I feel hap­py to say that it is (I think like every­one else who’s stood on this stage) a pro­found priv­i­lege and a plea­sure to be here. It’s always kind of fun as an Australian to be in New Zealand. I will say this is a much bet­ter expe­ri­ence for me than the last time I was here speak­ing, when I was the warm-up act for Sir Richard Hadlee. For the Americans in the room, he’s a crick­eter. For the Australians in the room, he’s an hon­ored ene­my. For all of you, he was a hero and I was in the way. This, much better.

I know the title of this talk is kind of cheeky, and it clear­ly requires just a lit­tle bit of unpack­ing. It actu­al­ly comes from a solil­o­quy from a tele­vi­sion show that I love unabashed­ly. The show is called Penny Dreadful. I’m sure some of you might’ve seen it. Set in 19^th cen­tu­ry London, it’s a Gothic hor­ror tale. It is replete with char­ac­ters from fic­tion and fan­ta­sy and in some ways the imag­i­na­tion of John Logan, who is clear­ly dement­ed in ways that I love. It draws on all these char­ac­ters and, in the very sec­ond episode, Dr. Frankenstein, Victor him­self, appears, is cre­at­ing anoth­er mon­ster. And mon­ster #1 turns up, kills mon­ster #2, and in a fit of rage deliv­ers this extra­or­di­nary solil­o­quy, and I just want to read a lit­tle bit of it, because for me it is kind of where this talk takes off. Monster to Frankenstein:

I’m not the cre­ation of an antique pas­toral world. I am moder­ni­ty per­son­i­fied. Didn’t you know what you were cre­at­ing was the mod­ern age? Did you real­ly imag­ine that your mod­ern cre­ation would hold to the val­ue of Keats and Wordsworth? We are men of iron and mech­a­niza­tion. We are steam engines and tur­bines. Were you real­ly so naïve to imag­ine that we would see eter­ni­ty in a daffodil?
Penny Dreadful, ​“Séance”

Of course, here we’re play­ing on a famil­iar idea that tech­nol­o­gy is apart from poet­ry. That tech­nol­o­gy is not art, that it’s not love. Of course we’re riff­ing on two poems here by Keats and Wordsworth, the poem beau­ty trav­els and the poem about clouds, daf­fodils here in many ways [sym­bol­iz­ing] many things. 

But in this talk I want to sug­gest that it’s nev­er quite as sim­ple as to say there is tech­nol­o­gy and there is art. That there is tech­nol­o­gy and there is cul­ture. Clearly these things have always been in dia­logue and are still. So this means this is a sto­ry about art and tech­nol­o­gy. It’s also a sto­ry in which I am acute­ly aware I am nei­ther an artist nor a tech­nol­o­gist, so it’s a lit­tle bit cheeky.

I am in fact the child of an anthro­pol­o­gist, a child of the Pacific and the Southern Hemisphere. I spent my child­hood on my moth­er’s field sites, and I spent my for­ma­tive years liv­ing in indige­nous com­mu­ni­ties in Central and Northern Australia at a time when peo­ple still remem­bered what their coun­try was like before cat­tle and white fel­las and fences, not always in that order. It was a long jour­ney from those com­mu­ni­ties to Silicon Valley where I now live and work. Somewhere along the way, I found anthro­pol­o­gy. I fol­lowed in my moth­er’s foot­steps. I did my under­grad­u­ate degree on the East Coast of the United States, and my grad­u­ate train­ing at Stanford. I was hang­ing around Stanford in the late 1990s, teach­ing anthro­pol­o­gy and lov­ing the expe­ri­ence of hav­ing a class­room, when in true Australian fash­ion (and pos­si­bly, I sus­pect, New Zealand fash­ion) I met a man in a bar in Palo Alto, and he changed my life.

Now, in America I have to point out that did­n’t mean I mar­ried him. It also did­n’t mean I had sex with him. And actu­al­ly I did­n’t let him buy me drinks, which was prob­a­bly not a good plan because he did have more mon­ey than I did. I was, again, a pro­fes­sor. He was in Silicon Valley. But he asked me what was it would turn out an incred­i­bly impor­tant ques­tion, because he said to me what did I do. And I said I was an anthro­pol­o­gist. He said, ​“What’s that?” I said some­one who stud­ies cul­ture, and he said, ​“What do you do with that?” I said I teach, and he went, ​“That’s nice.”

Okay, good.

He said, ​“Couldn’t you do more?” And I’m think­ing I’m a tenure track pro­fes­sor at Stanford University. This is as good as it gets for peo­ple like me. And I thought, ​“Well I’m done with you.” So I left. And because my moth­er as well as being an anthro­pol­o­gist is an emi­nent­ly sen­si­ble woman, she told me nev­er to give my num­ber to strange men in bars, so I had­n’t. So when he called me the next morn­ing at my house, this was odd. Because we are talk­ing about 1998, so before Frank’s modem nois­es, or right on the edge of it. Certainly before a white box on the Internet, or LinkedIn, or Facebook, or real­ly any­thing else. There was no Google into which he could’ve typed ​“red­head­ed Australian anthro­pol­o­gist” and my name would’ve popped up. Truthfully, if you do it now, my name is the first search item, which I’m kind of proud of, in a very per­verse way.

But in 1998, there was noth­ing, and he did it the old-fashioned way. He called every anthro­pol­o­gy depart­ment in the Bay Area look­ing for a red­head­ed Australian. The sec­re­tary of the Stanford anthro­pol­o­gy depart­ment said, ​“Ooh, do you mean Genevieve? Would you like her home phone num­ber?” I’m odd­ly grate­ful, but at the time I was very annoyed. 

