Speaker 1: Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome
Speaker 1: back to the show Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always
Speaker 1: for tuning in. Please do not leave the podcast until
Speaker 1: the ride has come to a complete stop. I'm not
Speaker 1: going to do that voice the whole time, but I
Speaker 1: thought it was cool to start that way. My name
Speaker 1: is Ben Bleep Bleep, Blue Blue Blop. My name is noll. Uh.
Speaker 1: We're talking about robots today, romans, and we're uh, we're
Speaker 1: doing it with the uh uh, the digital spirit, actual
Speaker 1: guidance of our super producer, Casey Pegram. Now, long time
Speaker 1: listeners to both this show and our other show stuff,
Speaker 1: they don't want you to know. You probably know that
Speaker 1: a lot of people have been worried for a a
Speaker 1: while now about the idea that increased automation and increasingly
Speaker 1: sophisticated robots and artificial intelligence programs will one day drive
Speaker 1: the organic meat bag of humanity out of the employment market. Uh.
Speaker 1: It's something that we've we've talked about extensively, and we're
Speaker 1: not going to be too conspiratorial today, but we are
Speaker 1: here to tell you that this fear of the rise
Speaker 1: of robots dates back much much further than many folks
Speaker 1: might imagine, No, what do you think of when you
Speaker 1: just when you hear the word robot? Um, you know
Speaker 1: I think of I tend to conjure the image of
Speaker 1: like the classic robot, uh, the sort of tin man
Speaker 1: esque model of of the robot. Uh, you know, a
Speaker 1: metal being, sort of a humanoid type thing, um that
Speaker 1: has sort of herky jerky movements, possibly some sort of
Speaker 1: antenna um, an automaton if you will, lightbulb eyes maybe
Speaker 1: totally yeah, yeah, yeah, that kind of retro futuristic nineteen
Speaker 1: fifties era robot, maybe the maid from the Jetsons or
Speaker 1: uh maybe the uh, the automaton in the fantastic film Metropolis.
Speaker 1: It's weird because for most of us listening to the show,
Speaker 1: now most of us humans at least, uh, the word
Speaker 1: robot or the concept has been around all of our lives,
Speaker 1: but the word robot is fairly recent in this language
Speaker 1: of ours. It comes from a check author, novelist, and
Speaker 1: playwright named Carol Choppeck. He was born in eighteen eighty Pastway,
Speaker 1: nineteen eight. In nineteen twenty he wrote a play called
Speaker 1: Are You Are Rosslam's Universal Robots? And this is where
Speaker 1: we get the phrase robot from the etymology is pretty
Speaker 1: interesting and not super optimistic, no. It it came from,
Speaker 1: you know, the period in history where serfdom was a thing,
Speaker 1: and this idea of like lords and surfs and you know,
Speaker 1: having a manner and having like the lower class essentially
Speaker 1: being indentured servants that would you know, work for the
Speaker 1: right to subsist on the manner on the land of
Speaker 1: like the upper class by you know, doing kind of
Speaker 1: lowered class peasant type work, the kinds of things that
Speaker 1: the upper crust would never you know, deign to do. Um,
Speaker 1: the idea that you were sort of paying your way
Speaker 1: by doing this forced labor, and it kind of created
Speaker 1: this construct in the zeitgeist um that you can see
Speaker 1: in things like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein or the legend of
Speaker 1: the Gullum, which was a Yiddish Zeck kind of folklore thing.
Speaker 1: This notion of this sort of man made uh, you know,
Speaker 1: creature that would do the bidding of its master and
Speaker 1: are you are um really crystallizes that and becomes like
Speaker 1: a very early science fiction work in that it uh
Speaker 1: describes this creature as a worker who quote lacks nothing
Speaker 1: but a soul um and it would you know, perform tasks.
Speaker 1: It was it was meant to be, you know, mass
Speaker 1: produced to do the bidding of man. And uh. Copeck
Speaker 1: initially called these creatures labori um, and that was of
Speaker 1: course the Latin root for the word labor. But he
Speaker 1: wanted something that was a little sexier. He thought he
Speaker 1: sounded to quote bookish, and his brother Joseph came up
Speaker 1: with the word roboti um and the English just of
Speaker 1: course is robots. And you know, surprise, surprise, in in
Speaker 1: the twist of the century that now we see as
Speaker 1: just like almost cliche and like such a trope. The
Speaker 1: automatons in the play ultimately revolt against their human masters um,
Speaker 1: you know, causing a genocide of sorts. Uh, the uprising
Speaker 1: of the robots, and that it was meant to be
Speaker 1: a political kind of work. It was describing the plight
Speaker 1: of these lower class people, these these indangered servants, and
Speaker 1: the idea they were going to be able to revolt. Uh.
Speaker 1: And in fact, if I'm not mistaken, ben Kopeck was
Speaker 1: also kind of describing the rise of Nazism, and he
Speaker 1: was persona no grata to the Gestapo and Hitler himself
Speaker 1: and actually ended up like on their list of you know,
Speaker 1: kill on site. He had a death warrant out on him. Um.
