In 1747, about a century after Descartes’ death, the French physician Julien Offray de La Mettrie wrote a highly controversial pamphlet called L’Homme Machine, which literally translates as “Man a Machine.” In it, La Mettrie takes a radical step beyond Descartes by jettisoning entirely the notion of the soul, and portraying the human creature as no different in kind to the animals Descartes had presented to the world as mere machines. For him, the human body was “a self-winding machine, a living representation of perpetual motion.”
La Mettrie had been influenced by seeing the exhibited automata of the inventor Jacques de Vaucanson, whose most famous work was a mechanical duck that, when fed grain, appeared to have the ability of metabolizing and then defecating it. (“Without the shitting duck of Vaucanson,” Voltaire sharply observed, “we would have nothing to remind us of the glory of France.”) Vaucanson also made human automata, although these were charged not with the production of feces, but with more genteel labors like the playing of flutes and the banging of tambourines.
It was through the popularity of Vaucanson’s contrivances that the term “android” became established. The first volume of Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie contained a lengthy and detailed description of Vaucanson’s automated flautist, in an entry entitled “Androïde,” which referred to “an automaton in human form, which, by means of certain well-positioned strings, etc. performs certain functions which externally resemble those of man.”
In L’Homme Machine, La Mettrie raises the specter of an automaton capable of more than mere parlor tricks. “If it took more instruments,” he writes, “more cogs, more springs, to show the movement of the planets than to show or tell the time, if it took Vaucanson more artistry to make his flautist than his duck, he would have needed even more to make a speaking machine, which can no longer be considered impossible, particularly at the hands of a new Prometheus.”
In 1898, when the power of the U.S. Navy was being tested in the Caribbean and Pacific during the Spanish-American War, the inventor Nikola Tesla displayed a new device at an electrical exhibition at New York’s Madison Square Garden. This was a miniature iron boat, which Tesla had placed in a large vat of water, and equipped with a mast for the reception of radio waves, allowing him to direct its movements from the opposite end of the arena with a wireless controller. The demonstration stirred considerable public excitement, and Tesla and his autonomous boat made the front pages of national newspapers. Given the events of the time, the device was inevitably interpreted as a great leap forward in the technology of naval warfare. But like so many scientists whose innovations have refined the machineries of slaughter, Tesla was personally opposed to the forces of nationalism and militarism (if only passively so). According to Prodigal Genius, a 1944 biography by John O’Neill, when a student suggested that the boat might prove extremely useful if its hull was packed with dynamite and torpedoes to be remotely detonated, Tesla snapped: “You do not see there a wireless torpedo; you see the first of a race of robots, mechanical men which will do the laborious work of the human race.”
Tesla was convinced that the development of this “race of robots” would have a transformative influence on how humans lived and worked, on how they waged war. “This evolution,” he wrote in 1900, “will bring more and more into prominence a machine or mechanism with the fewest individuals as an element of warfare….Greatest possible speed and maximum rate of energy delivery by the war apparatus will be the main object. The loss of life will become smaller.”
Writing in June 1900 about his ambition to create functioning humanoid robots, Tesla echoes Descartes and La Mettrie in invoking his own sense of himself as a mechanical instrument:
I have by every thought and act of mine, demonstrated, and do so daily, to my absolute satisfaction that I am an automaton endowed with power of movement, which merely responds to external stimuli beating upon my sense organs, and thinks and moves accordingly.
With these experiences it was only natural that, long ago, I conceived the idea of constructing an automaton which would mechanically represent me, and which would respond, as I do myself, but, of course, in a much more primitive manner, to external influences.
This machine, he reasoned, “would perform its movements in the manner of a living being, for it would have all the chief elements of the same.” To the problem of this machine lacking an “element” of mind, Tesla proposed the solution of letting it borrow his own. “This element,” he writes, “I could easily embody in it by conveying to it my own intelligence, my own understanding.” The idea here was that he would control the machine using the precise method he had used with the boat. This he gave the inelegant name “telautomatics,” by which he meant “the art of controlling the movements and operations of distant automatons.”
But he was convinced that it would be possible to create automata not merely with borrowed minds, but with the ability to think for themselves. As he put it in an unpublished statement fifteen years later, “Teleautomata will be ultimately produced, capable of acting as if possessed of their own intelligence and their advent will create a revolution.”
—
Over the two days I spent at the Fairplex, I saw things that caused me to reflect upon whether such a revolution might be close at hand. In a more or less explicit sense, the whole premise of the event was that these automata would, sooner or later, stand in place of our bodies, these machines of bone and sinew and flesh. I saw a bomb-disposal robot, its pincered arms moving in perfect synchrony with those of a man standing behind it, opening a zippered canvas bag and plucking from within it plastic-wrapped candy, which it handed to passersby—as powerful an example of Tesla’s teleautomatics, in its way, as the more complex humanoid marionettes competing in the arena. Tesla’s idea of a race of robots “doing the laborious work of the human race” was clearly some distance from realization, but there didn’t seem to be any doubt that this was what capitalism’s most advanced engines were driving toward. A solid indicator of this trend was offered, as it happened, by a business named after Tesla himself: the Silicon Valley electric car company Tesla Motors, whose production line was almost entirely roboticized, and whose CEO, Elon Musk—the same Elon Musk who was so publicly terrified by the prospect of artificial superintelligence—had recently announced the company’s plans to develop its own self-driving system within three to five years.