So Bob calls me. Bob says, ​“You seem interesting.”

I’m like, ​“You’re not.”

He’s like, ​“No no no.” And then he said mag­ic words that will ring true for some of you still. He said, ​“I’ll buy you lunch.” Then I real­ized I was­n’t that far out of grad­u­ate school that I would­n’t still do things for free food. 

So Frank intro­duces me around the val­ley. He was an extra­or­di­nary men­tor. He intro­duces me to the peo­ple at Intel. Intel at that point are hir­ing, which I did­n’t know. I also did­n’t know that they were grow­ing a small team of social sci­en­tists, and that they des­per­ate­ly need­ed a woman, because they had six men and they real­ized that was pos­si­bly a problem. 

I did­n’t know any of these things when I rocked up for my inter­view. I aced the inter­view, sur­pris­ing­ly because I was kind of bel­liger­ent. And at the end of the inter­view process, you’ll be hap­py to know Janet, they asked me, ​“Is there any­thing else we need to know about you?” 

And I said, ​“Well I’m kind of a rad­i­cal fem­i­nist and an unre­con­struct­ed Neo-Marxist.” I was 29 and I did­n’t real­ly want the job, I has­ten to add.

And the nice men with whom I now work looked at me and said, ​“Will we like that?”

To which I said very hon­est­ly, ​“I think the first six months will be rocky.”

So I get to Intel. My new boss sits me down (Who is aston­ish­ing­ly a woman report­ing to a woman. Little did I real­ize how rare this would be) and says, ​“Great, you’re here. We’re very excit­ed. We need your help with two things.”

I’m like, ​“Good, and these would be what?”

My new boss says, ​“Well, thing num­ber one we need your help with is women.”

Now, I’m fresh out of the uni­ver­si­ty sys­tem, so I ask the obvi­ous next ques­tion, ​“Which women?”

My new boss says, ​“All women.”

“So you need my help with all 3.2 bil­lion women.”

“Yes” says my boss.

I’m like, “…okay.”

So in my note­book of the day, I write down ​“Women all.” And under­line the ​“all” a lot. And try to imag­ine what is the project you will do to explain why ​“women all” is not a mean­ing­ful cat­e­go­ry, and then some insight that will be use­ful about ​“women all” that will be use­ful to a semi­con­duc­tor man­u­fac­tur­er. ​‘Kind of prob­lem that as a researcher can make you very hap­py.

But then remem­bered this new boss had said two things. And if thing #1 is ​“Women all” it is ter­ri­fy­ing to con­tem­plate what #2 might be. I secret­ly hoped she would say ​“men,” because that’d round out the equation.

But no, this new boss said that Intel had an ROW prob­lem. And I’m like, what’s that?

She said, ​“Rest of World.”

And you know at this point I know I’m from Rest of World, but I ask any­way because I’m a good researcher. I’m like, ​“And where’s ​‘world’ in this equation?”

She says, ​“That’s America.”

“Okay, so to recap you need me to study women, and every­one who does­n’t live in America.”

She said, ​“Yes.”

And I said, ​“Good.”

And I went back to my desk. I thought for a long time about what the job would be that that was the brief. And I real­ized two things. One was that that was the best oppor­tu­ni­ty I was ever going to have in my entire life. That being offered the job described ​“women all and every­one else” meant that my job was to talk about all the peo­ple that weren’t in the build­ing to all the peo­ple that were. And that my job was ulti­mate­ly and always going to be about how did I bring the sto­ries from the rest of the world into the build­ing, and use them to shape next-generation tech­nol­o­gy devel­op­ment and innovation.

That has to be, and still is to this day, about the best gig you can ever have. Because it’s the busi­ness of telling sto­ries. As Kim said this morn­ing, it’s what I get to do. I get to talk about sto­ries. I get to do them based on what peo­ple care about, what piss­es them off, what frus­trates them, what they love, what they desire, what they hope for them­selves, their kids, their fam­i­lies, their com­mu­ni­ties, even their countries.

And on a good day I get to use that to shape the val­ues we talk about and the val­ues we don’t. And the prod­ucts that we make as a result of that. On a bad day, I just spend a lot of time say­ing, ​“Where are the women?” Because you have to. But what that also means is that I’m in the busi­ness of think­ing about the future, of think­ing about tech­nol­o­gy, of think­ing about the sto­ries we tell about tech­nol­o­gy. So I have had the extra­or­di­nary priv­i­lege to sit in the front row for the last 18 hours and lis­ten to peo­ple tell some of the most extra­or­di­nary sto­ries, and I want to add just my own small lit­tle one here for all of you.

Sometimes we tell aren’t about what’s on the screen. They’re not about tech­nol­o­gy per se. They about our rela­tion­ships to tech­nol­o­gy, and those sto­ries are pro­found­ly reveal­ing and impor­tant, and they’re root­ed not just in the present and the future, but also in our past. I want to unpack a set of those sto­ries for you, because I think they’re real­ly impor­tant for how we think about the future.

I ran across this video on YouTube about two and a half years ago.