Speaker 1: But I guess unfortunately for Hitler he didn't have the
Speaker 1: pleasure of carrying out that death warrant because in Copack
Speaker 1: died of the flu at the at the age of
Speaker 1: forty eight, which is terribly young. Also, uh, topic described
Speaker 1: are You are routinely as his least favorite work, even
Speaker 1: though it is by far as most well known today
Speaker 1: and audiences disagree with chopicic it's probably his most popular
Speaker 1: work for audiences. People love the play across Europe. In
Speaker 1: the US, it should go without saying that shortly thereafter,
Speaker 1: robots became the number one love of many science fiction authors.
Speaker 1: I mean, just consider everything Isaac Asimov did with the
Speaker 1: Three Laws of Robotics, which later find themselves in a
Speaker 1: non fictional work by roboticists and by people who are
Speaker 1: working in the field of AI. And with each new
Speaker 1: story about robots, they became, um, a little bit closer
Speaker 1: to human at least that's that's the trend. Uh. And
Speaker 1: since since this origin point of the term robot, which
Speaker 1: as you mentioned, it explores the kind of the creation
Speaker 1: myth that we see also in Frankenstein, or in the
Speaker 1: idea of the golem, that man could make something the
Speaker 1: way that God made man. With this, there comes this fear,
Speaker 1: are we going too far as a species? Have we
Speaker 1: crossed some sort of metaphysical line or some sort of
Speaker 1: line of divinity. People have been terrified that robots will
Speaker 1: take all of the jobs on the planet for more
Speaker 1: than two centuries. Way back in New York Times had
Speaker 1: a book review called will Machines Devour Man? And you
Speaker 1: can see the illustration here and just look it up online. Uh,
Speaker 1: it's accompanied by this picture of a person being fed
Speaker 1: into a sausage grinder. And then there are other things
Speaker 1: like there was a drawing called Vision of the Machine
Speaker 1: Age that showed thousands of people cowering under these gigantic
Speaker 1: mechanical cogs and gears like worker ants, ghosts in a
Speaker 1: machine of their own design. So we often have this
Speaker 1: implicit assumption that robots are gonna be kind of humanoid, right,
Speaker 1: that they're gonna have a torso with a head, two arms,
Speaker 1: two legs, same number of limbs as a human. However,
Speaker 1: nowadays many real robots we see kind of have that
Speaker 1: schematic from the waist up. The first ever real robot,
Speaker 1: real humanoid robot was built by a guy named Ron
Speaker 1: Wensley in nineteen Uh. The robot was named Herbert Televox,
Speaker 1: so shout out to you Herbert. Herbert could do the
Speaker 1: following things. Her could lift the receiver to get a
Speaker 1: telephone call and operate switches well, which was a big
Speaker 1: deal because that was a profession, you know, switchboard operator. UM.
Speaker 1: And I could see how this would would seemingly put
Speaker 1: a lot of those people in a state of anxiety
Speaker 1: or it's like, well what am I going to do
Speaker 1: if the robots swoops thing? Because that was specialized kind
Speaker 1: of training that went into that type of job to
Speaker 1: be able to operate the switchboards and if all of
Speaker 1: a sudden you're not needed anymore, what do you do then? Uh?
Speaker 1: This robot couldn't speak or communicate really, it was very
Speaker 1: task driven. UM eventually was updated where it could say
Speaker 1: two simple sentences on on the phone like you know
Speaker 1: which again, we're we're there. We don't have switchboard operators anymore,
Speaker 1: and all that stuff is automated and it's definitely not
Speaker 1: like a humanoid robot in a room with limbs and
Speaker 1: a voice, but it's all like in the cloud or
Speaker 1: it's in computer service. So Uh. The most important feature
Speaker 1: of of Herbert Televox was its ability to listen um
Speaker 1: because it had a very sensitive microphone that was placed
Speaker 1: close to the telephone receiver. Uh. And then it could
Speaker 1: then respond based on these voice commands. The idea of
Speaker 1: voice commands seems like a really modern thing, but it wasn't.
Speaker 1: It really was like in the earliest days of this
Speaker 1: type of computing and this type of robotics. Uh. It
Speaker 1: would respond to sound and pitch and these would then communicate.
Speaker 1: This information would communicate to the machine and and give
Speaker 1: it a corresponding set of instructions that it could then
Speaker 1: act out whatever you know, task was was asked of it.
Speaker 1: Very simple, obviously very rudimentary, um, based on the appliance
Speaker 1: that it was using. Yeah, and this was just the
Speaker 1: starting point for Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company. They went
Speaker 1: on to create a thing they called Electro the Moto
Speaker 1: Man in N seven and yes, that's Electro with a K.
Speaker 1: A lot of people will tell you that's the first
Speaker 1: real humanoid robot. Electro was created by Joseph Barnett, made
Speaker 1: from aluminum and steel and capable of performing twenty six
Speaker 1: different things they called routines, what waking up, talking, counting,
Speaker 1: and of course smoking because it was the nineteen thirties.
Speaker 1: And uh, that's right. There's actually a clip we can
Speaker 1: play really quickly from a demonstration of Electro the motor Man.
Speaker 1: I believe it was at the nineteen thirty seven World's Fair.
Speaker 1: All right, now, Electro, I know you enjoy these, and
Speaker 1: I'm really going to try to give you a nice
Speaker 1: pleasure out of these. So there you are. You got that.
Speaker 1: Now hold onto him, you mate, Now smoke this cigarette.
