← HistoryExtra podcast
HistoryExtra podcast
Robot history: everything you wanted to know
00:37:26
Kerry McInerney answers your questions on the history of robots – from ancient Greece to the age of AI
Loading summary
Transcript43 lines
- [00:00]
Kerry McInerney
Okay, I have to tell you, I was just looking on ebay where I go for all kinds of things I love. And there it was. That hologram trading card. One of the rarest. The last one I needed for my set. Shiny like the designer handbag of my dreams. One of a kind. Ebay had it. And now everyone's asking, ooh, where'd you get your windshield wipers? Ebay has all the parts that fit my car. No more annoying, just beautiful. Whatever you love, find it on ebay. Ebay Things people love Looking for a.
- [00:32]
Chevrolet Representative
Pickup truck to get just about anything done. Look no further. The Chevy Silverado EV isn't just the most powerful Silverado ever with next level towing capability and technology. It also offers game changing versatility with the available multiflex midgate and tailgate. Which means Silverado EV helps you carry large, bulky and oddly shaped items up to nearly 11ft in length. Chevrolet together. Let's drive. Visit Chevrolet.com to learn more.
- [00:59]
McCain Representative
From your Fryer to the Table It's a quick trip for crispy fries, but how about across town delivery? McCain sure. Crisp fries are designed to go from fryer to container to carrier to passenger seat. Across town during rush hour, down a shortcut that wasn't all that short to a doorstep before they hit the table. And that first bite? The crispiness speaks for itself.
- [01:19]
Voiceover Artist
Mmm.
- [01:19]
McCain Representative
To the last bite. McCain's SureCrisp fries go the distance. See how far our fries can take your business@surecrisprisp.com delivery.
- [01:31]
Shutterfly Representative
Meaningless stuff? Why do we gift so much meaningless stuff? Tired of generic gifts and hollow trends? Shutterfly allows you to create meaningful photo gifts for your family and friends. Whether it's a cozy fleece blanket for Grandma, a stunning canvas print for mom, or a mug to make dad smile. Enjoy. 40% off with code. Make 40@shutterfly.com and make something meaningful this year. See site for more details.
- [02:04]
Spencer Mizen
Welcome to the History Extra Podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. When did automatons first emerge? Which science fiction depiction of robots is the most accurate? And why did so many people fall for a hoax robot called the Mechanical Turk? Here in conversation with Spencer Mizen, Kerry McInerney answers some of the most intriguing questions on the history of robots.
- [02:37]
Harry Stone
I'd like to start with a question that was submitted by one of our followers on social media called Harry Stone. And that question is, where does the term robot originate from?
- [02:51]
Kerry McInerney
So the word robot is, interestingly, quite new, given that we have a much longer history of making robotic life like objects. But the term robot itself was coined in 1921 in a play called Rossum's Universal Robots by the Czech playwright Karl Czapek. This play was about a robot uprising of a number of robotic workers. The term robot is often translated as meaning slave. It's not entirely clear to me if that's an accurate translation. I think maybe a more accurate translation would be something like forced laborer. And certainly my colleague Tom Holenek here at the Leverhulme center for the Future of Intelligence thinks that maybe translating robot as slave can be a little bit misleading in some ways. And he says, you know, this term might have been generated in response to specifically Eastern European histories of forced labor. And that when we use the term slave, we often bring in a lot of other kinds of experiences of forced labor and lay them on the experience of what it means to be a robot. And so, yeah, that can just lead us maybe in slightly different directions. So the term itself is very much a 20th century term, and maybe from its very beginnings is quite entwined with these ideas of labor, but also dystopia.
- [03:57]
Harry Stone
Why do you think this particular term caught on so quickly? I mean, how long was it before it was in sort of quite wide use?
- [04:03]
Kerry McInerney
I mean, I think what's so fascinating about the rise of the term robot is it's such a testament to the way that science fiction isn't just something that happens on our bookshelves or on our TV screens, but that it really actively shapes science and technology development because we see this widespread take up of robot through the work of science fiction authors like Isaac Asimov, whose three laws of robotics then became very foundational to this field of robot ethics. And then in my field, AI ethics. But, you know, Asimov himself was a science fiction writer. He wasn't a roboticist. And so, you know, this kind of take up of the term robot throughout the 20th century is in many ways, I think, a testament to the way that science fiction writers have driven our imagination of the kinds of technologies that we think are possible.