This is the best 47 sec­onds of video on the Internet. I’m sor­ry, the cat and the don­key on the boat notwith­stand­ing, this is real­ly it. Because in this 47 sec­ond video, some­one has staged a con­ver­sa­tion between Furby and the first gen­er­a­tion of Siri. You all remem­ber Furbys, right? Furby were small, dig­i­tal, squealed a lot, ears [flapped], eye­lash­es flut­tered. They went, ​“Ah ah ah ah ah!” Yes? [audi­ence agrees] Okay, good. You’re all just look­ing at me. I know they got to New Zealand because they’re on the Qantas instruc­tion of things you can’t take on a plane, so they must’ve got­ten here.

So the Furby goes [squeak­ing nois­es]. And Siri goes, ​“I can­not find Graham in your address book.”

And the [Furby] goes [squeak­ing noises].

“Would you like me to look up Shell Oil?”

It’s delight­ful. Part of why it is fab­u­lous is these are the stir­rings of dig­i­tal life. These are things that are dig­i­tal hav­ing, effec­tive­ly, a moment of com­ing to life. The Furby came to life because it talked and danced, and it did it on its own mild­ly hys­ter­i­cal cadence. Sometimes, unknow­able, fre­quent­ly disturbing.

Siri is two gen­er­a­tions lat­er of a dig­i­tal thing com­ing to life. It does­n’t just speak, it lis­tens. It does­n’t just lis­ten, it has the promise that it might have a rela­tion­ship with you, that it might be doing things in the back­ground on your behalf. All of those promis­es are imper­fect, but they say some­thing real­ly inter­est­ing about our desires and our aspi­ra­tions, and our con­stant fas­ci­na­tion with what it means to bring things to life. Of what is it about our mild ambiva­lence about robots and arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence and drones, and why it is that we thing that the Roomba is fun­ny and also troubling.

I has­ten to add here when peo­ple ask me about the robot upris­ing, I will tell you the first place it is going to come is with Roombas. There are ten mil­lion of them in cir­cu­la­tion, lit­er­al­ly and fig­u­ra­tive­ly. Most of them with­out LEDs. And you know, you think that the robot upris­ing is going to be big. No, it’s going to be down on the floor, dis­con­nect­ing your wire­less router, which is a very dif­fer­ent peril.

So why is it that these objects held such a fas­ci­na­tion for us? What’s going on here? Part of what’s going on is that in human cul­tures over I would say a mil­len­ni­um, we have been fas­ci­nat­ed with and those cul­tures are riv­en through with the sto­ries of things com­ing to life. All the orig­i­nal ori­gin sto­ries are about some­one mak­ing things come to life, whether it’s the gods here, whether it is the cre­ative fig­ures who were in the cul­ture that I grew up in, whether it is the Greek and Roman and Egyptian gods, things were brought to life and giv­en pur­pose and set forth on the plan­et. All of the major world reli­gions turn on sto­ries of things being made to come to life. Of bring­ing life into existence. 

By the time you get into the last thou­sand years, those sto­ries get a lit­tle more com­pli­cat­ed. The last thou­sand years haven’t just been sto­ries about gods bring­ing things to life, but about peo­ple try­ing to do it, too. Whether it is the alchemists of the medieval age. We know alche­my sto­ries because they’re most­ly about spin­ning straw into gold, but alchemists in Asia and in Europe were also fas­ci­nat­ed with the idea of mak­ing things come to life. Their entire obses­sions with homun­culi was about mak­ing lit­tle tiny peo­ple and see­ing if you could do it. 

There were sto­ries that came through lit­er­a­ture that were about mak­ing things come to life. Those sto­ries sit right on the edges of reli­gion and art and lit­er­a­ture. Probably the most famous one, and the one that is most impor­tant to the sto­ry of robots is the sto­ry about Golem. Jewish Kabbalistic sto­ry, first appears in oral tra­di­tions at least a thou­sand years ago. It first starts to be writ­ten down about five hun­dred years ago. The most instan­ti­a­tion it is a sto­ry of the rab­bis of Prague cre­at­ing a fig­ure out of the mud in the river­bank and bring­ing it to life to pro­tect the Jewish enclave against the perdi­tions of an angry Catholic king. This golem fig­ure, huge, two meters big, made of mud, most­ly unshapen, is breathed into exis­tence with the word of God slammed into its fore­head, comes to life and pro­tects the Jewish enclave. Protects them from vio­lence, pro­tects them from anti-Semitism, pro­tects from all kinds of things. 

But the sto­ry of the golem is also a sto­ry of what it means to have men bring some­thing to life. Because this golem has to have a par­tic­u­lar set of pur­pos­es. It can only do sacred acts. It can­not do menial tasks. When the rab­bis wife real­izes that she has a body at her dis­pos­al, she attempts to make it car­ry water from the riv­er. (Free labor. Maybe you would do this.) Of course the golem does­n’t know when to stop, fills the base­ment with water, and even­tu­al­ly floods the house. The moral here is of course that life can only be cre­at­ed under cer­tain cir­cum­stances. The decom­mis­sion­ing, for want of a bet­ter word, the tak­ing away of life from the golem and its decom­po­si­tion again is also a sto­ry about how you stop life. The pieces of this golem are said to still be in one of the syn­a­gogues in Prague, wait­ing to be brought back to life when dan­ger aris­es again.

This sto­ry should be famil­iar to us because it runs through our his­to­ry in many oth­er forms, and I’ll touch on them in a minute. But remem­ber the last time this sto­ry has its ori­gin points is the 1500s. By the 1700s, we were already in the place where we could start to find pieces of tech­nol­o­gy that let you make things ani­mat­ed. There weren’t just sto­ries of ani­ma­tion, it was lit­er­al­ly possible.

