fascination with automata survives...

...In the fourth century A.D., esoteric philosophers struck an ideal balance of "divinized humanity"—Nel-son's original "sub-zeitgeist"—among people, statues, and the world...

...machines...

...After Maelzel died destitute in 1838, the Turk was found dispersed among crates in Philadelphia...

...News crossed the Atlantic, and after Maelzel's death a version of Mouret's confessions in the National Gazette was found among his effects...

...Or does a scientist with an uncanny puppet always remain mad or charlatanical...

...Cuckoo ergo sum...

...The eighteenth century was the golden age of fascination with automata...

...With some refinements, Standage endorses Willis's commentary (and engravings), which he judges superior to Poe's 1836 "Maelzel's Chess Player...

...But it was an era when even serious science—air-pumps, Franklin's electrical gizmos, chemical experiments—was often presented as a carnival show or parlor game...

...Within a few years of Dick's resurrection of "android," however, the word had become so familiar that it was changed to "replicant" in Blade Runner, Ridley Scott's 1982 cult movie version of Dick's novel...

...Nelson enjoys making an autodidact's case not only from arcane lore but from movies like The Truman Show and The Matrix...

...Skeptics could understand the principles of clockwork automata but could not accept the Turk's primitive simulation of intelligence...

...From its first appearances on the public stage, the Turk provoked suspicion...

...Both Brooks and his "cartoonish, mechanical gremlin" are discussed by Gaby Wood in the introduction to Edison's Eve...

...The infectiously enthusiastic Kurzweil is the leading proponent of "Strong A.I.," a brave new world in which a "Non-invasive Surgery-Free Reversible Programmable Distributed Brain Implant" will soon become available...

...Wood fails to emphasize that innovative scientists from Pythagoras to Edward Teller have frequently attracted whiffs of Dr...

...Standage contrasts the swindle of a human chess player inside a box with the beginnings of machine intelligence in Charles Bab-bage's early nineteenth-century designs for an "Analytical Engine" and with its triumph in Deep Blue...

...Between 1738 and 1 1741, Jacques de Vaucanson thrilled Paris with a clockwork duck, flutist, and pipe player...

...Even animals, lacking the capacity to think the cogito, must be merely machine-like material beings...

...In fact, few eighteenth-century automata have survived intact...

...1968) will probably be more familiar...

...Skeptics in those days— like skeptics in our own—mocked the charlatans (and their gulls) whose swindles made nonsense of claims about "The Enlightenment" and "The Age of Reason...

...The computer revolution and Deep Blue have redrawn our notion of "the powers of mechanism," although we are still debating the faculties of mind (or brain...

...together with the cyborging of human beings and the nanobotic downloading of human consciousness—imagine the alternatives are either a glorious future or a simple failure...

...The Devil always finds a way to nix our dreams of perfect life...

...And how different, finally, are Kurzweil's nanobots from Chucky...

...Nowadays almost everyone accepts that a computer programmed to win at chess poses no more threat to human intellect than a pocket calculator: Witness the extraordinary lack of public interest in this fall's million-dollar match between the world champion Vladimir Kramnik and the most highly rated chess computer, Deep Fritz 7, which ended in a 4 to 4 tie on October 19...

...In such books as Disclosure, Rising Sun, and Jurassic Park, the enormously popular fiction writer Michael Crichton has always been a remarkable predictor of the next topic around which public fears will crystallize, but his latest thriller, Prey, which constructs a nightmare out of nanotechnology, seems to have missed the public mood and is not doing as well as Crichton novels are expected to do...

...matches Kurzweil against various critics, from thoughtful anti-Darwinists to leading materialist philosophers such as John Searle—all of whom agree that "Strong A.I...

...Of all automata the Turk was the uncanniest...

...Philip K. Dick's usage of it in his classic sci-fi novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep...

...The Turk made its lucrative way from the Hapsburg court to pre-revo- DQ lutionary Paris, from George Ill's uHl London to New York and I Havana...

...So, does artificial intelligence transcend Freudian nightmare now that it has come to suggest not itinerant showmen or tinkerers with clockwork but university scientists, computer moguls, and global corporations...

...Somehow, people who discuss "Strong A.I...

...Now Joanna Zyminska gathers academic essays for The Cyborg Experiments: The Extensions of the Body in the Media Age...

...The Turk's next owner, Maelzel, designed automata, human prostheses, and a gigantic music box called the Panhar-monicon...

