It is perhaps the delusion of every generation to exaggerate the novelty of their age and believe they face challenges and opportunities that no one has ever faced before. So it is today as we contemplate our automated future.
The great service of Thomas Rid’s book — Rise of the Machines: The Lost History of Cybernetics — is to highlight how we have been grappling with the relationship between man and machine for longer than we might have imagined. It also shows how the debate has been coloured by the full spectrum of emotions.
According to Rid, the idea of playing God and creating mechanical life predates the invention of the computer by many centuries — at least in the world of mythology. Early Jewish folklore recounted the tale of the golem, a shapeless clay figure brought to life by humans. The Greeks invented Hephaestus, the divine blacksmith, who created automata out of bronze. The Czech playwright Karel Čapek gave us R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), a story about a factory manufacturing artificial workers that popularised the word “robot” when it was staged in the US in 1950.