All these things start to hap­pen in the 1700s: exper­i­ments with mag­net­ism, elec­tric­i­ty, with mechan­i­cal pieces, and sud­den­ly things can come to life. The con­se­quences of this are extra­or­di­nary and rip­ple through to the cur­rent moment. 

The first set of them are automa­tons. Here’s this incred­i­ble tech­nol­o­gy for mak­ing time, but one of the things about mak­ing time was that you could make things move, and they moved on their own. Once you wound them up, they kept going. Not quite per­pet­u­al motion, but they’d at least get across the stage; They’d do some­thing. Starting in the 1600s through the 17- and ear­ly 1800s, all across Europe and indeed into Asia, there were peo­ple who were fas­ci­nat­ed by what you could make if you could take the watch­es apart and use those pieces for some­thing else. Think of it as one of the orig­i­nal hacks, because here you were tak­ing this col­lec­tion of pieces and doing some­thing inter­est­ing and unex­pect­ed with it. 

There were a num­ber of peo­ple who were extra­or­di­nar­i­ly good at this, but one man in par­tic­u­lar changes the game in the mid­dle of the 1700s because he goes from mak­ing abstract things that just did some­thing, a hand moved, a small child that danced, to becom­ing deeply obsessed with veris­simil­i­tude, with sim­u­lacra, the thing that looked real. His name was Jacques de Vaucanson. He was from France. He goes on to have many oth­er lives, but the most impor­tant one is in this moment of time when he becomes con­vinced that you should be able to make things look life-like.

His first attempt at this is a hand that plays a flute. Has bel­lows, has hand, has flute. He goes through sev­er­al iter­a­tions and dis­cov­ers that this thing just does­n’t sound right, and he final­ly real­izes it’s because the hands that he has made are met­al, strik­ing the keys on the flute, and it’s not the right sound. He gloves the hand in skin (I has­ten to add, sheep­skin, just in case you wor­ry.) and plays the flute and he sud­den­ly real­izes he’s cracked the code. This things seems real. The courts are kind of fas­ci­nat­ed by this thing that sounds like a real flute. It does­n’t sound like it’s mechanical.

For his next and most famous automa­ton, he cre­ates a duck. Now, those of us who grew up with ducks, this is not so sexy. I was talk­ing about Vaucanson and his duck in Silicon Valley recent­ly to a slight­ly small­er crowd than this, and I real­ized that no one knew what a duck was. This is a very odd moment when you real­ize in a room of 350 peo­ple, only two of them had seen a duck. I’m assum­ing most of you have seen ducks, so I do not need to give you the Duck 101 primer. But let’s imag­ine duck-sized.

Vaucanson decides he is going to make a duck. Because, as it turns out in 1736 in France most peo­ple had ducks, he is com­pet­ing against good duck knowl­edge. So, high-barter duck­i­ness. Number one thing with a duck, you know it needs to walk prop­er­ly, so foot over foot, what we would know as wad­dling. So this duck wad­dles; 400 mechan­i­cal pieces so the duck wad­dles. Pretty nifty. Ducks eat, we know this, so the duck has a beak and it clacks because duck beaks should clack. This is good. Again he’s worked out how to make the duck do that; that’s pret­ty fabulous.

But real­ly the thing about this duck that is quite remark­able is this duck could eat. So the beak went like this [opens and clos­es hand] but you could stick food in it. And he actu­al­ly worked out how to make a diges­tive tract. Rapid pro­to­typ­ing here: first tract he made with met­al and it rust­ed, because he had to put water in it so it gur­gled. He becomes the first man to do some­thing with vul­can­ized rub­ber and cre­ates a rub­ber diges­tive tract. So now this duck will walk up to Mike, who will feed it, it will digest (gur­gle, gur­gle, gur­gle, gur­gle, gur­gle), and this duck does one more thing. I’m will­ing to bet you can guess what it is.

The best bit, of course, is in 1736 he could­n’t actu­al­ly work out how to gen­uine­ly fake diges­tion, so this duck had pre-cached shit in it. Next time you think about interns, imag­ine that there was some intern who had to go col­lect duck poo and stick it in the bum. And that was its job. 

So this duck wan­dered across the stages of Europe, wad­dle wad­dle wad­dle, chomp chomp chomp, food food food, shit shit shit. It was spec­tac­u­lar. No one had seen any­thing like it. Voltaire declared that with­out this duck there was no glo­ry for France. I’ve always thought that said more about Voltaire and France than it might’ve said about this duck, nonethe­less this duck was seen as being quite spec­tac­u­lar. And changes the game, because what it sug­gests is we could use mechan­i­cal things to make some­thing come to life. Even if only across as stage. Not very far, but far enough to be inter­est­ing. And far enough that a whole lot of oth­er peo­ple want­ed to make automa­tons that were just like this. That were real. That sug­gest­ed lifelikeness.

But what that meant looked dif­fer­ent in dif­fer­ent places. The very same tech­nol­o­gy, the very same watch­es from the very same clock pieces, trav­eled to Tokyo. And in the hands of a man some­times described as the Edison of the Edo Court, a man named Tanaka, he took the watch pieces and made some­thing com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent. He did­n’t make automa­ta, he made karakuri, which is what this one is here. It’s a teacup karakuri, about this big. [holds hands at about doll-size] So not life­like, or life-sized, frankly. Its spe­cial trick was that you put tea in it, and it ran across the table­top. When you took the teacup out of its hand, it bowed, and ran away again. So not mim­ic­k­ing real life, but impor­tant­ly par­tic­i­pat­ing in what was a huge­ly crit­i­cal cul­tur­al rit­u­al in Japan at the time, which is the tea ceremony.

