Automaticity and Playing God
When people first began dabbling in mechanics, they looked for ways to help people think. There were mechanical calculators and astronomical clocks that made solving arithmetic problems easier. The machines required input by man, a series of programmed procedures, and an output.
As technology progressed, men looked for ways to reduce the need for constant input. We moved toward automatic, thinking machines as we programmed them to assess feedback. Windmills controlled their speed depending on the severity of the wind, temperature-regulating thermostats self-adjusted to maintain a certain temperature, and steam engines monitored pressure regulators to keep them from exploding. We no longer wanted help thinking; we wanted machines to think for us altogether.
Pause for a second… Is this a bad thing? Not having to constantly monitor temperature or pressure allows humans to use their time and energy elsewhere, going back to that idea of furthering humanity. If a machine can perform simple, routine functions, it seems to be more of an advantage than a disadvantage. Relying on that “thinking” technology gives you more freedom; more room for higher-order thinking. The only problem there is the consequence of failure. If something goes wrong with a pressure regulator in a steam engine, the entire thing could explode.
While consequences worsen the more we rely on technology, that intellectual freedom to advance humanity in other ways is worth the cost. For so many centuries, people were at war or were constantly just surviving to survive. Beyond philosophy and great war stories, none of the discoveries we learn about in school come from much farther back in history than a few centuries. We get the cliffs notes of the wars and the dynasties and eras, but only know Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates. What happened in between? Nothing of too much significance, apparently. If we don’t learn about it in public school, it is implied that it matters less to our culture; thus less to our current state of humanity.
All of that to say that the most important discoveries have come when we have been free to think deeply. We weren’t concerned with perpetual environmental monitoring, we didn’t need to obsess over where the next source of food could be found; we could learn and devote resources to creative thoughts and expression. We intellectually evolved.
Let’s go back to this idea of technology receiving, and adjusting to, feedback from the outside world. It fascinated the masses for hundreds of years, pretty much until we got sent into space on this godforsaken ship. Scientists, inventors, and psychologists began trying to define human life in mechanical terms. The heart was a literal pump and ideas merely a function of acquired information. If people were just machines, we could be replicated. The development of mechanical automata exploded: there were ducks that could chew, swallow, and excrete; birds that could sing; monks that could write; dolls that could play the piano.
These all operated on very specific, defined procedures. Even though they could interact with their environments, their interactions were controlled by human input and design. But what if they weren’t? Scientists and everyone else involved loved to think about the day those automata could become self-sufficient. Literature and movies began focusing on potential futures: both good and bad, which speculated about what self-controlling machines might do and how they could change the world.
A historian named Chistine Woesler de Panafieu suggested this new obsession to create humans mechanically was an effort to construct an entirely manmade world. The attempt to give machines life was an attempt to play God. The world of science men had erected for centuries continued to exclude nature, and for that they felt an incompleteness they were trying to recover by reassuring themselves they could be responsible for creation on a larger scale.
f man could create and control the environment to which their creatures responded, there would be no variability; no reason to expect a robot takeover or Frankenstein’s monster. We were trying to edge ourselves toward a utopia comprised of complex robots and little personal effort. Our desire to be separate from uncivilized animals had gone too far. With all of the progress in such a short amount of time, I questioned how long it would be before corruption overtook betterment.