Speaker 1: Go on. Oh yes, still act Joe. You don't need
Speaker 1: to lie to it. Daunt you all right, here you are,
Speaker 1: and folks, he's only two years or two, just learning.
Speaker 1: And clip came from a YouTube video posted on odd
Speaker 1: History called Electro the Smoking Robot. And I highly recommend
Speaker 1: checking out the whole thing because it shows the schematic
Speaker 1: of like what the design of this thing was, and
Speaker 1: it's you know, very rudimentary. A lot of gears, um.
Speaker 1: It actually had a photoelectric tube to detect different colors
Speaker 1: that would allow it to respond um. And it was
Speaker 1: full of like you know, gears and drive shafts and
Speaker 1: like things look like bicycle chains, and then a bellows
Speaker 1: that would operate the mouth so that it could smoke,
Speaker 1: which is clearly a bit of a gimmick. Can't quite
Speaker 1: see what the function of that is outside of look
Speaker 1: it's almost like a real person, but it's a lot.
Speaker 1: It's very clunky, very very heavy, and not particularly elegant,
Speaker 1: uh in terms of you know, function, But I made
Speaker 1: a big splash. Imagine him. Yeah, and it's the boys
Speaker 1: a beast. He's like seven seven feet tall. Uh. This
Speaker 1: also gives us an opportunity to explore one of my
Speaker 1: favorite parts of science fiction as a genre, which is
Speaker 1: that science fiction is really a creative endeavor that functions
Speaker 1: in step with science fact, it would be naive to
Speaker 1: say that these two robots were not in some way
Speaker 1: inspired by the fiction going on at the time. One
Speaker 1: of the Big Ones mentioned it at the top of
Speaker 1: the show Metropolis. It's an amazing film. It's one of
Speaker 1: my favorites. Actually. In nineteen twenty seven, this becomes the
Speaker 1: first movie to have what's called machine and minch or
Speaker 1: machine men. Uh. And this is a well we can't
Speaker 1: call her a female robot, but a guynid or female
Speaker 1: shaped robot. This is like, even if you haven't seen Metropolis,
Speaker 1: I guarantee you you know the look of this robot.
Speaker 1: The entire film is silent, it's black and white. It's
Speaker 1: directed by the legendary Fritz la Get this. It's in
Speaker 1: and Metropolis, so it's it's coming out in real life
Speaker 1: six years from now. And Metropolis is about a massive
Speaker 1: city with the same name that is based on the
Speaker 1: brutal labor conditions of the underclass right and everybody in
Speaker 1: Metropolis vast majority. They live a slave like existence to
Speaker 1: sustain the lives of a privileged minority and their children
Speaker 1: that are cared for and inspired by Maria, who was
Speaker 1: the heroine of the show. She brings these kids to
Speaker 1: a forbidden garden of the ruling class and eventually, spoiler
Speaker 1: her just goodness overwhelms the son of Metropolis as ruler.
Speaker 1: He falls in love with her Starcross lovers YadA, YadA, YadA,
Speaker 1: and then he joins up with the proletary it Um.
Speaker 1: There's this famous image of Maria as a robot, and
Speaker 1: it's based on the robot created in the laboratory of
Speaker 1: the city's mad scientists to look like the dead wife
Speaker 1: of the guy rules Metropolis. I don't want to totally
Speaker 1: spoil the ending, but that that clearly inspires this real
Speaker 1: life creation of things like electro the motto man I
Speaker 1: love they called moto man oh, but I mean, gosh,
Speaker 1: how prescient it was that Are you are play by Chopic?
Speaker 1: You know, I mean every this is really the same story.
Speaker 1: It's about society where these automatons are created um to
Speaker 1: you know, do the work of the privileged upper class
Speaker 1: and then ultimately revolt or there's like an uprising of
Speaker 1: the proletariat, right, which is represented by these robots. So
Speaker 1: there's a twist. We're talking about a lot of things.
Speaker 1: We're talking about literature, we're talking about science fiction tropes,
Speaker 1: all of this kind of coming together and coalescing into
Speaker 1: something that we now just think of as like so
Speaker 1: ubiquitous in terms of the terminator or the Matrix or
Speaker 1: so many of these ideas of ai um and androids
Speaker 1: that like, you know, Philip K. Dicks may do Android's
Speaker 1: Dream of Electric Sheet, which became the incredibly influential film
Speaker 1: Blade Runner that created the whole kind of cyberpunk aesthetic,
Speaker 1: but it was another movie, not science fiction in the
Speaker 1: least that really pushed a lot of this stuff forward,
Speaker 1: not only in terms of the ability to create amazing cinema,
Speaker 1: but in terms of this whole argument of like are
Speaker 1: the robots going to steal our jobs? Because it was
Speaker 1: a film called The Jazz Singer starring Al Jolson um
Speaker 1: that was released on October six of nineteen seven by
Speaker 1: Warner Brothers. That was the first talkie, you know, it
Speaker 1: was the first one that used what's called synchronized sound,
Speaker 1: uh it had. It was very novelty at the time,
Speaker 1: and a lot of folks thought that it was going
Speaker 1: to be something like three D or smell a vision
Speaker 1: that would be like a little novelty that would then
Speaker 1: go away because surely, you know, the masses were ready
Speaker 1: for this, or not even weren't ready for this. But
Speaker 1: it was just two out there, right, and it didn't
Speaker 1: do that at all. In fact, it created this revolution
Speaker 1: in film that required a lot of technological advancement. Right.