So here is the tech­nol­o­gy wound up to deliv­er an expe­ri­ence that is cul­tur­al­ly appro­pri­ate, not about mak­ing things life­like, which was the European obses­sion, but about beau­ty and grace. Same tech­nol­o­gy down to lit­er­al­ly the parts, com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent notion of what it need­ed to do and why it might need to do it.

Of course, all of that is hap­pen­ing but these oth­er things are hap­pen­ing, too, which is that peo­ple are now start­ing to think about, what are going to be the con­se­quences of bring­ing things to life. If you can see an automa­ton, what comes next?

There’s a young woman who we all know. Her moth­er was prob­a­bly the first suf­fragette. Her father was a labor his­to­ri­an and writer. She grew up watch­ing the Luddites in England, going to the Egyptian hall and see­ing automa­ta and see­ing all kinds of new tech­nolo­gies on dis­play. Her boyfriend of the time, who was mar­ried to some­one else (lit­tle com­pli­cat­ed) was attempt­ing to seduce and woo her through poet­ry and read­ing. One of the first things he read her was an English trans­la­tion of a Grimm Brothers sto­ry about the golem. And in the sum­mer of 1816, she ran off with him to Europe, as you might.

So, she ran off with him to Europe with his best friend, his best friend’s doc­tor, and her half-sister, who was try­ing to race off with the best friend. If this sounds a bit like the Daily Mail, it real­ly was, because frankly this stuff was being cov­ered in the sec­ond page of the Times of London because the best friend is of course Byron. And you know, Byron got around. Best epi­taph ever, right? Byron, described by his spurned lover Charlotte Lamb as ​“mad, bad, and dan­ger­ous to know.” Which in 1816 sounds delight­ful­ly modern.

They were at a din­ner par­ty, as you might be. Byron declares that he is fright­ful­ly, fright­ful­ly bored in the way only the English aris­toc­ra­cy can, and declares that every­one must imme­di­ate­ly write him a sto­ry to shock him. Three tropes get invent­ed that night: the vam­pire sto­ries, the zom­bie sto­ries, and Frankenstein, which is of course the sto­ry about elec­tric­i­ty being used to bring some­one to life, to bring a body to life, to ani­mate a corpse and make it human, or at least an attempt at human. And it is the ulti­mate, in some ways, encap­su­la­tion of the morals of the golem sto­ry and a whole series of others.

Science replaces reli­gion, the word of God is replaced by elec­tric­i­ty, but what you do is bring some­thing to life, boom, and there it is. Of course, Frankenstein has been in print con­tin­u­ous­ly since 1818. It’s been in movies and tele­vi­sion and it is a sto­ry that has seeped its way into our uncon­scious and into our psy­ches. And it keeps tick­ing on as this sto­ry about what might go wrong, and about how we might think about why it is that bring­ing things to life is scary.

Of course that did­n’t stop peo­ple bring­ing things to life using elec­tric­i­ty. Well into the late 1800s, peo­ple were des­per­ate­ly try­ing to work out how to use steam engines and elec­tric­i­ty to make these things that were ear­ly robots, walk­ing men basi­cal­ly. Huge things, steam engine behind them, attempt­ing to make them come to life and walk. Turns out to be a real­ly huge prob­lem. Goes on for a long time. People spend a long time obsess­ing about it. No one ever cracks the code.

And frankly all of that tech­nol­o­gy gets piv­ot­ed between 1914 and 1918 by World War I, when sud­den­ly a whole lot of tech­nol­o­gy that looked like tech­nol­o­gy of sci­ence and opti­miz­ing and pro­duc­tion becomes tech­nol­o­gy of destruc­tion and death, and mass pro­duc­tion becomes mass death. A whole lot of tech­nolo­gies that appeared to be of one char­ac­ter are por­trayed and expe­ri­enced very differently.

A whole lot of social ref­or­ma­tion comes out of this moment. You come out of 1918 and the con­ver­sa­tions in Europe, and indeed in places like New Zealand and Australia, were con­ver­sa­tions about new forms of gov­er­nance, new forms of democ­ra­cy, new forms of social cap­i­tal. Whether it was about the suf­fragettes, the Utopian move­ment, whether it was bout dif­fer­ent ways of think­ing about eman­ci­pa­tion, all of that tech­nol­o­gy gen­er­at­ed a very dif­fer­ent conversation. 

That con­ver­sa­tion influ­enced a young play­wright in Prague by the name of Karel Čapek. He could­n’t go to World War I because he had a med­ical con­di­tion, but he watched his friends go, and he watched his friends die, and he watched his coun­try utter­ly trans­formed by this. He start­ed to think about the machin­ery and about the con­se­quences of the war, and he wrote a play. The play pre­miered in Prague in January 1921. It was called Rossum’s Universal Robots, and it is the very first time the word ​“robot” appears in cir­cu­la­tion, because the word ​“robot” is a word of art, not a word of tech­nol­o­gy. It’s a word invent­ed by a play­wright from a word in Czechoslovakian that means ​“drudge or serf.” A word about pain and class relations.

