In an article published in 1950, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Alan Turing posed one of the most provocative questions of the twentieth century: can machines think? In those pages, the British logician not only reformulated the famous “imitation game”—a thought experiment in which an observer had to determine, through a written conversation, whether their interlocutor was a human being or a machine—but also laid the theoretical foundations of what a decade later would be called artificial intelligence. Rather than seeking a definition of intelligence, Turing proposed an operational criterion to recognize it, anticipating a future in which machines would be able to simulate human thought. Is this future here and now?
Let’s take an example from a month ago. Its name is Moya. It is one meter and sixty-five centimeters tall, weighs about thirty kg, and is indistinguishable from a human being. It is the robot presented in mid-February by the Chinese startup DroidUp from Shanghai. It walks and moves like us. It is empathetic and capable of interacting with the environment in which it finds itself. Equipped with a state-of-the-art artificial intelligence system, it will be used for healthcare assistance, companionship for the elderly, and corporate reception services. Furthermore, it was designed to overcome the “uncanny valley,” that is, the repulsion one might feel towards a robot that only vaguely resembles a human. It is the most sophisticated prototype of the latest generation of automatons, capable of autonomous learning.
So, can machines think? The answer largely depends on what we mean by the word “thought.” If by thought we mean the ability to process information, solve problems, recognize patterns, and adapt to new challenges, then yes, machines think. They do not dream, despair, or fall in love, but they think. Every time a navigation app recalculates a route to avoid traffic, or a medical algorithm detects a tumor in an X-ray, or a chess program anticipates the opponent’s next move, the machine performs tasks that once required a human mind.
The truth is that Turing’s question has roots in the most remote antiquity. Already Homer, in the eighteenth book of the Iliad, describes the golden handmaidens forged by Hephaestus, a kind of anthropomorphic automata ahead of their time. Indeed, they resemble “living young girls,” thus with human features; “they have living sense enclosed in their chest,” meaning they possess cognitive faculties; they have “strength and speech” to perform heavy work and communicate; finally, they are “instructed by the immortal gods,” that is, they execute programmed instructions.
Another creation of the god of fire was Talos, a bronze giant tasked with protecting Crete from anyone who wanted to enter or leave the island without King Minos’s permission. For Apollonius Rhodius (295-215 BC), he is instead a gift Zeus gave to Europa, the queen of the island. The guardian of Crete patrolled three times a day, and if he spotted an enemy ship passing by, he sank it with enormous stones. The invincible Talos actually had a weak point, which symbolically coincided with the most human aspect of his structure: a single vein extending from the neck to the ankle, containing a vital fluid, an artificial surrogate for blood. It was precisely this human quality that caused his death. During the Argonauts’ landing on the island, distracted by Medea’s gaze, he injured his ankle by striking a rock spike and collapsed to the ground with “immense noise.”
It was therefore not a valiant warrior who defeated Talos, nor a supernatural force, but a gaze. But Medea’s gaze is one that pierces what it sees. In its power, myth and theater merge. The reciprocity of looking and being looked at is, in fact, the basis of every kind of spectacle and thus also of theatrical art. Not by chance does the term “theater” derive from the etymon “theaomai,” which means “I see, I observe” (with admiration). The “deus ex machina,” the mechanical deity that entered the stage in classical tragedies, recalled an aesthetic issue. Because theater and automatons both belonged to the dimension of the “thaumaston,” that is, the “marvelous.” According to Plato, the human being is like an automaton moved by elastic strings, as are the passions that guide his actions (The Laws, Rizzoli, 2005). Later, Aristotle considered the automaton as an object capable of generating intellectual wonder (Metaphysics, Carocci, 2015).
The evolution of machines, and particularly automatons, accelerated rapidly in the Alexandrian age. It was then that Hero, who lived during the 1st century AD, designed the “mechanical theater,” long considered an unsurpassable model of kinetic engineering. It disappeared in the Middle Ages, at least until the early fourteenth century, replaced by the puppet theater beloved by itinerant performers and court jesters […].
While in the sixteenth century interest in automatons was mainly morphological, aiming to imitate the perfection and harmony of the human body, in the seventeenth century there was a shift in perspective: attention moved to the mechanics of human movement, to understand its principles and reproduce them artificially. Animism and the sense of magic, which until then had permeated the conception of automatons, were progressively replaced by the new science of nature. This change is closely linked to the developments in mechanics, which received a decisive boost with the foundation of the science of the movement of bodies, starting from the studies of Galileo and Descartes.