- [04:46]
Harry Stone
Sure, right now. I'm going to rewind a little bit now with a question from another of our followers, Sandra Visser. She wants to know about the origins of what we call robotics. How far back can we track, trace the idea of robotics in history? I mean, when are we talking is this idea, this concept first emerging?
- [05:07]
Kerry McInerney
So the term robotics itself, like robot, is very relatively new. It's a 20th century term, I believe, also coined by Isaac Asimov, who added ICS onto the term robot to generate robotics as a field. But when we're thinking about mechanical objects or self moving objects, these have a much longer history and they date back thousands of years in the form of automata or sort of autonomous objects, the automaton. And these go back to ancient Greek and ancient Chinese times. Things like mechanical clocks, for example, or water clocks. And there's been, you know, this long storied history of inventors and scientists making objects and things that move, sometimes for the purposes more of, say, like art and pleasure. A lot of the automata we saw in the past were very much designed to captivate and enchant, sometimes for the purposes of labor. So, for example, creating, say, like servants who could pour water out of mechanical pieces. But, you know, I think what maybe draws together the automata of the past, of the robots of today, is that they're both an expression of human creativity, which I think is fantastic and amazing, but they're also often deeply entwined with philosophical ways of thinking about ourselves. That when we're constructing automata and robots, we're also often thinking about what it means to be human. And sometimes our kind of mechanical friends that we make can also be our foes, that we see things that we think are beautiful about humanity in them, or in contrast to them, or we see them as a threat to what it means to be human. And I think, I think we see a lot of those debates also playing out today with artificial intelligence.
- [06:35]
Harry Stone
Great stuff. Now, I took the liberty of running a few questions on the history of robots and robotics past a well known chatbot, because it seemed rude not to. It came up with a couple of questions. I wonder if I could just run one in particular past you. And that is, what impact did Leonardo da Vinci's designs have on the development of robotic ideas in the Renaissance? So I wonder if you could talk about da Vinci's impact and also maybe introduce us to, say, two or three of the most influential thinkers in the evolution of robotics pre the 20th century.
- [07:17]
Kerry McInerney
Sure. So Leonardo da Vinci, you know, the kind of polymath and, you know, the typical Renaissance man, was also quite influential when it came to the field of robotics. And not many people, I think, know this, but he actually designed, I think, some of the precursors to some of the most important robots or sort of AI entities that we see today. So one of them is, he's attributed with designing a mechanical knight. So one of the earlier humanoid robots, which is now a kind of massive area of discussion today, there's a big debate over whether or not we should have humanoid robots. And then he also designed, I believe, the first autonomous vehicle. I think he designed a self driving cart. And this is an area of AI design application that we see a huge amount of controversy over because of the rise of self driving cars. So I think it's quite amazing to see how some of these ideas can feel very, very modern actually can be evidenced quite a lot further back in history. At the same time there were also, you know, such a wide range of other historical figures who I think, you know, made really interesting contributions to this field. There's a possibility that Leonardo da Vinci might have been influenced by some of the Islamic mathematicians and engineers who at the time of the Arab renaissance were doing some of the most cutting edge and groundbreaking work in this field. So one of the most famous inventors, I think was Ismail Al Jazari, who was a mathematician, scientist, engineer, and he wrote a book called the Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices that had a lot of different automata within it. Interestingly, I think he also designed the first four part combination lock. So that's also been around a lot longer than I expected. So, you know, truly kind of a very inventive and brilliant man. But there's also a lot of other people, I think, who we can look to in this history of robotics and automata who offer maybe slightly different lessons for us. One I would say would be, for example, Ada Lovelace, the British mathematician and often called the first computer programmer. And computer programs obviously are now really central to, to our modern field of robotics. And another that I wanted to mention, even though he certainly will probably not be a household name in any way, would be Wolfgang von Kempelen. And he was a designer of a very famous automaton. And we're going to put automaton in question marks for now called the Mechanical Turk. And this Mechanical Turk was built in the 1700s and it was also the namesake for Amazon Mechanical Turk today, which is a worker platform. And what was particularly notable about the Mechanical Turk was not only that it gained huge crowds and huge amount of excitement. People came to watch it because it was a automedon that appeared to be able to play chess. And it was beating a lot of chess masters at the time. It was also dressed in this kind of very stereotypical orientalized way. It wore a turban and big robes. And then it turned out though that actually this was a fraud. It was actually hiding a human chess player within these kinds of like oriental robes and garbs. And so why I think the Mechanical Turk is a really important Story in the history of robotics, and particularly AI is I think it just shows how much the history of fraud has also been a part of AI and tech development, which unfortunately is also very true today. We see a lot of overpromising and under delivering. We see a lot of snake oil in this field. The Mechanical Turk, I think, is very indicative of that. And it's also indicative of like the way that hidden human labor is also really central to contemporary AI and robotics. Like the much darker side, which I think is also a lesson that comes out of Amazon in Mechanical Turk being so explicitly named after this robot that actually relied on a human on the inside.
