There, he mentions how much better life would be if the Greeks (and for their slaves) had weaving looms, musical instruments, and other devices that were smart enough to be able to understand orders and to work by themselves.

He also highlights the idea of the slave, automatic or otherwise, as part of a distributed somatic network.  This idea of the artificial servant as a prosthetic extension of the master reappears in medieval and Renaissance stories about famous scientists.  Such medieval works as Gower’s Confessio Amantis, where Robert Grossteste is depicted creating a talking brass servant, are followed during the Renaissance by tales like Greene’s The Honorable History of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, which depicts Roger Bacon creating a similar artificial, humanoid slave.  In all of these instances the idea of the artificial servant is connected with an emotional paradox: the joy of self-enhancement is counterpoised with the anxiety of self-displacement that comes with distribution of agency.

In this way, the older accounts of creating artificial slaves are accounts of modernity in the making—a modernity characterized by the project of extending the self and its powers, in which the vision of the extended self is fundamentally inseparable from the vision of an attenuated self.

My new book, Androids and Intelligent Networks in Early Modern Literature and Culture: Artificial Slaves, traces various ancient representations of artificially made humanoid servants, from their origins to their representation in selected Renaissance texts. The book is the first to concentrate exclusively on depictions of artificial humanoid servants in the literature of Shakespeare’s time and before. These representations eerily prefigure modern robots, androids, and artificially intelligent networks, and the art that is responsible for their creation blurs the edges between magic and science in a way that resonates especially with some of our modern notions of cybernetics.

In Robert Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, for example, we meet a sixteenth-century version of a famous medieval scientist, Roger Bacon, who tries to make a talking head of bronze. This artificial head, remarkably reminiscent of the robot in twentieth century fiction, is meant to serve mundane purposes in super-normal ways. Bacon intends to have it build a defensive wall around all of England and to solve difficult mathematical and philosophical questions—similar to the way we use modern computers.

Greene’s fictional, robot-like creations appear around the same time as the homunculus, an organically-based android that emerges in the non-fictional, alchemical literature of Paracelsus and Cornelius Agrippa. Moreover, tales of the golem, an organic android that is made from inorganic material (simple earth) also reach their most elaborate form in this era.

Also, Aristotle’s focus, in his Politics, on slaves’ functions versus their physical forms (which is what gives him the idea of replacing slaves with smart machines) gives me a historical precedent for discussing how Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus depict another form of artificial servant: the networked system. Both plays present us with scientist/scholars who use their knowledge to conjure spirits that take corporeal form and that, as a group, constitute an "organic system" for accomplishing their creators' worldly ends. Indeed, in The Tempest the island itself becomes a "machine" of sorts, as Prospero uses his magical science to yoke together all life on the island into an intelligent network made of spirit and flesh, as well as the very environment, to attain his goals. Ariel, along with other artificial slaves that interface with their masters, recapitulates Aristotle’s notion of slaves as “animate” and yet “separated” parts of the master’s body. Ariel’s role also harks forth to fictional entities like the ethereal, disembodied voice of H.A.L. the computer, in 2001: A Space Odyssey: both the voice and Ariel’s physical presence represent that part of a network which provides a “user interface” for communicating with its master/programmer.

My book’s thesis is that these fictional, artificial servants embody at once the ambitions of the scientific wizards who make them and society’s perception of the dangers of those ambitions. Creations made by natural philosophers like Robert Greene’s character Friar Bacon, or by Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (I discuss Mephistopheles as the interface for a hidden, functional network of demons), or by Shakespeare’s Prospero—whether those creations are physically or functionally humanoid—represent their makers’ dreams of dominance over nature, over their own destiny, and, indirectly, over other humans.

These creations reflect the rising individualism and the cultural dangers represented by Humanism in the Renaissance and of its proponents, like Marsilio Ficino—and of those scientific thinkers, such as Paracelsus, and Cornelius Agrippa, whom he influenced.

But they also represent a paradox: the self-enhancement promised by intelligent slave-systems is counterpoised with the threat of self-displacement or self-diminution that comes with distribution of agency to these artificial agents, and this is still relevant today. The chief trait of the instruments of the fictional scientists above is their difficulty in controlling them, and the consequent peril that the master-slave relationship might be reversed.

So these fictional creations are also embodiments of, or vessels for, the cultural fears triggered by independent, experimental thinkers—the type of thinkers from whom our modern cyberneticists directly descend. I go into more depth about this last point in the final chapter of my book, which touches upon connections between tales of the Early Modern artificial servants and the fears and hopes expressed in modern literature about networked systems and humanoid automata.



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