Demons and Monsters

"It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a compulsive motion agitated its limbs."

Mary Shelley's succulent description of Victor Frankenstein's moment of triumph--a moment that Hollywood traditionally illustrated with flashes of lightning and showers of sparks--dramatizes one of the most fundamental metaphors in mythology: the creation of an artificial man. It is an idea that can be traced back to the folklore of man's own creation. According to Greek legend, the first humans were robots formed out of clay by the Titan Prometheus.

The first automata in actual history were more modest in concept. Archytas of Tarentum (400-350 B.C.) built a wooden dove that was reputed to have flown. In the 2nd century B.C., Hero of Alexandria wrote a book, De Automatis, that described a mechanical theater with robot figures that marched and danced in various temple ceremonies. But the king of all robotmakers was Johann Nepomuk Maelzel (1772-1838), creator of the metronome, who also constructed an automatic orchestra called the Panharmonicon, which could simulate violins, cellos, clarinets, flutes, trumpets, drums, cymbals and triangle. For this contraption, the inventor commissioned Beethoven to compose his Vittoria Symphony, Maelzel also toured America with a robot chess player that was actually operated from inside by a hunchbacked Alsatian dwarf named Schlumberger.

These were mere toys, however, compared with the persistent and half-forbidden dream of an artificial man.-* St. Albertus Magnus, the 13th century German philosopher, was said to have spent 30 years constructing a servant of "deceptively human appearance" out of metal, wood, glass, wax and leather. This creature allegedly opened the door to Albertus' cell at the Dominican monastery in Cologne, asked visitors what they wanted and even engaged them in polite conversation. The end of the legend was that Albertus' celebrated pupil, Thomas Aquinas, smashed the robot to pieces because he considered it demonic. The Swiss alchemist Paracelsus, who was himself considered rather demonic, gave lectures on the creation of a homunculus and even offered a recipe of ingredients, including human blood and putrefied semen. In 16th century Prague, too, the devout Rabbi Judah Loew was reported to have created out of clay a giant robot known as a golem. This figure, which came to life when a tablet with a divine name, shem, was placed in its mouth, was supposed to protect the Jews from persecution, but some accounts claim that its masters tried to use it for unworthy purposes, and others report that it turned upon its creators.

To almost all these versions of the legend of the artificial man there clung the aura of evil. To create a living being was God's role; to imitate God was blasphemous, even diabolic, and thus doomed to disaster. Hence Frankenstein.

The term robot comes from the Czech word for forced labor and was invented by Karel Capek and popularized in his "fantastic melodrama" of 1921, R.U.R., which stood for Rossum's Universal Robots. These robots look and behave like people and work twice as hard, but since "God hasn't the least notion of modern engineering," as Rossum's general manager puts it, the robots have been built without such impractical attributes as feeling or a soul. First they do all the world's work, then they wage all the world's wars, then they rebel and destroy their makers. "You are not as strong as the robots, you are not as skillful as the robots," says the leader of the rebellion. "I want to be master."

Just as there is a romantic tradition that robots are inherently diabolic creatures that will rebel against human control, there is an equally romantic tradition that machines are inherently benign, symbols of progress and perfectability. Isaac Asimov epitomized that view in a famous story titled Robbie, in which a much mistrusted robot baby sitter of that name rescues its ward from a speeding tractor. Asimov then went on to formulate, in Runaround (1942), what he decreed to be, in the world of science fiction at least, the Three Laws of Robotics: "1) A robot may not injure a human being, 2) A robot must obey the orders given it by a human being except where such orders would conflict with the First Law, 3) A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law."

An admirable theory, but the whole tradition of the demonic robot assumes that when a metal creature feels immortal longings, no mere law can rein him in. Arthur C. Clarke demonstrated that in 2001. The computer HAL not only operates the space ship and talks in a supercilious tenor but is so exalted by its own superiority ("I am incapable of making an error") that it starts killing the astronauts who interfere with its plans. In a 1976 MGM effort titled Demon Seed, a presumptuous robot goes even further and fulfills the sinful ambition of making Julie Christie pregnant. But then came Star Wars, in which the cutely diminutive Artoo Deetoo and See Threepio help to rescue the imprisoned Princess Leia. Thus Hollywood found ways to reduce Frankenstein's heirs to figures of camp, reproducible in plastic. Inside their wired metal brains, the robots nourish greater ambitions than that.

* Or woman, as in the legend of Pygmalion. The most entertaining example is the life-size doll Olympia, a luscious soprano in Offenbach's Tales of Hoffmann. At the end of every verse in her main aria, however, she droops and swoons until revived by several noisy turns of a crank in her back.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.