Breakthrough: The Ideas That Changed the World: "The Robot" (Bigger Bang, PBS, 2019)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The Breakthrough episode after that, “The Robot,” proved unexpectedly interesting. It began, as so much of our scientific knowledge and curiosity does, in ancient Greece, particularly with a myth about one of the renegade gods (no, not Prometheus this time!) who was thrown out of Mount Olympus for literally playing with fire. So in his exile he built two contraptions in the form of females and made them his servants. The next step towards the invention of robotics happened from three brothers in Baghdad in the 9th century C.E. who were part of what amounted to a pioneering think tank in the capital city of the Islamic Caliphate. Not many people realize that during the Middle Ages, while Europe’s Christians regarded the Greeks and Romans as hopeless heretics and burned as many of their scientific writings as they could get their hands on, the Arabs revered their technological advances; many key works from ancient Greeks and Romans on science and technology survive only in translations into Arabic. As I’ve noted many times before, in the 13th century the world’s largest library was in Timbuktu, but virtually all its books were in Arabic because the indigenous African languages were not written down, and Arabic served as the lingua franca of scholarship in Africa the way Latin was in Europe. These three brothers in Baghdad worked out an automaton that could play music – though keyboard instruments didn’t exist yet, they devised a contraption that could record and play back music on a system like that of a player piano, and a modern-day researcher, Liang Zhipeng, built a replica of the machine from the original plans and used it to record a snatch of himself playing an Arab flute. (He wasn’t very good as a musician, but he didn’t have to be.)

The show also encompassed the story of Charles Babbage, who in Britain in the 1830’s essentially invented the computer; he built a working prototype of something called the “Difference Engine,” though he never finished it because he and his principal workman had a falling-out and only a portion of it survives to this day at a London museum of science and technology. Babbage later designed something even more elaborate called the “Analytical Engine,” and he had an interesting patroness: Lord Byron’s daughter Ada, whose mother didn’t want her to follow in her dad’s footsteps and become a scandal-mongering poet, so she educated her in science and technology. Ada Byron translated an Italian book about automata and added an appendix of her own in which she argued that machines could be built that could take over just about all calculations and other human processes, though she believed that no machine would ever be capable of independent thought. The show’s next profile in intellectual courage was Alan Turing, who before World War II published a 1936 article in a scientific journal exploring the possibilities of thinking machines. Turing is best known today for his work at Bletchley Park, the British code-breaking center during the war, and in particular for being part of the team that cracked the German Enigma code machine. Turing developed a computer called the “Bombe” that immensely aided the process of breaking Enigma by being able to run through, thousands of times faster than humans could do it, all the immense possibilities for just how an Enigma message could be decoded and what it could mean. In 1951 Turing gave a radio lecture in which he proposed the so-called “Imitation Game,” also known as the “Turing Test,” for determining whether a machine could actually think; he’d read Ada Byron’s essay years before but had decided she was wrong and it would be possible to invent a machine that could think.

Also in 1948 a team of British scientists built the so-called “Baby,” a giant computer that separated its memory functions from the central processing unit (though this was something Charles Babbage had built into his design over 100 years before when he said his “Analytical Engine” would have components called the “Mill” and the “Store” – basically the “Store” would be what is now called random-access memory and the “Mill” would do the actual computational work). This show argued that the “Baby” was the world’s first general-purpose computer (it ignored ENIAC, a similar computer built two years earlier in the United States), and as with the earlier demonstrations of the Iraqi robot musician and Babbage’s “Difference Engine,” it was illustrated through a modern-day reconstruction. The business of actually inventing a self-contained, self-powering mechanism that would perform simple tasks fell to a U.S.-born psychologist who was working at a mental institution in Britain when he invented the “Tortoise,” a mechanical creature whose outer skin was connected to sensors so that, if it bumped into something, the machine could figure out a way to back up and go around it. The show mentioned Czech playwright Karel Capek’s 1920’s play R.U.R. as the piece of literature that first gave the world the word “robot” (after “robotnik,” the Czech word for “worker”), became a smash hit worldwide and posited a dystopian future in which robots revolt against their human creators, take over the world, annihilate the human race and then have to figure out how to reproduce themselves sexually. (The haunting final scene shows the last two robots, one male, one female, pondering just how they’re going to keep the robot race going now that it’s just the two of them: an intriguing science-fiction “spin” on the Adam and Eve story.)

Then it depicted modern-day uses of robots, including the descendant of the Baghdad automata: a robot D.J. that can blend and “scratch” records and play simple chords on a keyboard. It also discussed the Roomba robot vacuum cleaner as well as another product made by the same company that was used by U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan to disarm roadside bombs and improvised explosive devices (IED’s) and blow them up safely without risking human lives. I must confess that the increasing development of robots scares the hell out of me, particularly the rise of artificial intelligence and its use to put huge masses of people out of work. Already musicians have reported being called in for recording sessions at which they just play scales, so the notes can be combined through A.I. and used to play any piece of music, past, present and future. One of the things that’s powering the current Hollywood writers’ and actors’ strikes is that the studios are starting to do that visually as well; they’re calling in actors and just filming them to use their images as background characters, obviating the need to hire human extras. The studios in future will just be able to plug in images from a huge data bank of A.I. representations and not have to pay actors. Between that and the possibility that A.I. programs can do the actual writing (fulfilling one of George Orwell’s most dire – and least quoted – predictions in 1984 that in his dystopian future all books would be originally written by machines and the only involvement from humans would be to edit the machine-generated manuscripts in a so-called “Rewrite Squad”), the big studios are looking towards a future when they won’t have to deal with those pesky “creative” people at all!