Chapter
Twelve
The evolution of machines
said and read and did, or would they just be acting as if they understood? We
arrive at the same question – is there something extra that is left out?
These are some of the central questions for this chapter. While the main objective
is to think about AC, this has been so closely bound up with the topic of artifi-
cial intelligence (AI) that we need to begin there. To us, adding machines and
other automata may not seem to have anything to do with consciousness, but
we should appreciate that rationality was long prized above all other qualities of
the human mind and assumed to be a product, perhaps the highest product, of
human consciousness. In fact it turned out that rational, logical thinking is far eas-
ier for artificial machines than are some of the things that animals do easily, like
seeing, finding food or mates, and showing emotions. So we no longer assume
that rationality is a sign of consciousness, and may be less impressed by mathe-
matical machines even though it is with them that humans began to think about
and create artificial consciousness.
MIND-LIKE MACHINES
From the fourth century BC the Greeks made elaborate marionettes, and later
complete automatic theatres, with moving birds, insects, and people, all worked
by strings and falling-weight motors. These machines mimicked living things in
the sense that they moved like them, but it was not until much later that the idea
of thinking machines became possible.
In 1642, the French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal began work on
one of the first ever digital calculating machines when he was only 19 years old.
Although it could add and (with difficulty) subtract, using interconnected rotat-
ing cylinders, it was too cumbersome to be commercially useful. In 1672 Leibniz
developed a machine that could add, subtract, multiply, and divide, although it
too was unreliable. Commercially successful machines did not appear until the
nineteenth century.
During the eighteenth century, automata became immensely popular, with the
most famous including a flute-playing boy, a duck with a digestive system, and
the earliest chess-playing machine, the ‘Turk’. This consisted of a wooden cabinet
with doors that opened to show cogs and wheels inside, and an impressive life-
size wooden figure that wore a robe and turban and used mechanical hands to
move chess pieces on a board. The Turk was said to beat most challengers within
half an hour and toured the great cities of Europe for decades without its trick
being exposed. But a trick it certainly was (Standage, 2002).
Automata continued to fascinate and frighten, and in 1818 Mary Shelley captured
this fear in her novel about Frankenstein and his gruesome monster. But soon the
technology began to be used for more scientific purposes.
In the 1830s, the English mathematician Charles Babbage was infuriated by
unreliable mathematical tables and conceived the idea of a ‘difference engine’
that could compute the tables accurately and even print them. It was never com-
pleted, and the even more ambitious ‘Analytical engine’ was never even started.
This was to have had a processing unit of cogs and wheels controlled by punched
cards, like those used in looms for weaving cloth, which would have allowed it
to carry out many different functions. This was probably not technically feasible
‘Every intelligent
ghost must contain
a machine – an
information-processing
machine’(Sloman, 2014, p. 1)