Frolicsome Engines: The Long Prehistory of Artificial Intelligence

Defecating ducks, talking busts, and mechanised Christs -- Jessica Riskin on the wonderful history of automata, machines built to mimic the processes of intelligent life. How old are the fields of robotics and artificial intelligence? Many might trace their origins to the mid-twentieth century, and the work of people such as Alan Turing, who wrote about the possibility of machine intelligence in the '40s and '50s, or the MIT engineer Norbert Wiener, a founder of cybernetics. But these fields have prehistories -- traditions of machines that imitate living and intelligent processes -- stretching back centuries and, depending how you count, even millennia. The word "robot" made its first appearance in a 1920 play by the Czech writer Karel?apek entitled R.U.R., for Rossum's Universal Robots.