- [10:46]
Harry Stone
What you said, though, just prompted another question. What is the difference between a robot and an automaton? I guess that some of our listeners won't have a full grasp of what that is.
- [10:56]
Kerry McInerney
Yes, I'll try and break it down for you the best that I can. So an automata is kind of this object that is able to move seemingly of its own accord, so through kind of mechanical techniques, appears to be kind of self moving, self possessed. And so the wonder of it is that, you know, it's a mechanical, mechanical object. You know, it doesn't have a soul or a spirit, but it can move. And so this has a much longer historical history than the contemporary robot. And I think we can see the descendant of historical automata in the animatronics. So if you've ever been to a theme park and they have a moving mechanical object, say like a fake superhero or something like that, then we would say this is very much in the vein of automata. And sometimes automata were doing things that were more practical. So there might have been clocks that could tell the time, but they were also very much designed for awe and wonder and the appreciation of an artistic object. So they're very tied not only with mechanical sciences, but also with art. Whereas robots emerge conceptually at the beginning of the 20th century and then make huge steps forwards in the mid 20th century. And robots again are mechanical objects that respond and sense the environments around them. So this is where they differ significantly, I think, for automata, which is that automata don't necessarily sense in this way. Like robots have to be able to sense and meaningfully interact with their environments. Automata often are moving quite independently. They might be programmed to do one thing or able to do one thing, but that's all they do. So if you try and go up and interact with an animatronic in a theme part, you'll look a little bit weird. You know, they're not going to respond to you. Whereas robots have to be able to sense and respond to their environment in some way. And also robots were very much about labor and being able to perform and automate different kinds of work. So we had some automata which were doing labor functions. But robots, while I'm sure they are artistic robots, the main function of robots have been to try and take over certain kinds repetitive or difficult or tiring human tasks.
- [12:50]
Allstate Representative
This episode is brought to you by Allstate. Some people just know they could save hundreds on car insurance by checking Allstate First. Like, you know, to check the date of the big game first before you accidentally buy tickets on your 20th wedding anniversary and have to spend the next 20 years of your marriage making up for it. Yeah, checking first is smart. So check Allstate first for a quote that could save you hundreds. You're in good hands with Allstate Savings. Vary terms apply. Allstate Fire and Casualty Insurance Company Company and affiliates Northbrook, Illinois Blinds.com's Cyber Monday.
- [13:22]
Voiceover Artist
Last chance is happening now. Don't miss out on up to 45% off site wide. A blinds.com design expert can help you make the perfect selection on your schedule. We can handle everything from measure to your whole home installed for one low cost. With over 25 million windows covered, Blinds.com is the number one online retailer of custom window coverings. Save up to 45% sitewide plus a free professional measure right now@blinds.com rules and restrictions may apply.
- [13:49]
Harry Stone
Now I wonder if we could go to the Industrial Revolution now, because I wanted to know how that contributed to the development of robotics. I mean, can you define the machines that powered the early Industrial age as a part of this story?
