He recommends you download the first book in the Circo del Herrero series for free here to prepare for tomorrow’s sequel giveaway.
Hercules and His Labor Day Weekend Reads:
Tag: Automaton
GABBLER RECOMMENDS: Brittany Nicole Cox On Horology
‘It’s interesting because there’s been a historic divergence in opinion between what is considered craft and what is considered art. Now, there seems to be a growing convergence between the two, where art is becoming synonymous with craft. What’s particularly interesting and complicated is how it’s coming back.
The figure of the craftsman wasn’t as well regarded as that of the artist, but the thing is when you were a craftsman, you created your masterwork. If you were a master clockmaker, you only got that title because you had created a masterpiece. Long ago, if you were a craftsman, you were considered to be on the same level as the priest or the king,. It’s the same with artwork: If you were a painter, you had your master work—your painting was this incredible result of years of study and practice at your craft. It was the same thing for a sculptor or for a horologist. If you were able to shape raw materials into things, you were considered someone capable of making miracles. It was seen as an incredibly noble vocation to be a craftsman and to devote your life to the pursuit of this applicable, tactile thing—and that was what really grabbed me. I’m still absolutely smitten. Horology is my whole life, and it’s been my life since I was very young.’
[Via]
GABBLER RECOMMENDS: ‘Three Stories You Absolutely Must Read to Learn About Automatons (And One You Definitely Shouldn’t)’ by Micaiah Johnson
Like any totally-normal-not-at-all-obsessed person, I spend a lot of time thinking about automatons.
Mostly, I shake my fist at the sky like an old man complaining that kids these days only like their sleek, human-passing, electric robots and no one cares about the wind, fire, water, and clockwork powered beings that preceded them. Is MonkBot not sexy? With that sweet, sweet segmented mouth action?
Automatons are usually thought of as no different from golems, living dolls, or patchwork girls. Just another category of animated being: nifty, sure, but so what? But automatons are, and have always been, important. And for two thousand years we knew that.
In the arc of human invention, automatons predate paper. That means before we thought “sure would be nice to write things in a convenient and portable manner” we thought “sure would be nice to have an inhuman creation in our shape that moves.” Then we immediately looked at this thing we’d made and instead of believing we’d become gods, we thought we’d created them. In ancient Rome and Egypt, as well as during the medieval period, automatons were representations of the divine. Even after they shifted into the realm of entertainment, automatons were singular wonders, art that brought joy to the viewer.
…
By remembering automatons we remember how the prioritization of art can become bulldozed by wants of industry, the miraculous giving way to the profitable. These creations are still essential to study, because when humans create in their own image they also create a tangible snapshot of the values and visions of the world at that moment. Sometimes, that image is of religious devotion. Sometimes, it’s an image of intellectual curiosity and wonder. But sometimes they are darker, cautionary tales exposing how power operates against the powerless.
[Via]
GABBLER RECOMMENDS: “Mechanical Magic: Automata, a Lava Lamp, and a Self-Playing Piano | Show and Tell | Atlas Obscura” and “The Mechanical Magic of Scotland’s House of Automata | Show and Tell | Atlas Obscura”
GABBLER RECOMMENDS: ‘Dreaming of artificial intelligence in ancient Greece and Silicon Valley’ by Matthew Hutson
An excerpt from the article:
The dream of building minds is an old one. How old? You may be surprised to learn that the ancient Greeks had myths about robots. In “Gods and Robots,” Stanford science historian Adrienne Mayor describes how, more than 2,500 years before the modern computer, people told tales of autonomous machines that could labor, entertain, kill and seduce.
Among them was Talos, a bronze automaton forged by Hephaestus, god of metalworking, to guard the island of Crete. This machine, the size of the Statue of Liberty, patrolled the shore hurling boulders at invaders. (In 1948, the name Talos was given to a partly autonomous missile.) Hephaestus’s human descendant Daedalus was said to craft animated statues of animals so lifelike they needed to be tied up. Pandora, another of Hephaestus’s creations, was an android sent to curse humanity. She entices Epimetheus (“afterthought”) to let her into his home, where she lifts the lid on her woeful jar. (“Box” is a mistranslation.) While Pandora was a one-trick pony — narrow AI — “The Iliad” describes Hephaestus’s golden serving girls as having “sense and reason . . . [and] all the learning of the immortals.” AGI, and then some.
Eastern traditions also featured robots. Indian legend has mechanical soldiers defending the remains of the Buddha. And an ancient Chinese tale has a robotic man dance and flirt with royal concubines, angering King Mu before its creator reveals its artificial nature. That people could even picture such technical feats thousands of years ago may seem a stretch, but they had catapults, voting machines and other automated mechanisms from which to extrapolate. We don’t have anything near time travel, and we can still enjoy “The Terminator.”
In “Gods and Robots,” Mayor carefully examines secondary and source material — writings and artwork — to discern the ancients’ views on minds both supernatural and soulless. She takes an academic tone (her book and Sejnowski’s are from university presses) but draws occasional parallels to modern sci-fi movies such as “Blade Runner” and “Ex Machina,” arguing that our concerns about artificial life haven’t changed much. “The age-old stories,” she writes, “raise questions of free will, slavery, the origins of evil, man’s limits, and what it means to be human.” Can we control our creations? Can our creators control us? Are we robots — in Plato’s words “ingenious puppet[s] of the gods”?
…
Mayor wonders if Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk and Bill Gates, who have warned that AI could kill us all, are “the Promethean Titans of our era.” She calls the stories in her book “good to think with.” And not just for us. Mayor foresees a day when AIs will read our fictions and come to understand us through them.
[Via]