Automatons

 The invention of the automaton dates from antiquity, as is shown by the dove of Archytas and the robot of Ptolemy Philadelphos. These much admired mechanisms, like the automatons of Albertus Magnus, Bacon, and Regiomantus, were ingenious toys; nothing more serious. They evoked not only wonder, but also fear. The robot of Albertus Magnus, which could open the door and greet the visitor (the fruit of decades of effort), was smashed by the startled Thomas Aquinas with a blow of his stick. The intellectual fascination which machines have held for man from the earliest times is coupled with a presentiment of the uncanny, an almost unaccountable feeling of horror. We sense this in Goethe’s remark on the advance of mechanical factory work, and in the shudder with which E. T. A. Hoffmann and Edgar Allan Poe viewed the automatons and mechanical figures of the early nineteenth century, among which the mechanical flute player, the drummer, and Vaucanson's mechanical duck are the most important.

This is the same horror that has of old seized man in the presence of clocks, water mills, wheels – in the presence of any work or contrivance which acts and moves although it has no life of its own. The beholder is not satisfied to study the mechanics; he is not satisfied with the understanding of their operation; he is disquieted by their mechanical action. This motion produces the illusion of life, and this illusion, once he has looked through it, is precisely what is so disturbing. Myths, sagas, and fairy tales recognize no distinction between animate and inanimate nature; they give life even to the lifeless by various personifications. That such a distinction is not recognized is the basis of poetry which voices itself by metaphor, analogy, and image; it is the basis, too, of all epic song. Orpheus, for example, to whom was ascribed the gift of enlivening the very stones, is the arch poet and arch singer. The machine, however, gives the impression that something lifeless penetrates into, and permeates life. This is what the observer senses and what evokes in him ideas of age, coldness, death, akin to the awareness of a lifeless, mechanically self-repeating time such as clockwork measures. It is no accident that the clock was the first automaton to achieve signal success among men. In the philosophical system of Descartes, animals, which are treated as automatons, are nothing but clocks whose movements operate under mechanical laws.

From Georg Jünger - The Failure of Technology