MONSTER THAT MAN HAS MADE TALK, WRITE AND FIGURE, BUT LACK THE HUMAN EMOTIONS

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 2, Issue 338, 27 September 1932, Page 7

MONSTER THAT MAN HAS MADE TALK, WRITE AND FIGURE, BUT LACK THE HUMAN EMOTIONS

THERE is a strange fascination • that has • driven manlcihd >] tkrougliout the ages to emniarp creation— that is,1 to construct monsters whicli imitate his' actions 'and thonghts, and which 1 distahtly • recall his own image! - The 'earliest .robot was that credited to Rene Descartes, the farnous -lGth century philosopher, tvho ' was -said to have eon'striicted an automatonwvhich talked, breathed, and moved. The tale can probably be diseounted. About a century later Vaucanson invented a mechanical figure which played the Aute, and there were seveval chessplaying robots, including Rempelen's which was Said never to have been beaten. A suspicion of .fraud surrounded the Iatter, it being claimed that the apparatus housed a dwarf. who really caused the flgure's arms to m&Vei. The parallel branch of efforts at creation is represented by:*a flood o? legends and tales of terror down to the 20th century, when plastic surgcry began to achieve marvels with tissue-grafts which suggest that the dead may yet be resurrected in a living human composite. An exainple is the early 19th cen tury story of Frankenstein, written by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (wife of the famous English poet). Dr Frankenstein, a young sclentist, who, consumed with a desire to create • an artificial monster, collects fragments of human bodies, pieces them together and succeeds in reanimating them by electrical means. Thus is created an 8ft high human robot witliout a soul, inspired only by the passions of hate and destruction. Beyond Control. The monster is imprisoned, but escapes, iriiirders ■ several people, is hunted down, and at last destroyed. A peciiliar quality of niixed attraction and horror still remains in this story for 20th century readers, cliiefly b«cause of the fact that we live in a robot age ourselves, and that Frankenstein created a semi-human mechanism which he could not control. To date robots are simple, usually creatures of one response to one

stimulus. But they grow daily more complicated. ■"T'elevox," for instance, at first only had one retiex — turning on an electric light when spoken to. ' Last year "Mr Vocalite" was exhibited, developed by Westinghouse engiueers. He has about 40 reflexes. each one called -up by the coi'rect ordeb spbken- to 'liim. - He can wallt, talk, sft dowh, smoke cigarettes.. and pehforip a mmiber of complicated « actions. Compare the way these are carried out, with the human way. The sentence spoken to Vocalite is con veyed from a microphone to a radio valve, which translates it into a patt6fn of electric impitlses in Vocalite's "brain." • The way the human brain reacts is similar. The only difference is that the human brain has hundreds of thousands of by-paths . and relays. It is a more complicated mechanism. that is all. There are robots that calculate, write, sell (and give correct change), teach surgery on themselves, direct traffic, answer telephones, invent, story-plots, fly 'planes, steer ships, wattch dam-levels (and report in speaking vbice), count visitors, give the alarm for burglars. and understand higher mathematics. If all these vocations were combined in one wallcing, talking robot, and the directing mechanism was made of microscopic size, so as to fit in its head, *vve would get the illusion of life. In fact, the robot would live and think —but its thinlcing would be short of human thought by the emotions of love and pity. Like Frankenstein's monster, the new race of mechanical slaves we are creating around us, to do human work (and rnake human unemployment), are without a soul. The creator of the name "Robot," Karel Capek, the Czechoslovakian author, saw this "Frankenstein -like development fully when he wrote "R.U.R.", the weird modern play that is indirectly derived from Mary Shelley's horror story. Rossom's Universal Robots were semi-human automata invented by an engineer, Rossom, to replace human workm.en. They eventually revolt against their masters (through the development of the only emotion that such a mechanical brain

is capable of — hate), kill them all, found a republic, and iind themselves doomed to extinctiOn for they have never learnt how to love. • Strange Surgery. Some of the feats carried out by modern surgeons seem to foresliadow the possibility of a Frankenstein creation. Ih 1929 Drs BrUkhenenko and Tchechulm, at Moscow, performed the weird experiment of killing a dog by decapitation and bringing the head to life after death by providing it with an artificial circulation. The Russian experiment is well authenticated and photographs are extant. In 1912 Carrel, the famous French surgeon, removed a piece of chicken's heart. The bird was then killed, but the heart-tissue is still alive, 20 years after its owner's death. It is kept artificially warm and fed. Practically every portion of the body has been kept alive artificially long after its owner has died. Skin, in fact, does not die for weeks after"ward, even if left in place. The idea of Mrs Shelley's fanatie young doctor of piecing together an organism from "scraps" salvaged from corpses has

thus a legitimate foundation; the only factor missing in her hate tale was the I method of preserving the material s now adopted by experimenters — either | in a refrigerator (for the lower-type 1 tissues) or in a warm nntrient fluid of | the same chemical constitution as that which- bathes the tissues ih life '(for the. higher -types). Even the idea of providing a brain has a parallel in the Russian experiment. Fragile and highly specialised as the brain is, it is feasible that it might be salvaged at the moment of I death by providing an artificial circu- I laticn, eventually to receive a new 1 body for fhe outworn one. But how could such a brain func- 1 tion to an alien environment? Its j "patterns" of conduct would have been originally built up by impulses arriv- j ing from nerve paths of type quite dif- i ferent from its new ones. Mental ; chaos might follow, producing a mind of pure savage type, modern refine- ; ments having cancelled out. The result would be just the i murderous, uncontrollable monster of the old Frankenstein stopy.