Speaker 1: So if you're doing silent films, cameras are very very loud,
Speaker 1: and you didn't have to soundproof the cameras. You didn't
Speaker 1: have to um, you know, encase them in these much larger,
Speaker 1: bulkier um you know, Housings. I guess so early silent
Speaker 1: films had more nimble cameras comparatively that could like do
Speaker 1: much more poetic or balletic even like moves right, And
Speaker 1: that was a big part of the aesthetic of of
Speaker 1: early silent film. Um. But when people just were clamoring
Speaker 1: for this sound sync, the technology had to go along
Speaker 1: with it, because you can't have the cameras rattling away
Speaker 1: if you're recording dialogue right and for the record. Uh,
Speaker 1: there were tons of naysayers for talkies and they said
Speaker 1: this is a fad. People aren't gonna wanna hear actors talk,
Speaker 1: and history would prove that to be incorrect. Uh. The
Speaker 1: Jazz Singer as a harbinger an omen of things to come.
Speaker 1: And after it was released in musicians panicked because at
Speaker 1: the time, during the silent film era, it was normal
Speaker 1: to go to a movie theater and watch the film
Speaker 1: with live musical accompaniment, which is something really cool. I
Speaker 1: don't know, ridiculous historians. I don't know if you live
Speaker 1: in a in a city or community where this is possible.
Speaker 1: But here in the fair metropolis of Atlanta, we have
Speaker 1: a we have a great classical community and every so
Speaker 1: often you can watch films with a live score by
Speaker 1: the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, and I highly recommend it. And
Speaker 1: and I'm somewhat envious of of the movie goers of
Speaker 1: the past. Well, I don't know when's the last time
Speaker 1: either of us went to a movie theater as well. Uh.
Speaker 1: But here here's why they're worried. The musicians are worried
Speaker 1: because synchronized sound means that their livelihood may become unnecessary
Speaker 1: or even old fashioned. So in nineteen thirty, just three
Speaker 1: years after the Jazz Singer, the American Federation of Musicians
Speaker 1: forms a new group. It's called the Music Defense League.
Speaker 1: I would love to see this as a superhero film.
Speaker 1: They launched this crazy ad campaign to fight off the
Speaker 1: advance of what they see as the menace of recorded sound,
Speaker 1: and they make a They spent like over five hundred
Speaker 1: thousand dollars in nineteen thirties. Money means it's time for
Speaker 1: the inflation calculator. Oh, I think it is that we
Speaker 1: gotta do that one, that blue calculator, calculator, calculator. And
Speaker 1: the results are in five hundred thousand dollars in nineteen
Speaker 1: thirty is equal to seven point seven nine million dollars
Speaker 1: in and this was just running ads in newspapers and
Speaker 1: like cartoons. For example, a lot of these ads would
Speaker 1: be there's a there's a there's a bunch of really
Speaker 1: good ones, but there's there's one. Uh lets, I can
Speaker 1: describe this. There's a wheel like you used to steer
Speaker 1: a ship, um and on each on one side of
Speaker 1: it is sort of like a Greek god looking figure
Speaker 1: holding a harp and reaching out and guiding the wheel,
Speaker 1: while on the other side a menacing looking robot, you know,
Speaker 1: like that robot that we described, the classic robot with
Speaker 1: the you know, the full chrummey kind of jaw and
Speaker 1: the boxy shape. The tag connected to it saying canned
Speaker 1: music in theaters is lunging across the wheel and also
Speaker 1: grabbing the other side of the wheel to try to
Speaker 1: resteer the ship in clearly a bad direction. And the
Speaker 1: the wheel is labeled musical culture oof yeah. And this
Speaker 1: was framed as a call to arms for musicians and
Speaker 1: fans of music. It was presented as protecting art with
Speaker 1: a capital A from debasement or indeed perversion. And there
Speaker 1: was another ad that said musicians were being put out
Speaker 1: of work because Hollywood wanted the only needed a few
Speaker 1: hundred musicians in recording studios to do music for all films.
Speaker 1: And they even put little scare quotes around the word music,
Speaker 1: saying that you know, if it's recorded, could it even
Speaker 1: count as music. It's a it's a disingenuous argument, but
Speaker 1: it's coming from a real and valid fear. And the
Speaker 1: president of the American Federation of Musicians in had an
Speaker 1: interview with modern mechanics who where he cristallize this view.
Speaker 1: His name's Joseph in Weber, and he said, you know everything,
Speaker 1: and he was pressing it too, by the way, he
Speaker 1: was pretty right. He said the time is coming fast
Speaker 1: when the only living thing around a motion picture house
Speaker 1: will be the person who sells you your ticket. Everything
Speaker 1: else will be mechanical. Uh. And then he has a
Speaker 1: line where he says, look, we're not against scientific development,
Speaker 1: but it can't come at the expense of art. We're
Speaker 1: not opposed to mechanical music except when it is used
Speaker 1: for artistic debasement. I think this is a disingenuous argument, Ben,
Speaker 1: because the implication if you if you don't apply this
Speaker 1: to music, shouldn't you also apply it to acting? Like
Speaker 1: It seems to me that the same argument could be like, well,
Speaker 1: it's reproduced mechanically, so it's not actually acting unless you're
Speaker 1: seeing human beings do it in real time, you know.
