Starting in the 1600s, but really coming to the fore in the 1700s, many effectively guild workers, mostly Huguenot in origin, started to make automatons, and so they took what they knew to make clocks and turned them into mechanical objects. Arguably, one of the most famous and certainly my very favorite is this one here. This is by a man named Jacques de Vaucanson. This is called—watch me do my very bad Australian accent around French—Canard Digérateur or Digesting Duck. Lots of automatons in this period. They do all kinds of things—small children that play musical instruments, things that write poetry, the Mechanical Turk is clearly a very famous one; although the Mechanical Turk was less automaton and more slide of hand, because it actually worked by getting small people who could play chess backwards. That was a necessity to stick it inside the box to make the Mechanical Turk work. It was not an automaton, but interesting nonetheless.

This one however is astonishing, because this is the first time that people start to work out that you could use mechanical objects to make things that looked real. This Digesting Duck is as real as it gets. Now, I know that Simon made you put up your hands for other things, but how many people in this room have actually been near ducks? Good. I asked this in California recently, and there was one person in a room of two hundred. It was like I had to do a whole duck explanation that I never thought I would have to do. It is very strange!

All right, there are a couple of things about ducks. They have bills and the bills clatter. This was news in California. “Clank, clank, clank go the bills.” This duck, its beak clattered. It waddled because it had a mechanical thing in it. That was excellent. It had two more truly astonishing innovations, this particular duck—you could feed it. Its mouth opened. When it came near you, you stuck pellets in its mouth. It waddled away very happily as ducks do and then it digested.

Vaucanson is actually the first person to have a commercial application for vulcanized rubber, which had just appeared in Europe at this point. He went ooh, that would be excellent! He tried to make an adjusting track for this duck using metal. It rusted, which that was not particularly effective. He put vulcanized rubber in this duck. As the duck waddles after you have stuck the pellets in its mouth, you can hear it digesting. It gurgles which is totally excellent. Now, those of you who have been around ducks, which is by my reckoning two-thirds of the room, know what happens next. This duck sh—t across the stages of Europe. You put food in its mouth. It digested the food, and sh—t came out behind it.

Now, Vaucanson could not actually solve the problem of creating the digestion, and so he actually precached the sh—t in the duck which is genuinely fabulous. He actually had to go and collect duck sh—t, stick it in the duck so that there was genuine duck poop coming out from this duck. How could this not be a delight? This was indeed a delight! This captured the imagination of European royalty the world over.

Voltaire, in one of his probably less well-known lines declared that without this duck there was no glory for France. I don’t know if this says more about France or Voltaire or this duck, but frankly, very important—the thing about this duck that is fascinating and what it signals the beginning of is an attempt to make life. The thing about this duck was its high, high attention to simulacrum. It was really trying to be as duck-like as you could be. It did all the ducky things. Now, the fact that it was gold and shiny is a different problem. It was duck-like. The capacity to make things that appeared real is the beginning of where the fear comes from. If we can make machinery that starts to resemble life, where does that lead us.

Well, in one direction it leads us to this. It is fascinating to be here frankly, at this moment in time, because we are on the 200th anniversary of this. You go from making automatons, and Vaucanson himself went from making automatons to making looms—and from making looms we know what happens next. We are sitting on the end of the 200-year anniversary of the end of the Luddite Revolution here in England. The introduction of spinning looms into the mills of England creates, as most of you know, a moment of political and labor upheaval where for many laborers and workers in this country machinery threatened livelihoods and their sense for their capacity to make a living. The machines came along and basically threatened to replace them, replace the work that they could do.

Most of you know the story, but starting in 1812 here in England a number of workers formed effectively a secret revolution to destroy the looms as best they could; to break into the factories and destroy the machinery in the hope of stopping this kind of encroachment on their work and on their livelihoods. There are a number of things that happened in this period that I think are relevant to how we think about all of these technologies.

The first was that they knew full well that what they were doing was an incredibly dangerous act. They also knew that in order to inspire people you needed to have someone to lead a charge. They knew that if they put a real person in charge, that person would be in incredible danger. They invented a character to lead the revolution. They called him Ned Ludd. They situate him in Robin Hood’s Cave in Sherwood Forest, because the Sherwood narrative and the Robin Wood narrative had just come back into vogue. Ned Ludd issues a series of manifestos from Robin Hood’s cave to galvanize workers and laborers all over England. Those narratives appear in two places in particular. One is that all the doings of the Luddites gets reported on page three of The Times of London. Everyone is reading it, or at least the literary community is reading it.