Although I had not beheld him with my own human eyes, I understood that Musk had come to the Fairplex that weekend to observe the robots and meet with their engineers. And I understood, too, that Google’s cofounder Larry Page, a Singulatarian of note, had descended from the summit of Mountain View to be among these machines, in whose future his own company had invested considerable money. In 2013, Google had paid half a billion dollars for Boston Dynamics, whose menagerie of uncanny creatures—BigDog, Cheetah, Sand Flea, LittleDog—had been created largely with DARPA funding, and whose Atlas robot was being used as hardware by several of the teams here in Pomona.
A few hundred yards from the racetrack, in the massive hangarlike building from which the robots were directed by their engineers, a squad of Boston Dynamics technicians was also on hand to tend to the contusions and malfunctions of the Atlas humanoids.
Boston Dynamics, with its weird techno-fauna, was itself a hybrid specimen of the relationship between the Pentagon and Silicon Valley; its machines were the unnatural creatures of a new military-industrial complex. Google’s links with DARPA were numerous and far-reaching. DARPA’s previous director, Regina Dugan, for instance, had left her government job to work at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, where she now leads something called the Advanced Technology and Projects Team.
For a while now, I had been fascinated by the creatures produced by this robotics firm, founded in the early 1990s by Marc Raibert (a former colleague of Hans Moravec at Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute). Over the last couple of years, I had repeatedly and compulsively watched the succession of YouTube videos releas
ed by the company, containing footage of their latest ingenious automata. And I found something subtly unsettling in these robots, in their simultaneous remoteness from and proximity to recognizable forms of biological life. Looking at BigDog, for instance, skittering with blind insectile relentlessness over a patch of ice, or WildCat, with its uncanny hydraulic dressage, I would feel a pleasurable thrill of dread—an instinctive terror of predation, perhaps—compounded with the knowledge that these robots had been created with Pentagon funding, and had become by acquisition the creatures of the world’s most powerful technology corporation.
The rhetoric of Silicon Valley’s geek establishment is steeped in a diluted solution of countercultural idealism—changing the world, making things better, disrupting old orders, and so forth—but its roots are deep in the blood-rich soil of war. As the writer Rebecca Solnit puts it, “the story Silicon Valley rarely tells about itself has to do with dollar signs and weapons systems.”
Hewlett-Packard, the valley’s first major success, was a military contractor whose cofounder David Packard served as deputy secretary of defense during the Nixon administration. His most significant contribution during his term of office, Solnit points out, “was a paper about overriding the laws preventing the imposition of martial law.”
I was aware that there was something unreasonable, even slightly hysterical, in my reaction to Boston Dynamics’ menagerie of humanoids and techno-animals, some half-gleeful indulgence of a paranoid tendency, but I could not on that account disregard that reaction. At a subcortical level, I rejected these creatures and what they represented; some primitive, human part of me wanted to smash them with a hammer just as the young Thomas Aquinas destroyed the automaton of Albertus Magnus. I was subject, in other words, to an obscure but insistent sense of their diabolical provenance and intent.
And yet I felt the whole idea of political paranoia to be increasingly an anachronism, a nostalgic and basically meaningless gesture toward a twentieth-century dispensation in which it was possible merely to suspect the iniquitous designs and collusions of government and capital. To be paranoid now—paranoid, that is, as opposed to minimally aware of what was going on—was to be deluded in a manner that had become almost whimsical, like those fond sentimentalists who comfort themselves with folktales about secret world governments and shapeshifting lizards and Illuminati bloodlines, and to whom the only reasonable response was to say, “Look, pal, you’re overthinking it, have you looked into this whole capitalism deal?” It was out in the open now, the truth about these things—or enough of it to be getting along with.
The May 1924 issue of the American popular technology magazine Science and Invention featured a cover illustration of a colossal red robot—a thing like an outsized hot water cylinder with articulated legs and caterpillar treads for feet and, instead of hands, twin whirring circular blurs of truncheons. The shining yellow lamps of its eyes stare down at a scattering crowd of men, their peaked caps flying from their heads, eyes abulge with terror as they flee the robotic assault. The article inside, entitled “Distant Control by Radio Makes Mechanical Cop Possible,” describes this imagined law enforcement device in almost obscene detail: the stabilizing gyroscopes of its thighs, the radio control cabinet and gasoline tank in its thorax, the modest phallic presence of its tear gas duct, the anal conduit of its rear engine exhaust. A further illustration shows a towering phalanx of these robot cops driving back a crowd of protesting workers, against a desolate background of chimney stacks, louring smoke, dark satanic mills. “Such a machine,” we are assured, “would seem to be exceedingly valuable to disperse mobs, or for war purposes or even for industrial purposes. For fighting mobs use is made of tear gas which is stored in a tank under pressure and which alone will quickly displace a mob if necessary. The arms are provided with rotating discs which carry lead balls on flexible leads. These act as police clubs in action.”*3
This bare fascist fantasy, revealing for all its absurdity, depicts a violent machinery of the state protecting the interests of capital against the assembled bodies of the laboring class, with their regulable human wills, their frangible skulls beneath undoffed caps. It’s as blunt an illustration as I’ve seen of the prewar terror of organized labor: an inverted Frankenstein scenario, whereby the monstrous body of the automaton, a looming literalization of Hobbes’s “Artificiall Man,” is enlisted into the stern husbandry of ideological order. As the French philosopher Grégoire Chamayou puts it in his book Drone Theory, the dream represented by the “mechanical cop” is “to construct a bodiless force, a political body without human organs, replacing the old regimented bodies of subjects by mechanical instruments that would, if possible, become its sole agents.”