- [14:07]
Kerry McInerney
Oh, I mean, absolutely. I think, you know, we saw some kind of huge steps forward when it came to the automation of the textile industry. And so I'm thinking in particular, for example, of the Jacquard loom, which used punch cards to automate textile design. And the textile historian Isabella Rosner talks a lot about how, you know, there are certain fields like textiles, embroidery, fabrics, which are often seen maybe as being quite low tech, but actually these really central drivers to technological innovation. And so I really like and think it's important to write these particular fields, which are often understood as being kind of very feminized or women's work, back into the story of technology, which is often understood as being very masculine. But I think what we can also see from the Industrial Revolution is a really important lesson for us today in this age of AI and automation. And so Brian Merchant, a journalist and writer, has a book called Blood in the Machine where he looks at the Luddite rebellion. So a movement of workers in the UK in the early 1800s who were grappling with the effects that this kind of wave of automation through the Industrial Revolution was having on their societies. And if someone calls you a Luddite, usually they're doing that because you don't like using your cell phone or because they see you anti technology. And Bryant Merchant, along with a range of other people who are trying to reclaim the history of the Luddites, argues that this is a bit of a mischaracterization of the movement that, yes, the Luddites did very famously go and smash machines. They protested the automation of certain kinds of labor, particularly textile labor. But they were doing so because they were trying to protect their dignity and their autonomy in response to this wave of automation and because they were really worried about the kinds of working conditions that these machines would generate. And I think there's a lot of parallels with their story back then and the way they. That many of us are thinking about AI and automation today, trying to think about how do you protect our own creativity and dignity and autonomy at work in response to kind of the widening range of automation?
- [16:03]
Harry Stone
And how did the authorities react to the Luddites back then? Were their voices heard or were they generally ignored?
- [16:09]
Kerry McInerney
I mean, I think the fact that we still remember them in some ways, I think, is a testament to the fact that they were able to be disruptive enough. I mean, ultimately, did they manage to turn the tide of history in their favor? I mean, I would argue no. But I think that's why also these revisionist histories of that movement are really important, because I think they've been dismissed for a very long time as this kind of fringe case of people who were anti progress. And now, because I think people are seeing in their protests the seeds of what we're experiencing today, they're starting to ask, okay, well, what does it mean to actually take the Luddites not as this reactionary movement, but actually as a political one that had its own philosophy for how we should or should not have technology in our society? Maybe we can use that to try and drive sort of a better world for us.
- [16:55]
Harry Stone
Now, I want to pick up on a point that you mentioned earlier, and that was machines and robots relationship to labor, safe devices, and by extension, sort of relationship between, in the workplace of men and women. How gendered has the rise of robots, especially in the 20th century, been I mean, how big a part of this story is the development of robots as labor saving devices in say, the 1950s and the 1960s?
- [17:25]
Kerry McInerney
Yeah, so I think there's like multiple ways that this story is very gendered, and so one is on the level of the devices themselves. So as we've mentioned, a lot of the development around robotics in the 50s and 60s was often to replace factory workers or jobs that we would see now as quite heavily masculinized jobs. And, you know, this has like, serious implications then for male workers. But, you know, I think it's also quite telling that at the same time we were having to some extent a revolution in domestic household appliances, which were sold as being able to kind of free women from housework, thus allowing them to enter the workforce later on. At the same time, that promise has not really borne fruit. And we not only saw a cap in that innovation really by the 1970s. And the feminist theorist Helen Hester talks about the way that a kitchen from the 1970s looks like quite distressingly similar to a kitchen now. We haven't actually seen necessarily these great jumps forward we thought we'd see, but also that, you know, rather than necessarily freeing us from labor, these, like new household devices also kind of created more work. So, like, yes, we got modern washing machines that saved certain kinds of backbreaking labor of doing washing, but also we haven't had much higher cleanliness standards for our clothes. So we now just do a lot more washing. And also there's a lot of things like washing which we might have outsourced or been like, okay, we have a communal laundry or communal baker. And now these become individualized tasks. They can become located in individual homes. And so I think there's one way we can see the story of gender playing out, which is like, where did innovation sort of keep pushing forward, say in like factory automation and where did it stop, like, in household technology? But we can also see another story agenda when it comes to the workforce themselves, who are making and programming the robots. So in the 1950s and before that, being a computer was understood as being like a secretary. It was a very feminized form of labor. And so in the UK context, where we are, you know, large numbers of female computers were really essential to the work at, say, like Bletchley Park. But the historian Mara Hicks traces how over the coming decades, from kind of the 50s through to the 80s through to now, that gender dynamic flipped. That computing went from being this sort of primarily female, female field to being a primarily masculinized one. And they give a lot of reasons for this. One of them being that computational work started to be seen less as secretarial work and more as managerial work that became sort of better remunerated, more highly paid, and also just became more highly valued and recognized. And as that happened, women got increasingly pushed out of this field and men increasingly came to take up that role. And I think that's also a really important story because robotics and computer science now is a very gender unequal field in the uk, where men are very overrepresented, women are very underrepresented, but that also always wasn't the case. I think sometimes when we talk about getting women into stem, it's also really important to say, like, there's a lot of historical and contextual factors why this has happened. It really wasn't always this way.