Among the most refined builders of automatons, capable of precisely reproducing human functions, stands the name of Jacques de Vaucanson. To see his “Flutist” (1738) in action, Parisians lined up for kilometers, paying as much as three lire for admission, equal to the weekly wage of a worker at the time. But the invention that sparked indescribable enthusiasm throughout Europe was an artificial chess player. In the lavish and frivolous Vienna of the second half of the eighteenth century, the court of Empress Maria Theresa was a stage where illusionists, mediums, and magicians of all kinds performed. After attending a show by conjurers, the empress urged one of her advisers, an expert in mechanics and hydraulics, to create a very special game capable of astonishing a nobility always in search of new thrills.
This adviser was Baron Wolfgang Von Kempelen, native of Pressburg (present-day Bratislava). In 1770 von Kempelen presented the fruit of his work. It was a puppet of Oriental design, seated on a large wooden box and smoking like a “Turk” (as it was nicknamed). In front of it was a chessboard, and it regularly defeated all opponents personally chosen by the sovereign. A success immediately followed by a triumphant tour in the main European capitals and Russia, where the “Turk” prevailed, among others, over George III, Benjamin Franklin, Napoleon, and Frederick II of Prussia. Only forty years later was the cunning trick discovered. The automaton was not a technological marvel: it was simply operated by a small-statured player who cleverly concealed himself behind the gears.
To the artificial perfection of the eighteenth-century automaton, Romantic literature opposed the primacy of its opposite: the ugly, the deformed, the grotesque. It was 1810 when Heinrich von Kleist published the essay “On the Marionette Theater” (“Über das Marionettentheater”). His thesis is peculiar: the marionette is a divine creature, endowed with harmony, lightness, and unparalleled grace. The modern man, on the contrary, is awkward because corrupted by a process of civilization that has distanced him from nature, making him, indeed, an inanimate automaton. The German playwright thus anticipated a theme that would be at the center of the technological revolution from the twentieth century to our days: man is capable of doing almost everything, but is he able to keep everything under control?
The word “robot” is relatively recent: it was first pronounced in 1920 in a play titled R.U.R., acronym for “Rossum’s Universal Robots,” by the Czech writer Karel Čapek. Robot is the masculine form of “robota,” which means hard labor. In Čapek’s drama, robots are not mechanical organisms but humanoids that serve as a metaphor for the man of the industrial era, reduced by work to a mere means of production. Čapek’s work was a worldwide success, and robots began to populate novels, stories, and films of every kind. In Fritz Lang’s film “Metropolis,” the machine-moloch obsessively controls every gesture of the workers and violently suppresses every attempt at rebellion. It is the hallmark of an alienated society that sacrifices the meaning of life and freedom on the altar of efficiency.
Following Lang’s machine-moloch came the famous robots of Isaac Asimov and the droids of “Star Wars,” up to Philip Dick’s replicants brought to the screen by Ridley Scott in “Blade Runner.” But, as we have recalled, the “artificial double” of man has very ancient origins. It can be said to be contemporary with the birth of Western civilization. While the term “android” (human simulacrum), also of Greek etymology, is much more recent. It was coined in 1886 by the French writer Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam in his novel The Future Eve. Science fiction appropriated it starting from its golden age, the years between the two world wars, and in many films the term android is used instead of robot to emphasize creatures that are not overtly mechanical but made in the image and likeness of man. In this category, we can also include the monster created by Baron von Frankenstein in Mary Shelley’s 1817 masterpiece.
But the fundamental difference between the automatons of the classical world and those of the modern world is that the former do not rebel, while the latter do so systematically. The role assigned to robots in modern literature is actually the one slaves had in the ancient world. In the first book of Politics, Aristotle observes that if it were possible to build and use automatons like those the myth attributed to Daedalus and Hephaestus, there would have been no need for slaves. In the classical world, it is indeed the slaves who rebel and attempt to escape, not the machines. Instead, the automatons of the twentieth century, from the robots of R.U.R. to Hal 9000 of Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” and many others, are perpetually on the verge of revolt against men. Chaplin’s masterpiece “Modern Times” (1936) shows on one hand the dehumanization of Fordist assembly lines, with time rationing taken to the extreme in the scene where the worker is fed by an automatic machine that comically malfunctions; on the other hand, the workers’ rebellions in which Charlot is unwittingly involved […].
* Il Foglio