For those who didn’t have a subscription, however, they also worked out that if you sang songs and songs were encoded—how to break into a factory and how most effectively to smash the looms—those songs would move, too. The songs of the Luddites were sung in the pubs in Southern England and sung all the way up the coast so that all the stories of how to break into the factory; what hammers were the most effective, and then where the looms most vulnerable were moved. Basically, they were like viral videos before we had the Internet. You have this incredible period of attempting to destroy machinery, because the machinery is attempting to displace a number of things that appear very threatening.

Lord Byron, who figures into this story more than he should, gave his maiden speech in Parliament in 1813 in defense of the Luddites and argued that they were the last kind of bastion of an England that was dying. They were the ones that would defend the romantic ideals of what England should be. They were standing against the dark satanic mills. They were this kind of moment of glory.

Now, most of you know that this story doesn’t end well by the Luddites. By this period of time 200 years ago, breaking into factories and destroying machines had been made into an offense that was punishable by execution or transportation to Australia. I’m surprised how many people picked execution! But those who didn’t came to Australia and we find ourselves as Australians at least deeply grateful, because they brought with them what were effectively the seeds of the labor movement that has been very powerful in Australia. But you go through this period of smashing looms, which this was kind of everywhere and you couldn’t miss it.

This is hugely important, because as it was happening there was a young girl of about 15 when the labor disputes broke out, whose father was a principle historian already in The Times starting to write about those labor disputes. She listens to people talk about it around her dining room table. She heard stories of those disputes. When she wasn’t listening to that, she was letting her slightly older boyfriend drag her around London to see experiments in early electricity. She missed Faraday, because this is ten years beforehand.

She did see scientific experiments; she saw vivisections being done, and she saw people trying to reanimate frogs using electricity. She saw many other things in the time period. In the summer of 1816, and so three years after the Luddites—she runs away with this boyfriend to Europe on a trip paid for and organized by Byron because he is everywhere. Anyway, Byron is off in Europe with his friend’s girlfriend who is this young girl—this young girl’s half-sister as well as Byron’s doctor. If this starts to sound like Keeping up with the Kardashians, you are not wrong. This is frankly the celebrity culture of the period, and it was every bit as naughty as we have now. The fact that one of Byron’s estranged lovers once described him as mad, bad, and dangerous to know, which sounds like a remarkably modern epitaph which was actually authored in about 1817.

Here he is in Switzerland with this entire party. He declares himself one evening to be frightfully, frightfully bored, in the way I feel that only the English aristocracy probably could and he says, “You must all now go and write a story to entertain me.” They did which is kind of amazing. Off they go. That night three troops get birthed that still shape our fear narratives today—not necessarily our relationship to technology, but our fear narratives. Byron’s doctor writes the first vampire story. This young woman’s half-sister who is trying to have a not really successful affair with Byron writes the first zombie story. This young girl, you know who she is.

This is Mary Shelley. She writes Frankenstein . The Frankenstein story of course is a story about a lot of things, but it is at its core a moral play. It is a moral story about the consequences of man attempting to make life—of Dr. Frankenstein taking a body, stitching it together and animating it with what was arguably the most important technology of the 1800s—electricity. This thing springs to life and attempts to do what? Well, it attempts to become human. It runs around studying people peering through holes in walls to attempt to work out what makes us us. It attempts to be human, of course, and ultimately fails and we reject it. It tries to kill us. Right there is borne the notion of “if we make something and it gets intelligent enough, it will try to kill us.”

This is one story, it has never been out of print since. It is one of the first things that was made into movies. It has had multiple stage plays. It has had television shows, and it has been in cartoons. Much like the Luddites, which we also use to talk about our relationship with technology, we talk about things as being Frankenstein-esque, i.e., cobbled together, doomed, not a good look. Here we have this kind of sense already of weaving things together, and already 200 years ago of where the narrative of fear comes from. It does not stop there, because that would be a depressing story if it did. It just gets worse.