Speaker 1: So the nature of cinema in itself would I think
Speaker 1: be called in a question by this kind of logic.
Speaker 1: You know, it says canned drama, canned music, canned vaudeville.
Speaker 1: We think the public will tire of mechanical music, will
Speaker 1: want the real thing. I just think like they're they're
Speaker 1: sort of picking and choosing and clearly have an agenda here.
Speaker 1: I do think it's really funny, ben as the time
Speaker 1: was coming fast and the only living thing around a
Speaker 1: motion picture house will be the person who sells you
Speaker 1: the ticket. Would love to see their thoughts around those,
Speaker 1: you know, little touch screens that they have at all
Speaker 1: the movie theaters now, and how so few even still
Speaker 1: have box office people. Yeah. Yeah, And they put a
Speaker 1: sexual panic in there too as a as a sort
Speaker 1: of thread in the conversation they had. Going back to
Speaker 1: that Syracuse Harold issue from November third ninety, there was
Speaker 1: a robot shown ineffectively trying to soothe a baby, and
Speaker 1: there would be other ads like the one from Centralia
Speaker 1: Daily Chronicle in Washington in August. And this one, this
Speaker 1: one is definitely like a moral panic thing. Uh. It
Speaker 1: shows a dad going down the stairs of a house
Speaker 1: yelling at his daughter, who is clearly a Greco Roman
Speaker 1: muse and she's being wooed by a automaton that has
Speaker 1: a helpful label canned music and theaters. It's like, look
Speaker 1: at this unwelcome suitor who's been wooing the muse for
Speaker 1: many dreary months without winning her favor. That's uh, that's
Speaker 1: a weird one. That's loaded, um. And like you said,
Speaker 1: it gets to the heart of it. You know, I
Speaker 1: do agree. It's thistant, genuous. They are kind of picking
Speaker 1: and choosing, um. But it gets the heart of it
Speaker 1: when we look at the concept here is really deeper
Speaker 1: than music or jobs. It's being portrayed as the definition
Speaker 1: of a soul. And as they say in the office,
Speaker 1: oh how the turntables, because today, as anyone can assure you,
Speaker 1: the music industry is battling to protect recorded music, right,
Speaker 1: that's right. I mean it's a little bit of a
Speaker 1: different argument. It's more around you know, intellectual property and
Speaker 1: like getting paid and making sure artists are treated fairly
Speaker 1: when it comes to people listening to their music, you know,
Speaker 1: on streaming services that pay them fraction of a penny. Uh.
Speaker 1: And how it's becoming increasingly difficult to make a living
Speaker 1: on recorded music alone, which is extra problematic considering we're
Speaker 1: in the midst of a pandemic where live music has
Speaker 1: essentially been you know, canceled for the time being. I
Speaker 1: think a couple of interesting artists have have done it
Speaker 1: sort of well, like the Flaming Lips did a live
Speaker 1: concert where every member of the audience UM was housed
Speaker 1: inside like a space bubble, you know, like one of
Speaker 1: those like giant plastic bubbles that you can like roll
Speaker 1: around in UM. But I would not say that's particularly
Speaker 1: sustainable moving forward, more of a cool art project kind
Speaker 1: of situation, but it's true. I mean, it's also something
Speaker 1: that you've seen suspicion or round like you know, in
Speaker 1: the eighties, for example, when synthesizers became more popular, well
Speaker 1: not even the eighties, more like the sixties with mog
Speaker 1: and um book La, the two kind of big names
Speaker 1: in in electronic music and synthesis. There was this kind
Speaker 1: of misconception that electronic music wasn't really music because it
Speaker 1: somehow was not created by humans, which anyone that knows
Speaker 1: anything about electronic music knows that it's just a tool,
Speaker 1: just an instrument like a violin or piano or anything else.
Speaker 1: It just makes different sounds and you can use it
Speaker 1: as such, and it's a lot more flexible. Um. But
Speaker 1: the idea that electronic music isn't music because the machine
Speaker 1: is making it is sort of missing the point. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and you can see another argument to take it even
Speaker 1: further back in time, there were there were probably people
Speaker 1: who said the creation of musical instruments or new musical
Speaker 1: instruments will somehow debase the importance of the human voice.
Speaker 1: Turns out they were wrong as well. But aside from
Speaker 1: the realm of music, there were plenty of other fears
Speaker 1: about the rise of machines or robots. Albert Einstein, during
Speaker 1: the Great Depression, blamed machines for joblessness. John Maynard Keynes,
Speaker 1: the famous economists, coined this phrase. He said, we're being
Speaker 1: afflicted with a new disease, technological unemployment. This phrase exploded,
Speaker 1: It was so popular. You can you can read more
Speaker 1: about this in an excellent article on timeline dot com.
Speaker 1: But there's one moment we have which is technically a
Speaker 1: story of a robot actually rising to attack its creator.
Speaker 1: It takes place, Yeah, it takes place in nineteen thirty two.
Speaker 1: British inventor named Harry May is very excited to demonstrate
Speaker 1: his newest creation, a robot called Alpha. Come on over,
Speaker 1: he says to his friends. Check out my new robot.