- [20:19]
Harry Stone
Okay, so I'm now going to turn to a question that's very popular among Internet search queries and that basically relates to the massive impact that robots had on culture and especially science fiction in the 20th century. What, in your opinion are the most influential depictions of robots in science fiction? And another question on top of that. So which were the most accurate?
- [20:45]
Kerry McInerney
I really love this question because as I mentioned near the beginning of this episode, I think science fiction is often treated as very much a niche interest when it's hugely, hugely influential when it comes to, like, not only the kinds of technologies we make, but also what we think is possible. So I actually crowdsourced for this because I work with a number of experts, experts on this. So particularly Dr. Stephen Cave and Dr. Kanta Dehal, who run projects on AI narratives or the stories we tell about AI. And they pointed me in the direction of a few kind of top contenders. One which I completely agree with them is the Terminator is pretty hard to avoid when we're thinking about stories about robots. And I spent a couple of years talking to data scientists and engineers at a big tech firm, and they would often kind of unbidden bring up science fiction references to talk about themselves or their projects. And the Terminator was one that was pretty hard to avoid, as well as a number of Terminator like stories. So kind of robot humanoids with guns trying to take over the earth, which I would argue is like a little bit concerning when it comes to trying to think about maybe better and kinder and healthier futures with the robotics.
- [21:48]
Harry Stone
That's a really interesting point of Terminator's great series of films, mega successful series of films. How did they shape the way that people sort of regard Robots?
- [21:58]
Kerry McInerney
Yeah. I mean, I think this idea of, like, the scary robot is definitely in part to not just Terminator, although it's, of course, a leading figure in this area, but to, like, the, you know, decades and decades of storytelling about robots that are going to kill us all and take over the world. And I think we see some of those fears reflected again in the hype, in this fear around things like artificial general intelligence or AGI. And, you know, I think the success of these robot uprising narratives is in some way baked into the. Where the robot came from in the very beginning. This is what that play in 1921, Rur, was also about. It was about a robot uprising. But also Dr. Dehal, among a number of other scholars have also pointed out that we often use the metaphor of the robot uprising uprising to talk about lots of other kinds of human uprisings that have occurred. This idea that the stories that we tell about robots are often, yeah, reflective of, like, broader kind of social and political anxieties we have about, like, race or gender or other kinds of marginalization. And it's a way of people grappling with those kinds of fears. And particularly, like, when we see, like, slave uprising narratives and things like, say, Blade Runner or the Terminator. And they're often because I think we haven't resolved or grappled, like, meaningfully with these kinds of, like, racial violence that have occurred historically. And so you. You know, I think talking about, like, the robot uprising is, like, a way that we explore some of these themes without having necessarily to take full responsibility for these forms of historical violence that have occurred. Which is why I think, like, they're particularly important stories, but ones that we should, like, not be approaching or consuming uncritically in any way. I think we should be looking at them much more critically as these stories that have so much to say about how we relate to one another rather than to do with how we relate to machines.
- [23:37]
Harry Stone
What's your next choice, then, for most influential science fiction depictions?
- [23:42]
Kerry McInerney
Yes. So when I asked Dr. Cave and Dr. Dihar another that they pointed out, which I hadn't actually expected, but that does actually make sense to me is the droids in Star wars was such a cultural phenomenon. And so they pointed to some research that came out of Germany which said the two most recognizable robots were the Terminator, inescapable and R2D2. And so, you know, I think some other kind of big cultural franchises I would add to Star wars is, I would say, Japan's Astro boy in the 1950s, Robbie the Robot, and Then one that I would like to flag that might not up maybe in popular consciousness and much, but I think was also very influential for a lot of media around the world is Ghost in the shell from the 1990s. So the Japanese manga anime films that then went on to also influence a lot of Western media like the Matrix. And so these are some, I think, of the big influential figures that pop up again and again. But I also think that they aren't necessarily just sort of individual robots have been really influential, but also particular tropes. So like the robot uprising being one, but also like the sexy fembot that then revenge on her male creators or like the robot wife paradigm. So we see this a lot throughout science fiction from Fritz Lenk's Metropolis, kind of a famous German film from 1929, which has a robot called Maria kind of staking revenge through to 2014's Ex Machina by Alex Garland, where the robot Ava kind of takes her revenge on her creator and, you know, many, many other things in between. And so I'd say, you know, we can look at it at the level of these individual robots that have been culturally, I think, very, very successful. But also the wider tropes that.