In this play, which will sound deeply famil­iar to you, there is a robot mak­er named Rossum. Rossum pro­duces a whole series of robots that can only live 20 years. They have to do pro­duc­tive tasks, and after a cou­ple of gen­er­a­tions, they get real­ly shit­ted off by the fact they’re not hap­py and they don’t have souls, and they come back to him and demand to be giv­en both. ​“We’d like a soul and we’d like to not have to die after 20 years.” Should sound vague­ly famil­iar as a plot­line. This would be the plot­line of Blade Runner, among oth­er things.

In the­o­ry, a play that pre­miers in January 1921 in Prague, in Czechoslovakian, should prob­a­bly stay there. Not because it does­n’t have any­thing to offer to the world, but the geo-capital pol­i­tics of it all are just that plays in plays in Prague in 1921 don’t go glob­al. Except that this play did. January 1921, Prague. October 1922, Broadway. March 1923, the West End. January 1924, Tokyo. Sydney…1935. New Zealand, I can find no record, for which I am sorry.

This play cir­cles the plan­et incred­i­bly quick­ly. It’s trans­lat­ed into English, clear­ly. It pre­miers in New York to great acclaim. The New York Times does­n’t love it. They com­pare it to Frankenstein and say it does­n’t raise goose­bumps. The Mail thinks it’s excel­lent and will be a real win­ner. Tells you some­thing right there. 

Part of why this play res­onates, though, is that it’s tap­ping into all these ear­li­er sto­ries. It’s tap­ping into the sto­ry of golem, it’s tap­ping into the sto­ry of Frankenstein, it is nam­ing an entire new form of tech­nol­o­gy and giv­ing it a nar­ra­tive, giv­ing it a face. It turns out this play is the first play to appear on the BBC Radio as sci­ence fic­tion. It’s the first piece of tele­vised sci­ence fic­tion on BBC Television. It has this incred­i­ble res­o­nance, and it nev­er goes away. For a brief moment there, the robot is a thing of lit­er­a­ture. It is a sto­ry. It is a human-metallic per­fect beau­ti­ful object search­ing for a soul. 

But that does­n’t last, because in 1928 an engi­neer in Britain decides he’s going to make his own robot. His name was Richards. He was the head of the British motor engi­neer’s soci­ety, and he was hold­ing an annu­al con­fer­ence in 1928. He invit­ed the Duke of York, the Duke of York said no, and he said, ​“Fine, I’ll build a robot.” I come from a fam­i­ly that has prob­lems with the roy­als. I can under­stand this as an approach.

This is Eric. Eric is 1.8 meters high, he weighs about 60 kilos. He is made of alu­mini­um. He has a 20-volt bat­tery under­neath his feet. He has bright blue eyes. He has ​“RUR” embla­zoned on his chest. Rossum Universal Robot, just in case you missed the point. And he bows, a lot, because he’s real­ly polite. He opens the [con­fer­ence] of the engi­neer­ing soci­ety in the Royal Horticultural Pavilion to great acclaim. Everyone’s like, ​“Look, a robot! Very cool.” So peo­ple kin­da go ​“that’s nice” and he goes on tour. 

The Japanese, who’ve also seen the play, think that they should make their own. This is Gakutensoku, who is about 3 meters tall, is oper­at­ed by pneu­mat­ic fans under­neath, has a pen in his hand where he will write your for­tune if the bird on his shoul­der thinks he should. He goes on tour in Germany in the 1930s and is inex­plic­a­bly lost. I do not know how you lose some­thing that is near­ly 3 meters high and pneu­mat­i­cal­ly dri­ven. He disappears.

The Americans have to make their own, nat­u­ral­ly. This came from Westinghouse. His name is Elektro. He is about 2 meters tall. He has an exten­sion cord that runs out behind him for pow­er. He can dance. He can talk, which is extra­or­di­nary. He has a record play­er inside of him like a juke­box, and a voice com­mand sys­tem. A very ear­ly one that if you trig­gered the right word, it trig­gers the right record that was played. He called every­one ​“Toots,” because it was the 1930s, I has­ten to add. And best of all, he had bel­lows in his head so that he could smoke cig­a­rettes, and blow up bal­loons, but real­ly he just smoked cig­a­rettes. He appears in the 1939 World’s Fair in New York. Everyone loves him. He’s in the movies. He makes his last appear­ance in the movies in 1952, I think, in a movie called Sex Kittens Go to College [1960], which is not what it sounds. It was nowhere near that inter­est­ing. He also dis­ap­pears in about 1953. His head ends up in a frat house in California, being used to open beer bot­tles. The rest of his body is dis­trib­uted into sheds and garages in Pennsylvania. He was reunit­ed with all of his bits and bobs in about 2013, I believe. 

So first you have a play, then you have a series of first engi­neers then com­pa­nies attempt­ing to make this thing come to life. And they’re strug­gling with all of the pieces. They’re strug­gling to make it talk, they’re strug­gling to make it walk, they’ve made it smoke cig­a­rettes, which is weird. Hollywood on the oth­er hand, not so con­cerned with any of those prac­ti­cal­i­ties, and just charges for­ward and takes robots almost any­where you can imagine.

First robot movie, arguably Metropolis, 1929, and after that it just goes. Lots of robots, lots of Hollywood movies, lots of tropes here. But usu­al­ly the run­ning thing here is that robots are not nec­es­sar­i­ly your friends. They are com­pli­cat­ed, they are oth­er, they are fre­quent­ly dan­ger­ous. With the excep­tion pos­si­bly of R2D2, who’s just sur­re­al. Most of these robots don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly mean when. Sometimes they do, but for the most part they don’t.