Speaker 1: His name is Alpha. He can fire guns. What could
Speaker 1: go wrong? What could go wrong? Indeed? Um, and so
Speaker 1: you know, the robot is asleep, I guess, or in
Speaker 1: shutdown mode in a chair, and um. May places a
Speaker 1: weapon in its robot arms uh, and then walks over
Speaker 1: across the room. Bizarre there doing this indoors, but this
Speaker 1: is how the story goes. Walks across the room to
Speaker 1: adjust a target that presumably is going to be the
Speaker 1: center of the demonstration, and as he does so, Ben,
Speaker 1: something shocking happens. That's right, as he's walking across the room, Alpha,
Speaker 1: who weighs two tons by the way, slowly gets up
Speaker 1: to his on his robo feet and he points the
Speaker 1: gun and the people observing this are screaming and terror
Speaker 1: at May. Watch out, it's turning on you. May turns
Speaker 1: around and he sees that his robot has apparently come
Speaker 1: to life and is now pointing the gun at him.
Speaker 1: Alpha moves forward. The aventor throws his hand in front
Speaker 1: of him his face to defend himself. Maybe he invented
Speaker 1: a bulletproof hand earlier or something, I don't know. The
Speaker 1: gun went off, and this means that Alpha technically became
Speaker 1: the first robot to rise against his inventor. The media
Speaker 1: went crazy about this. Yeah, I mean this is like
Speaker 1: a real world example of of everything that science fiction
Speaker 1: has predicted. Uh, you know, obviously as satire, but sometimes
Speaker 1: people that that's lost on people. Um, but yeah, this
Speaker 1: is the robot, you know, creations rising up to murder. Uh,
Speaker 1: the us, the creator, this is all of us. This
Speaker 1: is not only is it threatening our jobs, like as
Speaker 1: Alpha going to now replace soldiers, Like what's what's gonna
Speaker 1: what does this mean? And then okay, this is exactly
Speaker 1: what we needed to hear. The alarms are sounding, the
Speaker 1: robot rises up and shoots his master. Only that's not
Speaker 1: really how it happened at all. Yeah, it didn't happen
Speaker 1: that way, no matter what the the hyperbolic, juicy headlines
Speaker 1: were saying. It turns out that Harry May is real,
Speaker 1: first off, and he did have a robot. Alpha is
Speaker 1: also real, and he did want to show his friends
Speaker 1: the robot of fire a gun. But this was what
Speaker 1: we would call user error. You see, the gun accidentally
Speaker 1: went off as Harry was placing it in his robot's hand.
Speaker 1: He was not shot. He got a minor burn on
Speaker 1: his hand from the gunpowder. But people were willing to
Speaker 1: believe this, that this robot had somehow, despite not having
Speaker 1: the cognitive technology to even understand the concept of betrayal,
Speaker 1: they thought Alpha had risen up and attacked Harry May.
Speaker 1: And this panic, this resurrection of this panic at least,
Speaker 1: is happening in part due to the social crime of
Speaker 1: the time in the US. We have to remember this
Speaker 1: came about during the Great Depression. By nineteen thirty three,
Speaker 1: almost one out of four people in the US were unemployed.
Speaker 1: Thirteen million were out of work, and you needed something
Speaker 1: to blame, and there were tons of scapegoat candidates. Right,
Speaker 1: blame the president, No, it's the weather. No, let's blame
Speaker 1: the wealthy. And one of the things people blamed it
Speaker 1: was robotics, that's right. And even outside of of the
Speaker 1: play that we talked about at the top of the
Speaker 1: show Are you are? Um, we had a fantastic illustration
Speaker 1: of this, maybe not a robot exactly, but of the
Speaker 1: idea of of playing god and and reanimating life, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, in our own image with Frankenstein Mary Shelley's
Speaker 1: story that remains incredibly popular and and um, you know,
Speaker 1: reinterpreted um many many many times over today. And we
Speaker 1: mentioned the original recounting, you know, incorrectly of this scenario
Speaker 1: with May that was run in a Louisiana paper and
Speaker 1: the piece was titled our Dread of Robots. But this
Speaker 1: really caught fire, and another paper in Sandusky, Ohio published
Speaker 1: another letter to the editor in September ninety two. The
Speaker 1: editor's name was Bruce Katton, and he used that Mary
Speaker 1: Shelley story in a very similar way to the editor
Speaker 1: in Louisiana in saying, quote, a psychologist could probably make
Speaker 1: a good deal of this fascinating dread of ours for
Speaker 1: mechanical monsters, A machinery has created a revolution in our life.
Speaker 1: The wage earner, the farmer, the soldier, the merchant, the politicians,
Speaker 1: the schoolmaster, the printer, all of us, in every moment
Speaker 1: of our lives lived differently than our ancestors lived because
Speaker 1: of the constant increase in the mechanization of society. This
Speaker 1: to me is a pretty even handed, uh description, wouldn't
Speaker 1: you say, Ben, Yeah, Yeah, that's true. And props to
Speaker 1: Bruce Chatton for explaining this in a objective way. That
Speaker 1: trend continues, it never stopped. And this this is a
Speaker 1: good segue to represent the other side of the argument,
Speaker 1: the people who thought this was on balance a good thing.