- [25:17]
Harry Stone
Are there any that you'd say are particularly accurate that really got it right, say, a couple of decades in advance?
- [25:24]
Kerry McInerney
Depressingly, probably the more accurate representations of robots tend to not be narratively the most interesting. It's probably more like a robot arm that you see in a factory. Something like Monsters Inc. Actually, children's movies are really interesting sites for looking at robots because they tend to have a lot more robots than the average film. I think a film that I actually really like for its representation of. I'm not sure if it's quite robotics, but certainly kind of cutting edge technology is. There's a 2009 film called Sleep Dealer by Alex Riviera which explores a kind of dystopian near future world where there are factories set up in Mexico that allow workers to kind of plug in and then remotely control robots across the border in the US and the important conceit of the film is that this is a way of the US to extract Mexican labor without having to have Mexican laborers cross their borders. So it's commenting on these, like, xenophobic, anti immigration policies at the time. And I think, unfortunately has only become sort of more prescient over the decades that have followed. Yeah, and I think that the film itself is a really good representation of the way that so many of these technologies are about either trying to extract labor from people or rely on these kinds of hidden human work. And so that to me makes it like a very, very accurate representation of today.
- [26:38]
Harry Stone
Sure. And you've obviously we talked about Terminator, you mentioned it a few times earlier. And that's kind of the relationship between robots and the evolution of war effort. Fair. How has robotics accelerated our ability to wage war? And how has war accelerated our ability to produce ever more sophisticated robots? There must be some kind of link there, I imagine.
- [27:03]
Kerry McInerney
Yes. I mean, I think very, very sadly, when it comes to a wide range of science fields and technology fields, not just robotics, like war and colonialism, have been these central laboratories for exploring and developing new kinds of very violent technology. And I think we live with the legacies of that now. And so we can see that certainly in computer science, where World War II and the invention of the Colossus, the code breaking computers that were really central to the work of Bletchley Park. I think by the time that the war ended, there were nine Colossi, I think, at Bletchley park that then went to the University of Manchester and then were kind of really integral to the creation of the modern computer. But also we can see that in things like the Vietnam War as well, which has been called by some historians kind of like this first computational war. And there were huge kinds of experimental technological projects that were enacted by the US against Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos. So for example, the US had an operation called Operation Igloo White, which from about 1968 to 1973 involved dropping huge numbers of sensors. I think they dropped 20,000 into Laos. And this was a modern day precursor to border control, that they were trying to use remote sensing technologies to kind of track and trace people and kind of moving forces on the border. I don't think that it was very successful, but I think it does show how in a time where kind of people's human rights are already being abused, this is often when people will kind of take opportunity of that moment to kind of test out and explore new kinds of technologies while they have that remit to do so. And I think, unfortunately that's also something we see today when it comes to the deployment of AI and warfare from Ukraine to Gaza. Right now, you know, we're seeing a lot of new AI systems that are very, very unethical, very dangerous being deployed under those conditions. And not only are those horrif in the moment, but I think we will also live with the legacies of those technologies for much longer.
- [28:56]
Harry Stone
Okay, so yeah, you mentioned AI there and obviously we can run a podcast on robots without mentioning AI. When does a robot become AI and when did that start happening?