So what’s going on in all of this? Where is the inter­sec­tion of art and tech­nol­o­gy and what can it tell is about what tech­nol­o­gy might be. Because I think in mak­ing real, both in the movies and in the lab­o­ra­to­ry, you are strug­gling with four key chal­lenges. I actu­al­ly think these are chal­lenges that are not just about robots. I think these are chal­lenges about our life with tech­nol­o­gy. These are chal­lenges about what it means to inhab­it a world where part of our lives are digital.

Problem #1 is there is this prob­lem of, in robots the body, or form. There is a man in Melbourne, I love him, who has a web site called Cyberneticzoo, and he has spent near as I can tell as long as there has been the Internet, and pos­si­bly pre­vi­ous to that, try­ing to col­lect and col­late all the robots there have ever been. Like, all of them. He has an entire sec­tion on robot­ic ele­phants. (Many. Who knew?) Elephants are good, you can hide the motors; they make great robots. But he has a whole col­lec­tion of humanoid robots dat­ing back basi­cal­ly to the 1920s. 

It’s prob­a­bly about 150 of them, there­abouts. Two of them are female. One of them is marked as African-American. This one is clear­ly Japanese. The rest of them have no anno­ta­tion. And what does that tell us? Every sin­gle oth­er one does­n’t need to be marked with gen­der or race because they are male and white. So, a lot of robots. Most of the humans ones turn out to be boys, or blokes, or men. They’re cer­tain­ly not women, and they’re most­ly not eth­ni­cal­ly oth­er. Which is in and of itself imme­di­ate­ly inter­est­ing. What is the imag­i­na­tion of the robot? In Rossum, some of the robots are female. But we’ve already turned it into a male thing.

The sec­ond prob­lem of bod­ies is a more prag­mat­ic prob­lem, which is, what’s the thing going to do? Humanoid robots are actu­al­ly real­ly dif­fi­cult. There’s a rea­son we’ve nev­er made them real­ly suc­cess­ful­ly. The walk­ing piece, your knees and ankles as you get up to get out of here, you should just reflect on the fact that is real­ly tech­ni­cal­ly dif­fi­cult. I can do it, robots not so much. Arms, pret­ty com­pli­cat­ed, too. Hands, oh my god, real­ly sur­pris­ing­ly difficult.

So lots of peo­ple have solved the robot prob­lem by just mak­ing a piece. Think of mechan­i­cal arms in fac­to­ries. Think of lifts. Lots of peo­ple have solved this by break­ing the body into pieces because a whole inte­grat­ed body is actu­al­ly real­ly dif­fi­cult. But it also reflects, what is the thing you’re try­ing to get done? As design­ers, we rou­tine­ly grap­ple with ​“what is the form?” What is the device? What is the glass? I’m still mes­mer­ized by that yes­ter­day; what is the size of the screen? What is the form you are try­ing to deal with, prob­lem #1 for robots.

Problem #2, inex­orably linked to prob­lem #1 is What is is going to do? This is one of the only female automa­tons that exists. It’s Edison’s talk­ing doll, 1915. She sings ​“Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” in a man­ner that makes you think you should turn on all the lights in your house and lock all the doors imme­di­ate­ly. She is the most sin­gu­lar­ly ter­ri­fy­ing thing I have ever encoun­tered, and I’ve seen a lot of stuff. 

So the ques­tions is what is the thing going to do? What is its pur­pose? What is its func­tion? What is the thing this object needs to do? Does it need to be leg­i­ble from a dis­tance? Does it need to be scal­able? What’s its pur­pose? Because that in some ways is huge­ly impor­tant to how you think about how you’re going to build it.

Next prob­lem, very robot-specific but also increas­ing­ly our prob­lem on the web because we think about algo­rithms, is how much auton­o­my is this thing going to have? My favorite sign, just out­side of Tokyo. I got out of a mov­ing vehi­cle to pho­to­graph this sign, because I’m an anthro­pol­o­gist. My col­leagues stopped the car, got out, fol­lowed me and said, ​“What are you doing?”

I’m like, ​“What does this sign say?”

They said, ​“It’s a robot zone.”

I’m like, great. ​“Good. I can read that bit. What’s the bit I can’t read say?”

“Oh, it says it’s an autonomous robot zone and there are robots 2 meters in from the curb.”

“Who’s robots?”

“Autonomous robots.”

“What are they doing?”

“They’re 2 meters in from the curb.”

I’m like, ​“Aren’t you con­cerned about these robots?”

“No, that’s what’s the sign is for.”

“Where did the robots come from?”

“They’re autonomous.”

“How did they get here?”

“2 meters in from the curb.”

I’m like oh my God. And this con­ver­sa­tion goes on the way ethno­graph­ic exchanges do when you’re get­ting it wrong because you’re not ask­ing the right ques­tion. And I’m still going, ​“But aren’t you con­cerned about the robots?”

“No.”

I’m like, ​“But where did they come from?”

They’re like, ​“The side­walk.”

“How did they get here?”

“We don’t care.”

And one of col­leagues who knows me well final­ly said, ​“What is your problem?”

I’m like, ​“Well, aren’t you con­cerned that some­thing’s going to happen?”

They’re like, ​“What?”

“… They’ll go mad and kill you.”

My col­leagues looked at me and went, ​“Oh, that’s just American sci­ence fic­tion. In this coun­try the robots are our friends.”