Speaker 1: There were people who you know, would be doing ted
Speaker 1: talks yea at this time if they were around people
Speaker 1: like Walter S. Gifford. He was also in Interview and
Speaker 1: Modern Mechanics. Gifford is a guy with skin in the game.
Speaker 1: At the time of his ninety one interview, he is
Speaker 1: president of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, and he
Speaker 1: says that the depressional pass and will enter a period
Speaker 1: of prosperity the likes of which no country has seen before.
Speaker 1: He was definitely a fan of what was called the
Speaker 1: technocracy movement. We've heard the phrase technocrap before, sometimes as
Speaker 1: an insult, sometimes as a compliment. Uh. This movement started
Speaker 1: in nineteen you in New York and the idea is
Speaker 1: that every world problem can be solved if we just
Speaker 1: replace politicians with engineers and with scientists. They described this
Speaker 1: as a revolution without bloodshed, as something that would lead
Speaker 1: to a guaranteed income and end to crime and disease,
Speaker 1: and they had a rhetorical question In one of their magazines.
Speaker 1: The cover features a robot and the text under the
Speaker 1: robot says, thirty million out of work in nine or
Speaker 1: twenty thousand dollars guaranteed income for every family, which and
Speaker 1: so they're probably going too far in the positive direction here, right,
Speaker 1: because they're saying it's a panacea, which which it isn't. Uh.
Speaker 1: And technocracy, actually it is a weird technocracy fell out
Speaker 1: of popularity because of technology. One of the movement's founders,
Speaker 1: a guy named Howard's, gave a just ridiculous speech on
Speaker 1: January three and was broadcast on national radio. So they
Speaker 1: looked kind of like clowns. You can find copies of
Speaker 1: this online, but it's kind of like, uh, several years back,
Speaker 1: when former presidential candidate Howard Dean had an unfortunate uh
Speaker 1: it's a yeah, yeah, really high pitched and then you know,
Speaker 1: from that point on his policies didn't matter as much
Speaker 1: as the fact that there was this terrible sound bite
Speaker 1: all to say we're still fighting technology today. The matrix
Speaker 1: did not come cut out of whole cloth. Uh. Predictions
Speaker 1: for the future really are a direct reflection of the
Speaker 1: times in which they're created. And what I like about
Speaker 1: that is it reminds me of Um. Have you ever
Speaker 1: heard that old observation that a disguise is really an
Speaker 1: autobiography of the person who chooses to wear it. No,
Speaker 1: but I like that very much. So maybe maybe what
Speaker 1: we're doing with our fears of the future is we're
Speaker 1: exploring our fears of the modern day. You know, we've
Speaker 1: seen us residents of every political stripe imaginable, Uh, be
Speaker 1: concerned about the future, and more often than not, be
Speaker 1: concerned about continual employment. It's really tough out there, you know. Uh.
Speaker 1: There's a writer for Slate called for had Man Joe
Speaker 1: who warned that in the future, even very highly educated
Speaker 1: folks like doctors and scientists and lawyers might find their
Speaker 1: jobs outsourced to robots or to AI. I don't know
Speaker 1: what you I don't know what do you think? No,
Speaker 1: Because to me, it seems like it should be interesting
Speaker 1: to everyone to know that the panic about automation in
Speaker 1: robotics is very old, but I don't think it will
Speaker 1: put everybody out out of a job. It just seems
Speaker 1: naive to say it won't put anyone out, because that's
Speaker 1: clearly gonna happen. Heck, man, I mean, you know, you
Speaker 1: and I have even seen stuff. We've been like shown
Speaker 1: betas of software that can take a voice print of
Speaker 1: of say a podcast and do a pretty convincing job
Speaker 1: of like doing ads for example. Right uh, And there's
Speaker 1: you know that the ads is how we make ourmoney
Speaker 1: on this show. And even that idea or the idea
Speaker 1: of like what if we don't need voice actors anymore
Speaker 1: to like do audio books, or what if like you know,
Speaker 1: we've got the technology has gotten good enough that we
Speaker 1: don't even need actors anymore because the c g I
Speaker 1: is so good and it's cheaper just to like, you know,
Speaker 1: have computer animators do it all. I think that fear
Speaker 1: is always present when you have a new technology that
Speaker 1: comes out, but it takes such a long time for
Speaker 1: it to get to the point where it's gonna be
Speaker 1: a replacement for the human touch, And I think it's
Speaker 1: would be naive for us to say that's never gonna
Speaker 1: happen for our career. What about editors to edit video?
Speaker 1: You know, surely if a good enough algorithm could edit
Speaker 1: a video convincingly, right, Um, we haven't seen it quite yet,
Speaker 1: but we know that that is certainly someone that some
Speaker 1: people are in a lab right now trying their damnedest
Speaker 1: to figure out. Yeah, and I think we'll see a
Speaker 1: rise of neo Luddites along the way at some point.
