Rise of the Robots: 1. The history of things to come

BBC Inside Science

BBC

Science

4.6 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 3 March 2017

⏱️ 29 minutes

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Summary

The idea of robots goes back to the Ancient Greeks. In myths Hephaestus, the god of fire, created robots to assist in his workshop. In the medieval period the wealthy showed off their automata. In France in the 15th century a Duke of Burgundy had his chateau filled with automata that played practical tricks on his guests, such as spraying water at them. By the 18th century craftsmen were making life like performing robots. In 1738 in Paris people queued to see the amazing flute playing automaton, designed and built by Jacques Vaucanson.

With the industrial revolution the idea of automata became intertwined with that of human workers. The word robot first appears in a 1921 play, Rossum's Universal Robots, by Czech author Carel Chapek.

Drawing on examples from fact and fiction, Adam Rutherford explores the role of robots in past societies and discovers they were nearly always made in our image, and inspired both fear and wonder in their audiences. He talks to Dr Elly Truitt of Bryn Mawr College in the US about ancient and medieval robots, to Simon Shaffer, Professor of History of Science at Cambridge University and to Dr Andrew Nahum of the Science Museum about !8th century automata, and to Dr Ben Russell of the Science Museum about robots and workers in the 20th century. And Matthew Sweet provides the cultural context. Show less

Transcript

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0:00.0	Choosing what to watch night after night the flicking through the endless
0:06.8	searching is a nightmare we want to help you on our brand new podcast off the
0:11.8	telly we share what we've been watching
0:14.0	Fladiated.
0:16.0	Load to games, loads of fun, loads of screaming.
0:19.0	Lovely. Off the telly with me Joanna Paige.
0:21.0	And me, Natalie Cassidy, so your evenings can be a little less
0:25.0	searching and a lot more auction listen on BBC sounds.
0:29.0	Hello You this is a very special podcast not the usual inside science, but a series I've made that we think that you might like.
0:37.0	It's called Rise of the Robots and it's three parts on the ideas of robots and artificial intelligence in science and in culture punctuated and illustrated by robots in fiction and notably in movies because as you know I'm a massive film nerd.
0:51.6	Anyway here is the first part, the history of things to come, which is a quote from,
0:57.3	parts two and three coming out soon.
1:00.9	People love robots, but they're also frightened by them.
1:04.0	And in a sense, I think that's something that comes from the movies.
1:08.0	Robots have been an entertainment for far longer than they've been a fact.
1:12.0	And of course, we love to be frightened by fictional robots. The interesting thing about these robots is that they're mirrors. Now why do we keep building these things?
1:30.0	Robots are in a way a sort of question of perfection. We've been trying to find robots that look
1:35.9	like us or move like us or think like us for a long time. It's been a very sort of long-held
1:40.4	quest.
1:48.0	And so there's questions of actually, you know, are the machines more capable than we are? They're here.
1:50.0	They've always been here.
1:52.0	Robots, automatons, artificial intelligences. They're all immigrants from the future.
	...

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