Humanity’s Previous Attempts To Create Life Explain Our Fears Of AI Today
Dr. Frankenstein, automatons, animal electricity, and fallen angels
Our ancestors lived in a world with uncountable unknowns. Their method of handling these uncertainties was magic, spirits, and gods that directed these things that couldn’t be understood. Even if their magic wasn’t real, their belief gave it power.
And, on occasion, sometimes our ancestors could manipulate this magic in their favor. Although chance likely played more of a role. But this is changing.
We’re currently entering a strange time where technology is creating our own type of magic that doesn’t just exist in belief. Our tech magic manifests itself on command. Moreover, we can flex this skill in a way a semi-divine hero might use a special ring or cape.
This power gives us a dual vision of the future: one of hope and wonder, while the other involves opening doors that should forever remain shut.
Nothing demonstrates this more than our current fascination with artificial intelligence, and it played out right before our eyes recently in a business drama. The maker of ChatGPT, Open AI, suddenly fired their CEO.
Their corporate board was rumored to have been upset by a “powerful artificial intelligence discovery that they said could threaten humanity,” according to Reuters.
While it’s unknown if this is true, or what exactly this discovery is, much hype has revolved around our AI programs becoming sentient, and the Pandora’s Box it might open. But humans trying to create artificial life isn’t a new thing.
Before ones and zeros became the tool of choice, there were springs, cams, electric shocks, and mechanical lungs that breathed. These triumphs convinced many artificial life was within reach. Much like today.
Oddly, it all started with clocks.
Skilled Clockmakers Create Mechanical Creatures
In the documentary Wonders of the Clockwork World, Cambridge Professor Simon Schaffer explains clocks were once massive structures, which required a tower. But this changed in the eighteenth century. Gears, springs, and screws shrunk so small; timepieces could fit into your hand.
These machinists became the innovators of their day. Often specific buildings specialized on one piece of the clock, with a master clockmaker assembling them into a functional device. It was much like the Silicon Valley of its day.
It wasn’t long before the clockmakers realized their devices exhibited homeostasis, or self-regulating properties, like a human body. In fact, this could be simulated by devices. Inventor Jacques de Vaucanson took this to the next level, believing humans to be machines.
In his research, he studied human anatomy, much like Da Vinci, and learned by experience what made flesh and bone machines work. Lungs, hearts, hands, and fingers could be recreated with clockwork precision.
In particular, he watched human flute players and carefully considered every living effort that made this possible. Then, Vaucanson created a machine. It had human skin, a mechanical tongue, and functioning lungs. According to author Gabby Woods in the Smithsonian:
“Nine bellows were attached to three separate pipes that led into the chest of the figure. Each set of three bellows was attached to a different weight to give out varying degrees of air, and then all pipes joined into a single one, equivalent to a trachea, continuing up through the throat and widening to form the cavity of the mouth. The lips, which bore upon the hole of the flute, could open and close and move backwards or forwards. Inside the mouth was a moveable metal tongue, which governed the air-flow and created pauses.”
Vaucanson also created a mechanical duck, which ate, digested, and then excreted waste. While rubber tubing helped the duck, these automatons could generate their coordinated motion with a wonder device called a “cam.”
You may be familiar with the term through automobiles, but in essence, a cam can be a mechanical memory. It takes the form of a wheel with grooves cut into it. While its simple spinning motion gives you an up or down, or side to side, the intricacy of the grooves can recreate elaborate functions.
Moreover, if you stack many elaborate cams on top of each other, then you get what our ancestors would refer to as magic.
Pierre Jaquet-Droz used this technique to create a six-thousand-piece automaton in the shape of a boy, which could write messages with a quilled pen. Schaffer says “the writer” could also be reprogrammed to write other things by replacing components.
However, electricity allowed a whole new realm of magic in the attempt to create life.
Animal Electricity And The Force That Creates Life
“‘Hateful day when I received life!’ I exclaimed in agony. ‘Accursed creator! Why did you form a monster so hideous that even you turned from me in disgust? God, in pity, made man beautiful and alluring, after his own image; but my form is a filthy type of yours, more horrid even from the very resemblance. Satan had his companions, fellow-devils, to admire and encourage him; but I am solitary and abhorred.’”
— Frankenstein’s Creation, Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Andrew Klavan in The Truth and the Beauty, tells the story of Mary Shelley’s creation of her epic horror novel Frankenstein. Its inspiration started on a trip to Geneva in 1816. Mary, her husband Percy, Lord Byron, and John William Polidori amused themselves with a contest to create a horror story.
While Polidori produced one of the first vampire novels, Mary struggled. Until a stormy night drew the group to talk about lightning and electricity. Mary had recently read a story about Giovanni Aldini.
This scientist hooked the body of an executed prisoner to electricity, making it move with gesticulations of life. Aldini believed the human body worked on “animal electricity.” In fact, he thought with proper shots of voltage, the dead could be reanimated, and life generated.
Klavan explains Mary also had dreams about bringing one of her dead children back to life by stimulating its body with touch. These sparks of ideas led to a dream involving a scientist creating life.
Unlike many movie versions of the story, which told of a dimwitted monster with incredible strength, Shelley’s creature is different. It reads Paradise Lost, Plutarch’s Lives, and the Sorrows of Werter. This living creature is also tormented because it can never truly belong to the world of humanity. It also begs for acceptance.
“Remember that I am thy creature; I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed. Everywhere I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded. I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.”
The experiment ended in disaster for both Frankenstein and his creature — a true horror classic. Aldini’s theories also missed the mark.
While the automatons gave that first wondrous vision of the future, Shelley and Aldini painted uglier images. The creation of artificial life forever settled into that second category. And this continues today.
An Old Vision In Today’s Artificial Intelligence
Perhaps the idea of AI becoming a sentient lifeform scares us so much because it brings back remnants of past attempts at creation. We don’t exactly see them. But they lay firmly under our subconscious, pointing towards that door which should remain shut.
The “animal electricity” now takes the form of algorithms, which mimic our thinking processes. Call them brains in a circuit, like the type Dr. Frankenstein kept in a jar. Moreover, they’re just as functional as the fictional doctor’s reanimated brain.
Not long ago, Google subsidiary Deepmind claimed to have created an AI called “AdA” that can learn on its own from trial and error, like a human without data sets. No cams necessary. But this isn’t the only throwback.
Modern robotics is taking our past automatons to human-level capabilities. Now, stick AdA in these robots. And, well, you have a mixture between Shelley’s vision and the devices of Jacques de Vaucanson. So, the “flute player” can do things never thought possible.
Will this AI and robot combo turn into the nightmare of Frankenstein? That’s anyone’s guess. Needless to say, we’re entering a new world of magic, and trying our hand at that old experiment of creating life again.
If we succeed this time, hopefully, our creature becomes Adam, and not a fallen angel.
-Originally posted on Medium 11/28/23