Byron had a complicated relationship with his daughter and with his daughter’s mother who decided that Byron was a bad influence. The chances are that she probably was not wrong. She decided to raise this child as arguably one of the first children of the modern era. This child was a scientific experiment, Ada Lovelace and it ended nearly as poorly. She let this child have no access to art, no access to poetry. She was kept away from painting and literature. She was raised on a steady diet of science and mathematics. She had a mathematics tutor. She had language tutors. She had a science tutor, and she was incredibly gifted. She showed extraordinary promise. She married young and continued to move around English society and high society.

She befriended a man called Charles Babbage, who was nothing if not kind of a bit of a mover and shaker. He was a bit of a kind of player and a huge gambler. He was also a man who collected automatons because all of these stories loop around on themselves, and then a man who at least on paper invented the first computer. This in fact, the Difference Engine. This was a first attempt to use the technology of looms to create abstractions, to basically go from straightforward information to a layer of abstraction. He built half of one of these. It sat in his dining room. He had a naked dancing silver automaton next to it. He would hit people up for money to try and build out the rest of it. He published a series of papers about this. They caught the attention of many of the intelligentsia in England at the time—and notably this young woman. She went well, if you could do that, that is all really interesting. Effectively, you are going to need a program to take advantage of it.

Byron’s daughter, Ada Lovelace is the first programmer. She is the first person to work out that computation which was all really well and good, but you needed to do it in the service of something. This moment here of being able to say that you could abstract information, that you could take the technology of automatons and looms and start to say that maybe you could make what out of it? A brain? Sense? An abstraction? You know where this is going. It takes a while. This is in the 1850s, 1856 to be precise.

You do not actually get to the real potential of what this might be until World War II. Flash forward to Bletchley Park, to the enigma, to the code breakers of England, and to the mathematicians who went “how on earth do we brute force this code breaking? We need something.” They look back to Babbage and they look back to this piece of technology. They start to invent the beginning of the computing that we understand today.

There was a young man that was involved in that effort, hugely important also to our fear of the moment. He was born in Orissa, India to English parents. He was sent back to England to go to school. He was an awkward, incredibly smart, an incredibly socially uncomfortable man. He turned out to be an incredibly gifted mathematician and ended up at Bletchley Park. In some ways, he is not unreasonably given enormous credit for breaking codes and for the work that he did there. He was also, I think, incredibly awkwardly in the 1940s and 1950s in Britain—gay . This had huge consequences for him in the work that he was doing. He was caught in a compromising situation immediately after the war and was offered some choices about how he wanted to handle it. He first chose was to be mediated with hormones to stop his quote, unquote “unnatural” impulses. Ultimately, he decided that that really was not for him. The British government stripped him of his security clearance. They stripped him of his access to Bletchley Park and all the work he had done before and sent him into exile to Manchester. I am sorry for those of you who are from Manchester. You did not realize that you were exiled. In the 1940s, late ones you were, they sent him there and told him that he couldn’t work on any of the things he had been working on.

In some ways, he became a theoretical computational person at that point. His most important article, at least from where I sit at this point in this field, is one that was published in 1950. It had the title: Can a Machine Think? Now, talk about a provocative question. As soon as you ask the question, you have to presuppose the answer yes. In this article he spells out a test to prove whether a machine is thinking or not. We know this test because it’s called the Turing test, because this is of course Alan Turing’s life story. The Turing test presupposes that the test will be passed so that the machine would have been able to think when it passes a simple test. There is a wall. On one side of the wall there is a machine and a human being. On the other side of the wall there is another human being. When the human being asking the questions, the interrogator, can no longer tell what is on the other side of the wall—cannot tell the difference between the machine and the person—the Turing test would be passed. Now, the Turing test has not yet been passed.

The closest we have come is with machines that were either programmed using dialogue from schizophrenics, which is really interesting. As long as it didn’t seem rational, you actually got somewhere interesting for the human on the other side. Of course, what that also starts to set up is again this kind of reification of the notion that what makes us human and what would make a machine like us—is it if thought like us. Effectively, here is it that if it has our cognitive capacity than it is like us.

Of course, for those of you who did not know Turing, you know this test but from a slightly different angle. An American science fiction writer working in this moment took this article and turned it into what has to be one of the more famous novellas, because it bookends one of the more famous movies that also sets in play our fears of technology. The novella is Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. The movie is Blade Runner. The author is Philip K. Dick. He understood full well that it was not about whether machines would think. He reasonably assumed given where he was sitting in the world, machines were going to think. A much more interesting question was “were they going to feel?” If they felt what would they have felt? If machines could have emotions and memories and feelings, what would that make them? For Philip K. Dick, unlike Turing, he understood that what made us human was our capacity for emotions and memory—and a whole life that was neither rational nor objective. It was the subjective landscape that would be more interesting.