...But the myth of Descartes's clockwork puppet daughter reveals that uncanny automata also raised questions about our relations with the Devil...

...Are we still, in our adult nightmares, no more than mechanical puppets who can be dismembered...

...Games were played fast to ease the operator's cramped position...

...Nelson reminds us that "rotating statues, singing mechanical birds, and automated miniature puppet theaters" enlivened pagan temples and even some Christian churches...

...The first seemed genuinely to excrete after being fed, while the second breathed faster and the third played faster than any ¦L human...

...Certainly much more immediately pressing concerns seem to be coming out of cloning and other parts of the Brave New World of eugenic biotechnology...

...What Nelson's "secret life of puppets" entails will escape most readers— including this one—but our own era certainly seems eager to make the kind of connections that Wood limns between the handiwork of eighteenth-century mechanicians and the android simulacra that twenty-first-century proponents of artificial intelligence have unleashed...

...The most remarkable fact about the Turk's career is that Kempelen and Maelzel each orchestrated, on two continents, a successful conspiracy of superb players, journalists, and even a Columbia University professor, all of whom took turns in the android's cramped box...

...Only the sepulchral voice and the pantography that allowed the operator control of the Turk's playing arm were genuine clockwork...

...As consumers of "video nasties" like Child's Play, the lads imagined they were killing the demonic doll Chucky, whom the unfortunate toddler resembled...

...The sheer mileage of the Turk's career suggests there was more to him than met religious, skeptical, and scientifically curious eyes...

...Surreptitiously, the nineteen-year-old Willis measured the box with his umbrella during one of the Turk's exhibition games in London and then made the requisite calculations...

...More human than human is our motto," explains the mad scientist who runs the interplanetary corporation designing these masterpieces of artificial intelligence...

...Meanwhile in Building Bots, William Gurstelle gives instructions on how to build your own little fighter in the garage for "combat robotics...

...On suspicion of demonic possession, the Spanish Inquisition briefly imprisoned Pierre Jacquet-Droz and one of the family's mechanoid toddlers...

...However great and surprising the powers of mechanism may be," declared Robert Willis in his expose of the Turk, "the movements which spring from it are necessarily limited and uniform...

...In 1747 Julien Offray de la Mettrie, an atheistical follower of Descartes, took the next step and openly proposed the "man-machine": Men and their brains comprised no more than a highly complex system of biological cogs and wheels and camshafts...

...Immortality looms, if "we are sufficiently careful to make frequent backups...

...And yet, most of those who emptied their pockets in order to watch robotic chess were there for the best show in town...

...It's certainly true that people are increasingly becoming cyborgs—part man, part machine—as they acquire artificial hips, pacemakers, and even computer chips in the brain...

...There remains, however, another possibility: initial success at the dream of mechanical life, which then becomes a nightmare...

...Purveyor of ear-trumpets to Beethoven, Maelzel unsuccessfully negotiated to have the composer's "Wellington's Victory" performed on the Panharmonicon...

...It cannot usurp and exercise the faculties of mind...

...He also notes how Vaucanson switched his attention from clockwork automata to the use of cards in order to program weaving looms...

...All of these creations, however, were evidently clockwork—and their exhibitions always included displays of the robotic innards after the audience's wonder had abated...

...A spate of new books addresses eighteenth-century automata, ventriloquists' dummies, and puppets—together with more recent avatars of chess computers, artificial intelligence, androids, robots, and cyborgs...

...Can puppets or dolls come alive to threaten or kill us...

...According to Victoria Nelson in her goofy The Secret Life of Puppets, the turn of our new millennium has witnessed the wonderful reemergence of a "sub-zeitgeist...

...Does "computerization" challenge human identity as ominously as "mechanization" previously seemed to...

...Frankenstein...

...And in I, Cyborg, Kevin Warwick issues a wacky manifesto for those who aspire to become A.I...

...Kempelen also designed waterworks and mining pumps as well as a typewriter for the blind and a machine for simulating the human voice...

...The Turk made both Kempelen and Maelzel rich, but Maelzel (who passed off the android as his own invention) ended up fleeing Europe...

...Connor recalls how, in 1995, a toddler was butchered by two ten-year-olds in Liverpool...

...Organized religion and the mechanization of the world picture took their toll, but modern technology now promises a New Age return to ancient wisdom...

...The truth is that Kasparov's defeat proved little more than a seven-day wonder...