Abstract
While Social Robotics is a relatively new field that addresses the problems of creating machine intelligences capable of sophisticated and extended social interaction with humans, the problems addressed by Social Robotics are not at all new. In the late sixteenth century, two man-made artificial intelligences became embroiled at opposite ends of an international religious conflict that would shape the modern political world. This chapter seeks to draw a parallel between these two early robots and their entwined destinies not merely to demonstrate some oppositional principles of Reformation and Counter-Reformation aesthetics, but to reveal how these histories reinforce some key observations by evolutionary psychologists on the role of performance as foundational to the development of human civilization. In so doing, the chapter suggests a practical approach to applied Social Robotics that addresses some vexing questions regarding the nature of ‘the clockwork self’.
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Notes
Some of those who have most recently crossed this territory before myself include Kara Reilly, Automata and Mimesis on the Stage of Theatre History (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
Ruth Evans (‘Our Cyborg Past: Medieval artificial memory as mindware upgrade’. Postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 1 (2010), 64–71).
Eileen Joy and Craig Dionne (‘Before the trains of thought have been laid down so firmly: The premodern post/human’. Postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 1 (2010), 1–9).
See Rodney A. Brooks, ‘Elephants Don’t Play Chess’, Robotics and Autonomous Systems 6 (1990), 3–15.
See Kerstin Dautenhahn and Iain Werry. ‘Towards interactive robots in autism therapy: Background, motivation, and challenges’, Pragmatics and Cognition 12.1 (2004), 1–35.
See Brian T. Horowitz, ‘Cyber Care: Will Robots Help the Elderly Live at Home Longer?’, Scientific American, 21 June 2010, http://www.scientificamerican.com/ article.cfm?id=robot-elder-care&page=2) (retreived 15 September 2012).
Quoted in H. Ellis (ed.), Original Letters Illustrative of English History, Vol. 3 (New York: AMS, 1970), 168.
There is much interesting scholarship on the Rood of Grace; my sources include: Leanne Groenveld, ‘A Theatrical Miracle: The Boxley Rood of Grace as Puppet’, Early Theatre 10.2 (2007), 1150).
Scott Lightsley, ‘The paradox of transcendent machines in the demystification of the Boxley Christ’, Postmedieval 1.1–2 (2010), 99–107. Some scholars disagree about whether it was an image or a model of the Rood that was destroyed at St Paul’s, but the evidence seems clear that it was not the actual Rood that had been housed at Boxley Abbey.
The folktale is transcribed by William Lambarde in his A Perambulation of Kent (London: Henry Middleton, 1576; STC 2nd edn 1596), 182. See also Groeneveld, ‘A Theatrical Miracle’, 17–18 and 40–2; I can find no reason to challenge her conclusions about the folktale’s exposure of the ‘miracle’.
William Prescott, History of the Reign of Philip the Second, King of Spain, Vol. 1 (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1874), 461.
The best recent source on this machine is Elizabeth King’s ‘Perpetual Devotion: A Sixteenth-Century Machine that Prays’, in Genesis Redux: Essays on the History and Philosophy of Artificial Life, ed. Jessica Riskin (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 263–92
See K. Jensen, J. Call and M. Tomasello, ‘Chimpanzees are rational maximizers in an ultimatum game’, Science 318 (2007), 107–9.
Richard W. Byrne and Andrew Whiten, ‘Machiavellian Intelligence’, in Machiavellian Intelligence II: Extensions and Evaluations, ed. Richard W. Byrne and Andrew Whiten (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
Letter to Christoph Freidrich Nicolai, in ‘Briefwechsel über das Trauerspiel zwischen Lessing, Mendelssohn, und Nicolai’, Werke und Briefe in zwölf Bänden, Vol. 3, ed. Wilfried Barner (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985–2003), 671. Translation by Wendy Arons.
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© 2013 Michael M. Chemers
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Chemers, M.M. (2013). ‘Lyke Unto A Lively Thing’: Theatre History and Social Robotics. In: Reilly, K. (eds) Theatre, Performance and Analogue Technology. Palgrave Studies in Performance and Technology. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137319678_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137319678_13
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