You have building here very clearly across this sort of trajectory a story about fear. The fear is about objects that might replace us, and objects that threaten what makes us distinctively us. Nearly 400 years ago the stake that we put in the ground—at least in the West or at least in the post-Enlightenment period—was that what made us human was our capacity to think. As the machines get closer and closer to thinking, the anxiety ratchets up. We get to think that somehow Furby-Siri-Terminator is a reasonable sequence. When we all know that that is kind of a cuckoo-bananas sequence. You can do that kind of stretch, right? For me you kind of go okay, well that is where fear comes from. I have to wonder about where wonder might go.

I am inclined to think that as human beings we are oriented to it. We kind of like it. I have to imagine that it is possible to have technology without fear, and without the sense that it is going to kill us, and so where do you go looking for that? Well, if you take the kind of Frazer The Golden Bough approach you get out of the West almost immediately. You do the kind of classic neo-orientalizing that anthropologists like, or you kind of go that there are probably some other people who think differently. We should go and find them.

Here is my move to say that it turns out that whole fear of machines is deeply rooted and embedded in a post-Enlightenment West, Cartesian idea of “I think, therefore I am.” It turns out that if you go into other places, there are already completely different ideas about machinery.

In Islam there are two very famous books, one written in 850 A.D. by Banu Musa, and so three Persian brothers who were engineers wrote a book called The Book of Ingenious Mechanical Devices, which is an excellent name. It is full of genuinely ingenious mechanical devices. And then in 1206 A.D., that book was updated and edited by a man named Ibn al-Razzaz al-Jazari who included a whole new set of mechanical devices in this. Mostly, not yet working out the mechanisms that we would see in mechanical clocks, but starting to use springs and gears and levers to make objects come to life. There is a series of them that are really quite famous. They mostly have to do with these objects here, which are these enormous clocks. We are talking about 10-15’ high, huge movements of water, elephants appeared, dragons appeared. I mean, they were quite a spectacle, but in these there are also a series of other objects that are really important.

Both al-Jazari and Banu Musa created a series of birds and the birds were for participation in Salat. Five times a day in Islam when you pray you should wash your hands and your feet before you go to the mosque, before you pray. They created a series of birds that when you tipped them over, water came out of their mouths or water came out of their heads. They were exquisite objects. They are clearly designed to be a part of a ritual landscape. They are not like anything that exists before, because whilst it is true that ducks do sh—t when they wander around, peacocks do not pour water out of their mouths when you tip them upside down. There was very much a sense here of playing with the possibility of things and not the literal trajectory of them. You already start to see here that with these ingenious mechanical devices there is no notion that they are replacing what we can do, or what objects did. It was not about simulacrum; it was about grace.

The much better, I think most extraordinary example of this, because it does borrow literally and directly on the Huguenot watch parts actually comes from Japan. The surplus of clocks in Europe, clocks get shipped all over the place where a bunch of clocks from Switzerland and France end up in China. They go from China to Japan. In Japan they are immediately dismantled in a kind of reverse-engineering with which we are somewhat familiar. They are immediately dismantled and they try to work out what makes them interesting.

There are a series of fascinating engineer kind of mechanics in this period, one in particular who got really interested with the mechanics inside clocks and created a series of objects on the basis of them. This is his most famous. This is a teacup, karakuri. For karakuri there is no word in English for it, but basically in English it literally translates to a trickster or a trickster figure, which is interesting. Also, sometimes in the literature these are sometimes called automatons or robots. Basically, this one here is tiny. It is about this big. Again, it is not really shaped like anything that we know, because there is not much that is this big. It has a little teacup in its hand. You put tea in its hand. When it has got weight in the cup, it runs across the tabletop. When you pick up the teacup, it run back across the tabletop. It is kind of excellent, right? It was motivated by a whale bone. The guy who built them actually had an entire book of diagrams, and so I think like blueprints. This one is actually not an original. It is built from this blueprint by [Masahiro] students in Japan. It took them ten years to work out how to get from that to that, but it does run across the table and deliver tea. It is kind of fabulous.