Speaker 1: Is people fear and fight against change. But I also
Speaker 1: think there's there's an important thing that often gets lost
Speaker 1: when we talk about utopian post work futures. Somewhere along
Speaker 1: the line to a postwork future where no one truly
Speaker 1: has to do anything unless they feel called to do it,
Speaker 1: there would inevitably be a period of a post worker
Speaker 1: future wherein people still have to provide for themselves, but
Speaker 1: the opportunities to do so are increasingly limited. These are
Speaker 1: real fears. There's there's a reason that this line of
Speaker 1: thinking keeps happening. With that being said, I'm very much
Speaker 1: forward to the future kind of person. In other shows,
Speaker 1: we've explored the possibilities here, like the I wonder if
Speaker 1: the if the American Federation of musicians could travel here
Speaker 1: to as we record this. I wonder what they would think.
Speaker 1: All the idea that we're close to a world of
Speaker 1: artificially generated scripts, were close to a world, maybe in
Speaker 1: our lifetimes, where you could have an app on your phone.
Speaker 1: I want to design this, but I'm not smart enough.
Speaker 1: You could have an app on your phone where you say, okay,
Speaker 1: take like Metropolis and the Gremlin's Big Trouble, Little China
Speaker 1: and the jazz singer and put it all together in
Speaker 1: a coherent story and then cast me and my friends
Speaker 1: based on the photographs you have of us from social media,
Speaker 1: as the principal actors, and then just let me see
Speaker 1: it happen. That could happen. And that's not to say
Speaker 1: that there isn't even an art in interacting with uh.
Speaker 1: Let's call it generative technology, right, So, like that would
Speaker 1: be a script that was generated electronically by artificial intelligence.
Speaker 1: But there is a lot of interest in experimental music,
Speaker 1: in generative music, where you kind of set some parameters
Speaker 1: and then sort of see what happens. You know, it's
Speaker 1: like uh uh, an artificially intelligence driven experiment where you're
Speaker 1: sort of choosing the parameters and then like Brian, you know,
Speaker 1: does this a lot, the incredible producer and ambient musician,
Speaker 1: where he'll kind of make these generative things that will
Speaker 1: just continue to evolve. And that's something that's used in
Speaker 1: video game music, for example, where you can set these
Speaker 1: parameters around an ambient tone and it will drift or
Speaker 1: change based on certain things that you then set up,
Speaker 1: like the way programming language works. So that's creative in
Speaker 1: and of itself. Like I would, I would argue that's
Speaker 1: not cheating, that's just being clever and using the tools
Speaker 1: in an interesting way. Does using a typewriter mean you're
Speaker 1: not writing? That's that's a similar question. Uh. And and
Speaker 1: these are questions that we're going to continue exploring in
Speaker 1: the future as as a species. But how fascinating is
Speaker 1: it that over two hundred years ago many of our
Speaker 1: fears remain almost exactly what they are today. Uh. We
Speaker 1: hope you enjoyed this episode, Robots and humans alike. We
Speaker 1: can't wait to hear from you. What do you think
Speaker 1: the future of this trend will bring? We would love
Speaker 1: to hear your thoughts. You can find us on Facebook,
Speaker 1: you can find us on Instagram, you can find us
Speaker 1: on Twitter. We'd like to recommend our Facebook page Ridiculous Historians.
Speaker 1: You can also find us as individuals on the old
Speaker 1: social meds, sure can. You can find me pretty much
Speaker 1: exclusively on Instagram where I am at how Now Noel Brown,
Speaker 1: and you can join up with me on Twitter where
Speaker 1: I'm at ben Bull and hs w or witnessed my
Speaker 1: various strange experiments, discoveries and tinkerings on my Instagram at
Speaker 1: ben Bull and thanks as always to Christopher Hasiotis. Thanks
Speaker 1: to our number one technological threat or the guy who
Speaker 1: wants to be our number one technological threat, Jonathan Strickland's
Speaker 1: aka The Quister all too human huge thanks to our
Speaker 1: very human super producer Casey Pagraham. I wish he would
Speaker 1: be able to get out on this conversation. I thought
Speaker 1: that the film stuff would have been particularly of interest
Speaker 1: to him, but we can now. We'll catch up on
Speaker 1: that next time. UM. We hope his adventures are faring well.
Speaker 1: Huge thanks to Alex Williams, who very humanly composed this theme.
Speaker 1: Uh he used electronic technology, but it all came from
Speaker 1: his heart and brain and his lovely, lovely hands thanks
Speaker 1: to Gabelusier are also very human research associate. Um couldn't
Speaker 1: do it without you, Gabe, Eve's Jeff Coates who the
Speaker 1: catters out of the bag, Jay dot Ill the Jill
Speaker 1: Scott Podcast. Eves has been instrumental in working with that team.
Speaker 1: I had a little hand in it, barely just getting
Speaker 1: things off the ground, and she's just taking the ball
Speaker 1: and run with it. And as I'm really, really really
Speaker 1: happy with that show. It is out in the world now.
Speaker 1: I think there are two episodes fully live. Check out
Speaker 1: j dot Il the podcast. Awesome. Yes, and I'd love
Speaker 1: to have Eves back on the show again today. So
Speaker 1: when you're right to her, tell her the guys say, Hi,
Speaker 1: we can assure you that this show is at this
Speaker 1: point uh not robotic. But if you are a robot
Speaker 1: you're listening and you'd like to be a guest on
Speaker 1: the show, uh, let us know. Just send send us
Speaker 1: the text and binary We'll see you next time. Foloks.
Speaker 1: For more podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit the I
Speaker 1: Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to
Speaker 1: your favorite shows.