- [29:07]
Kerry McInerney
So I would say that I see AI as being unlike robots or automata, which are kind of related to specific kinds of physical technologies. I see AI more as a concept. First and foremost. It's an idea that something could be artificially intelligent. And we have again kind of thousands of years of stories about what it would mean to have or be an intelligent machine. Whereas I think when it comes to something like automata, there's no expression of or no expectation of any kind of meaningful intelligence. Like the wonder of an automaton is that it moves without external interference. It self moves in a way, but it doesn't need to necessarily be self processing in any way. It doesn't need to be self aware or self conscious or intelligent in order to do that. Robots are a little bit more interesting because I think there is no concept of intelligence inherent to the robot. It's about being able to perform these motions, to be able to sense the environment, to be able to work. But I think where it does get more complicated is that act of sensing and responding to the environment. You could argue like that that is a kind of intelligence. And that's where we see kind of like AI and machine learning maybe being deployed is to kind of feed into that capacity to be able to respond to the environment in such a way. And we also kind of see sort of more complex things where you might have say, something that's understood as being like a robotic body, then being sort of integrated with like an AI chat bot or AI voice recogn recognition software, or, you know, so you also see these amalgamations of different kinds of technologies being laid onto each other. I think, though, for me, why I say that I think AI is like a concept first and foremost is because our parameters or our understanding of what AI actually is are constantly shifting. And that's partly because of the difficulties of even trying to gauge or understand something as complex as intelligence. And it's also partly just because AI has been kind of historically and contemporaneously a kind of marketing tool. It's something that grabs people's attention. And so we now have technologies that 15 or 20 years ago would not have been called artificial intelligence, suddenly being referred to as AI. And so my favorite example of this is something like decision trees, which are quite a simple computational process now being called artificial intelligence. And the technology hasn't changed, or the process hasn't changed, but the label has changed. And so to me, that doesn't mean that I think that the term AI is totally useless. It's more just that I think it's important to look at what is it actually doing and what is it describing, rather than saying that there's one thing that AI is and that it isn't.
- [31:31]
Harry Stone
So is it therefore impossible to pin a precise date on the emergence of AI because it's a concept rather than a physical thing?
- [31:39]
Kerry McInerney
I mean, I would personally not be sitting here trying to put a date on it. I know that is some people's job that they're trying to understand, say, when they think artificial general intelligence will come, or AGI. So this is a particular kind of AI, one that is, like, understood as sort of having genuine, sort of multipurpose intelligence that's not just made to do, like, one task, like play chess, but it can actually adapt and respond to new in different situations. We don't have that. Some people who do believe that we will have that and that we might have it soon. There's a lot more people who think that we will not have that at all soon. Some people who think that we will never have that. Yeah, but to some extent, I think, you know, when I'm thinking about AI and its impact on society, like, again, like, you know, I think that these kinds of questions are interesting, but they're maybe actually not as pertinent to what's happening in the here and now. So, like, the questions that you were just asking me before about, say, like, AI in the military, like, I think that's actually much, much scarier to me than the idea of artificial general intelligence.
- [32:33]
Harry Stone
What history teach us about how we can deal with AI? What over the last 2000 years have we learned about our relationship with robots that we can apply to the future? Maybe, maybe help us deal with challenges that are going to be coming our way in the next couple of decades.
- [32:52]
Kerry McInerney
I think this is a really lovely question and a really understandable one because it is a huge amount of fear and doom around AI, around robotics, around new technologies. And that fear is really understandable, but it can also be really stultifying. And to me, I think what's most interesting about tracing our history of robotics and automata is not only tracing, like, the much longer history of both, like, anxieties and excitement that we can see around these, but also just all the ordinary ways that people have resisted them. That's why I find the Luddites really interesting. But even, you know, in the 20th century, we can see all the different ways that people resisted, say, computerization at work. And even if it seems like the tide might have turned against those people, I think their stories are really inspiring because it shows us that, you know, our lives don't have to be this way, and there actually are things we can do to collectively organize or collectively resist the technologies that we don't want. And that doesn't mean, again, necessarily that all of these technologies are bad or that they're all harmful, but that they're also not inevitable in some way. So I think that's one lesson to me that comes out of this history that I personally find, like, a little bit more encouraging at a time when things can feel kind of very dark or quite despondent.
- [34:01]
Harry Stone
Kerry, thank you so much for that. That was absolutely fascinating. Thanks for your time.
- [34:06]
Spencer Mizen
That was Kerry McInerney, research associate at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence. And for more on what science fiction can tell us about our own changing fears, then check out our everything you wanted to know episode on the history of the genre with Roger lst. You can find the link in this episode's podcast description. Thanks for listening to the History Extra podcast. This podcast was produced by Sam Leal Green.