Again, this is not replacing something. There were not little people that you stuck on tabletops and they ran across tables in Japan. This is not kind of the experience of the landscape here. What you have instead is making an object that is about grace, about a ritual. It is a ritual that is a hugely important ritual of sociality, of relationality, of righteousness—of beauty—and here you have created a piece of technology that fits into it.

Those same pieces of technology passed down through the ITO period, by the 1820s you have the arrival of mechanization brought directly from England to Japan at the behest of the Chinese emperor. Some of the figures who mechanized the factories in England go with the machinery to Japan. There is no destruction of the machinery. There is a very different embrace for better or worse of industrialization, such that by the contemporary period we see a completely different orientation to machinery.

I was in Tokyo about a year ago with some colleagues of mine. We were driving in one of the prefectures outside of Tokyo. I saw this sign out of a window. Like the good anthropologist that I am, I got out of a moving vehicle to photograph this sign—much to the horror of the people who were with me. It’s like they stopped the car. “Are you okay?” I am like oh, my God, what is this? They’re like what? What is this? They’re like it’s a sign. I’m like yeah, I know that. It’s like a totally excellent sign. I must photograph it from like seven different angles. The car is like what is your problem? I’m like what does it say? They’re like it says that it’s a robot zone. I’m like oh, my God! Okay, because I’m realizing that it’s going to be one those conversations that possibly goes on longer than you want. I was thinking well, what does it say? They said, “Well, it says that it is a robot zone. It’s an autonomous robot zone; that there robots two meters in from the curb.” I’m like what robots? They’re like autonomous robots. Like what are they doing? They’re like two meters in from the curb being autonomous. I’m like okay, but aren’t you concerned? They’re like no, that is what the sign is here for. I’m like who belongs to the robots? They’re like they’re autonomous. Doesn’t that mean the same thing? They’re saying, “Yes.” I’m like but about the robots—we have those moments where as an anthropologist you realize that you are having a cross-cultural encounter that is going poorly. I stopped and said, “Okay, were I in America I think that they would find this sign troubling. They’re like oh yeah, that’s because they think that the technology will kill them in America. That is just science fiction. Here in Japan the robots are our friends. I’m like excellent.

They proceeded to unpack this for me. It was a series of people who were various different ages who talked about growing up with comic books with friendly robots and with technology as part and parcel of what it means to be a progressive nation; of what it means to be a modern nation; of technology as being suffused with its own, in this case, autonomy where the robots can be perfectly well trusted to run around two meters in from the curb being autonomous doing God knows what! No one was concerned. I remember thinking ah, okay, technology doesn’t always have to equal fear.

There are a whole series of other ways of making sense of this here, if you don’t believe that your entire humanity is tied up in your capacity to be autonomous and sentient, cognitive beings. You can share the sidewalk, albeit with guidance with technology. It got me thinking of are there other points in Western tradition where there is also at least part and parcel what is going on? There are pieces of it. There are moments when as technologies have sparked into life, we are extraordinarily enamored with them. The moments in the U.S. and in the U.K. when electricity was first introduced and we went through a period of visiting electricity—when people took buses from the Midwest of the United States to New York to see electricity—they literally went to visit Broadway to see electricity. That line about the lights on Broadway was a true and literal thing. The same in the U.K., people went to visit electricity. You went to go see it.

Unsurprisingly, right? It’s kind of a hard sell. If you’re an electricity company you’ve got a bit of a hard life here. You’re like here, I have this great infrastructure and it’s got one killer wrap. That killer wrap is a light bulb and you’re going to love it. Everyone is going, you know, I’ve got windows and gas—and candles. I’m not sure that I need this light bulb thing. It became very much a “how do you make a spectacle out of electricity.” How do you capture the extraordinary magic that really did exist for people when a light bulb flicked on. There was something quite amazing about that moment.

My favorite of all the stories about this comes from Niagara in New York. The man who owned the electricity plant there had electrified all of the businesses in town. He had a surplus of electricity. He was like, we must engage people with this electricity thing. He couldn’t very well bus them all to New York, because that kind of defeated his purpose. He decided that he would hold parties at his house to demonstrate electricity—a big house, old house, wooden floor on the first floor. He lays into the wooden floor a little tiny metal track, much like this black line here. It went all the way around the first floor of his house. He invited all the big names in town to come and visit.