Automata

In Our Time: Science

BBC

History

4.5 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 20 September 2018

⏱️ 53 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the history of real and imagined machines that appear to be living, and the questions they raise about life and creation. Even in myth they are made by humans, not born. The classical Greeks built some and designed others, but the knowledge of how to make automata and the principles behind them was lost in the Latin Christian West, remaining in the Greek-speaking and Arabic-speaking world. Western travellers to those regions struggled to explain what they saw, attributing magical powers. The advance of clockwork raised further questions about what was distinctly human, prompting Hobbes to argue that humans were sophisticated machines, an argument explored in the Enlightenment and beyond. The image above is Jacques de Vaucanson's mechanical duck (1739), which picked up grain, digested and expelled it. If it looks like a duck... with Simon Schaffer Professor of History of Science at Cambridge University Elly Truitt Associate Professor of Medieval History at Bryn Mawr College And Franziska Kohlt Doctoral Researcher in English Literature and the History of Science at the University of Oxford Producer: Simon Tillotson

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, it's Doleepa, and I'm at your service.
0:04.7	Join me as I serve up personal conversations with my sensational guests.
0:08.8	Do a leap interviews, Tim Cook.
0:11.2	Technology doesn't want to be good or bad.
0:15.0	It's in the hands of the creator.
0:16.7	It's not every day that I have the CEO of the world's biggest company in my living room.
0:20.7	If you're looking at your phone more than you're looking in someone's eyes, you're doing the wrong thing.
0:26.0	Julie, at your service.
0:28.0	Listen to all episodes on BBC sales.
0:31.0	This is the BBC.
0:33.0	Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time.
0:36.0	There's a reading list to go with it on our website
0:38.0	and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC in our time.
0:43.5	I hope you enjoy the programs.
0:45.0	Hello, in the 10th century, a life-like golden lions guarded the Byzantine court, moving and roaring.
0:50.7	Western visitors had no idea how these worked but guessed they were enchanted.
0:54.6	In genius machines such as these called automata challenged what it meant to say
0:59.5	that something was alive and when such devices took human form they questioned what it meant to be human.
1:05.0	Were we machines too in some way?
1:07.0	If not, how are we different?
1:09.0	The answers to that changed over time,
1:11.0	but what remained constant was an uneasiness the machines made to
	...

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