Because there is a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent nar­ra­tive about robots in this place. This is not a set of sto­ries about robots and death, this is a set of sto­ries about robots and friend­ship. This is not a place that needs Asimov’s Three Laws of the robot because there’s a very dif­fer­ent his­to­ry. But we know the ques­tion here about auton­o­my. How much inde­pen­dence are we going to grant an algo­rithm to decide what data we see? To decide what peo­ple we are paired with, what des­ti­na­tions we go, what images we throw out at the stream. How much auton­o­my are we going to grant the agents that act on our behalves in the dig­i­tal realm, and what will the con­se­quences of that be?

Robots are one of the places that ques­tion plays out, but almost every talk you’ve heard over the last two days is also about what the con­se­quences are of algo­rithms for how we inhab­it the world both phys­i­cal and digital.

And of course if you’ve solved the prob­lem of bod­ies, and the prob­lem of pur­pose, and you have thought through the ques­tion of how much inde­pen­dence or auton­o­my you are going to grant, in this case the robot, but in any case a dig­i­tal agent, you’re left with one last thing: What is it think­ing? What will it inner life be?

Hollywood has taught us that robots have only two thoughts:

1. Kill John Connor.
2. “I have seen things you peo­ple would­n’t believe. I have seen star­ships on fire off the belt of Orion.”

That’s it, right? We know what robots are think­ing, it’s those two things.

Twitter has taught us, if you fol­low the self-aware Roomba as obses­sive­ly as I do, that Roombas wor­ry about toast and crumbs and glit­ter. If you fol­low the Internet of Things Toilet (anoth­er excel­lent fol­low on Twitter) it tells you how much water goes through it on a dai­ly basis. Turns out robots may be think­ing about deeply mun­dane things. But we have this extra­or­di­nary unwill­ing­ness to imag­ine what it might be for these objects to have an inner life, ie. actu­al­ly to havea life. Because in some ways the great fear, the fear of things com­ing to life, the fear that runs through Frankenstein and Golem and the Terminator sequence is a fear about what makes us human and whether it is dis­tinc­tive or not.

If some­thing else can come to life, can have pur­pose, can have form, can have auton­o­my, can have sen­tience, what makes us spe­cial? What makes us dif­fer­ent? One of the anx­i­eties fre­quent­ly expressed about robots, but also about many dig­i­tal objects, is if they have sen­tience and inde­pen­dence, sure­ly the next they will do is kill us. The engi­neers in my lab­o­ra­to­ry fre­quent­ly tell me this.

Masahiro Mori, a very famous Japanese roboti­cist, wrote this extra­or­di­nary book in the 1970s called ​“The Buddha in the Robot” where he spec­u­lates about what the inner life of a robot might be. He says every time we imag­ine that the robot is going to kills us, what we are in fact doing is pro­ject­ing our own anx­i­eties about mankind onto the machine we are build­ing. Because of course the anx­i­ety there is about what we have already done to our­selves. It’s not what the machines will do, it’s what we are capa­ble of doing that we are real­ly fear­ful of, and it’s eas­i­er to put that on the machine than it is to say to our­selves we are the peo­ple who brought the atom­ic bomb to the world. We are the peo­ple who brought pol­lu­tion and cli­mate change to the world. It is eas­i­er to imag­ine that the robots will kills us than to take respon­si­bil­i­ty for our acts here.

And he says rather would­n’t it be extra­or­di­nary to imag­ine that the tech­nol­o­gy we built was the best of our­selves, not the worst of our­selves? What would it be to imag­ine a world in which a robot might achieve bud­dha­hood before a per­son, because it is capa­ble of infi­nite patience and infi­nite grace? What would it be if we imag­ined that tech­nol­o­gy was our best selves, not our worst selves. And what would it say about us if we could imag­ine that the tech­nol­o­gy would embody the things about us that were extra­or­di­nary: art, cre­ativ­i­ty, won­der, beau­ty, mag­ic. What if that was what we were build­ing? And what would it mean then to release that into the world?

So for me as I think about what it is that I’ve obsessed about robots for a year now, is I real­ize that it’s just anoth­er way into a con­ver­sa­tion about what makes us human, and about what it is that we should think about the future. Because ulti­mate­ly while we can talk about inhab­it­ing a world that is made dig­i­tal, the ones that will inhab­it it are us and the things we make. So we can talk about the Internet, we can talk about tech­nol­o­gy, we can talk about things dig­i­tal, but ulti­mate­ly what we are real­ly talk­ing about is our­selves. For me there is some­thing extra­or­di­nary to stop and imag­ine what it means to make a world that is as much about art and beau­ty and love and mag­ic and won­der, as it is about tech­nol­o­gy, objects, bits, bytes, devices, and screens. And for me I want to imag­ine that there is a moment when we can look back on a thou­sand years of human his­to­ry and a thou­sand years of human pre­oc­cu­pa­tions and say, those are things we can all bring to the table. These are the sto­ries that we inhab­it, the sto­ries that shape us. 

But they’re also ones that give us incred­i­ble pow­er to imag­ine oth­er des­tinies. The world ​“robot” is a word of art. It is a word we made real through tech­nol­o­gy. It is a word that has con­tin­ued to be shaped by art. And I want to imag­ine the same is true about every­thing else we talk about. About being dig­i­tal, about being human, about being chil­dren of a tech­ni­cal age. I want to think that Frankenstein’s Monster, from the begin­ning of this talk is wrong. We are not the men of steam and mech­a­niza­tion, we are the peo­ple of a human world that we get to build how­ev­er we want.