Even as I cheered on the robots competing at the DARPA Robotics Challenge, and even as I laughed indulgently at their crude pratfalls, something of this technological unease clung to me through my time in Pomona, some sense that I was watching the first staggering movements toward an unmanned future.
As I took my leave of these machines, the mind-children of my fellow humans, and as I made my way out of the grandstand toward the Uber driver whose approach I was tracking on my iPhone screen, I found myself suddenly, intimately conscious of the mechanical nature of my movements, of the articulated pendula of my legs, with their ball joints and adductors and extensors, and I felt for a moment as though no interior volition was at work here, as though this object in motion, feeling these things, was merely a component in some vast and unrevealed pattern, some controlled system that included the Uber driver, the advancing car, the highway network of Greater Los Angeles, the images representing these phenomena on the smartphone screen, the eyes watching that screen, the information, the code, and the world itself, among other things.
It occurred to me, not for the first time, that I might be losing my mind, that I might be succumbing to some bizarre delusion, brought on by excessive exposure to humanoid machines and to mechanistic ideas of the human being, that I myself was a machine, or a subordinate mechanism in a vast universal contraption of every existing thing. It was a delirium, or a truth, that would gather momentum, and find a sort of uncanny external reflection in the machinic humans, the self-proclaimed cyborgs, I was about to encounter.
* * *
*1 This is known, apparently, as Moravec’s Paradox, after robotics professor Hans Moravec’s observation that “it is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult level performance on intelligence tests or playing checkers, and difficult or impossible to give them the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to perception and mobility.”
*2 The Catholic Church, famously, was not a fan of the whole alchemy scene. This had largely to do with the perception that Satan’s fingerprints were all over the practice, with its herbs and sulfur and general aura of magic. But the fact that the work itself must have involved a nontrivial amount of wanking can’t have helped, either.
*3 The author of this article—and the publisher of the magazine in which it appeared—was Hugo Gernsback, the Luxembourgian-American inventor and entrepreneur who is often credited as a founding figure of modern sci-fi, mostly for having gone on to publish the first-ever dedicated sci-fi journal, Amazing Stories. The Hugos, the annual awards for outstanding achievement presented at the World Science Fiction Convention, are named after him. Like many a successful businessman then and now, Gernsback clearly did not have a lot of time for unions, whose members he seemed to want to be fucked in the eye by tear-gas-ejaculating police penises.
Biology and Its Discontents
THE OLD STEUBENVILLE Pike is a narrow stretch of country road just off the freeway between downtown Pittsburgh and the airport. A short distance along this route, there’s a small motel that’s been abandoned since the 1950s, its cracked windows and wooden doors half concealed by a profusion of vegetation: a rotting avatar of definitive Americana in the midst of nature’s slow and implacable reclamation. Right next door is a small wooden house with a couple of canvas hammocks hanging fr
om its front porch.
If you were passing by here, maybe on the way to pick up a crate of beer at the drive-thru liquor wholesaler just down the road, you might notice some people lounging in those hammocks, leaning against the screen door. And if you did notice them, you probably wouldn’t think there was anything much going on with them; you’d probably assume they were just a bunch of young wasters sitting around on a porch, smoking, shooting the Western Pennsylvania breeze. You’d have no reason, certainly, to believe that they were cyborgs, or that they thought of themselves as such. You’d have no reason to believe that they’d just come up for a breather from the basement of that house, where they’d been tinkering with homemade technologies for transcending the limitations of the human animal.
Let me fill you in, briefly, about that basement, where I spent some disorienting afternoons and evenings with these people, these cyborgs, in the dying days of the summer of 2015. It didn’t look like the kind of place where the future, or a future, was being created. It could definitely have done with a good cleaning, for one thing. There was stuff everywhere, a grimy miscellany of disjecta: disemboweled hard drives, decommissioned monitors, empty beer bottles, cardboard boxes, forsaken workout equipment coated with a velvet layer of dust. When I arrived on my first evening there, the occupants of this basement were unfurling a new plastic banner they’d just taken delivery of; in a spirit of corporate pride, they were tacking it to a wall over a long desk cluttered with an array of devices—laptops, semiconductors, batteries, wires, oscilloscopes. The banner bore the words “GRINDHOUSE WETWARE” in a stockily futuristic font, and a red and white stylized image of silicon-chip circuitry in the shape of a human brain.
To Be a Machine Page 14