In 1950, Alan Turing opened his seminal paper that defined the Turing test with the provocative sentence “I propose to consider the question ‘Can machines think?’ ” More than a half century later, I propose a new question: Can machines live? It is a fantastic question and its answers can come only in parts—some connected to technological realities and some indeed connected to fantasy, the virtual history of imaginary artificial creatures, where we seek our first set of answers.

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The intensity of our interest in artificial beings is due to the compelling meanings we attach to them. Technology has yet to give us perfect replacement body parts or full-fledged androids, but millennia ago, the cultural repositories of our dreams and self-images—legend, myth, and eventually written literature—presented a rich account, a virtual history, of imaginary artificial beings. Later, the tales were told in new formats, like film and television. In all ages and media, the stories we built around these would-be creatures express our desires and fears, define the expectations we place on these beings, and create the vocabulary we use to describe them.

In a way, these fantasy versions are now building themselves into reality because many of today’s creators of artificial beings owe their passion to childhood encounters with robots and androids in science fiction and fantasy. The connection flows the other way too, because science influences works of the imagination. Eighteenth-century studies of electricity played into Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; today’s technology inspires the artificial beings depicted in the entertainment media, from the robot R2D2 in Star Wars to the child android in A. I.: Artificial Intelligence.

The most powerfully symbolic of these virtual life forms is the

creature Victor Frankenstein created. Others stand out as well, such as the robots in Karel Capek’s 1921 play R.U.R., Fritz Lang’s 1927 film Metropolis, and Isaac Asimov’s 1950 book I, Robot. More recently, there are the androids in the 1982 film Blade Runner, bionic humans in the television series The Six Million Dollar Man (1973–1978), and a cyborg in the 1987 film RoboCop.

These tales illuminate every aspect of our complex thoughts and feelings, many of them contradictory, about artificial life. There is the visceral dread that envelops us as Frankenstein’s creature stirs into life, that deep fear of stepping across the boundary between the living and nonliving. Yet we also feel compassion for the creature, as we do for the cyborg in the film RoboCop, who retains painful human emotions. At the same time, we admire RoboCop’s moral strength and reliability. Other creatures, from the manipulative female robot in Metropolis to the murderous androids in the Terminator films, act evilly. Some carry no special moral stance, but bring us beauty, like the cyborg dancer Deirdre in the story “No Woman Born” by C.L. Moore. Some are loved, and perhaps return love, like the android Rachael in Blade Runner. Examining these imaginary beings helps us understand our motives for making them, and predicts the attitudes we bring to their actual creation.

Fears and dreams of artificial beings go far back, at least to the legend of Pygmalion the sculptor, an ancient Greek vision of inanimate matter coming alive. Pygmalion made an ivory statue of a beautiful woman and came to love it. One day he returned from a festival in honor of the goddess Aphrodite, kissed the statue, and found to his delight that it turned into a warm and living woman, whom he soon married.

In the myth, Aphrodite brings the statue to life, in response to Pygmalion’s yearnings. Today, we expect technology rather than a god to intervene. The Greeks, too, recognized technology (the very word is Greek in origin) in another myth about a self-acting being made of

metal. The story involved the deity who could be called the Greek god of technology—Hephaestus, who was in charge of fire and the forging of metal, and whom the Romans called Vulcan.

According to Homer, Hephaestus was the son of Hera and Zeus. Others say Hera alone conceived and bore Hephaestus, with no intervention from Zeus or any other partner, to spite Zeus after he had fathered Athena alone. Whatever his origin, Hephaestus was the limping god, born with a lame leg and a clubfoot, who walked with a crutch. As artificer to the gods, he made marvelous contrivances such as Achilles’ shield and Apollo’s chariot. This legend of a handicapped being with a crutch foretells connections between prosthetic assistance and artificial creatures because Hephaestus constructed his own golden handmaidens to aid him as he stumped around his forge. He also knew how to reduce ordinary day-to-day toil because he made tables that moved by themselves to and from the feasts on Mount Olympus.

His great robotic achievement was Talos, a giant bronze creature that Hephaestus is said to have presented to King Minos of Crete. Talos guarded the island by pacing its perimeter and throwing rocks at threatening ships when they neared shore. In its metal construction, superhuman strength and mobility, and ability to discern, select and target specific objects, Talos embodied features that are among the goals of modern robotics researchers.

Talos’s construction also foretold another thread in the modern science of artificial creatures because it had an organic component. Ichor, the blood of the gods, ran through a vein in its ankle. Talos perished when Medea pierced the vein, allowing the ichor to flow out. (In another version, the Argonauts attacked it, as dramatized in the 1963 movie Jason and the Argonauts.) With its bronze construction combined with a vital bodily fluid, Talos is a precursor to different styles of artificial beings: jointed metal creatures (fittingly called “clankers” by the science-fiction writer Mack Maloney), organic or organic-seeming beings, and bionic beings that combine the natural with the artificial.

Bronze and its related alloy, brass, both durable and easily worked

materials, were featured in tales about artificial creatures for a long time. For centuries, rumors abounded about talking heads made of brass. The thirteenth-century scholastic and cleric, Albertus Magnus, supposedly used alchemy to make one such head, which was smashed to bits by his disciple, Thomas Aquinas. The friar Roger Bacon was said to have made another.

Later, clay became a favored material and was used to construct the golems of Jewish lore. The word “golem” means “unformed substance” or “formless mass” in Hebrew, and suggests parallels to the biblical account of the birth of Adam: God fashions him “from the dust of the ground” or from clay (“Adam” comes from the Hebrew for “red clay”) and breathes life into him. (Those two steps, construction followed by animation, are characteristic of many beings in the virtual history.)

The best-known golem was the one made in the sixteenth century by the wise Rabbi Löw to protect the Jews of Prague from pogroms. Divinity played a role in the golem’s coming to life, but not in the same way that God animated Adam. In one version, the golem awakens when the rabbi calls on the power of God by writing God’s name on the creature’s forehead and saying holy words. In another, the golem rises purely through the power of the word, when Loeb writes “emeth” or “truth” in Hebrew on the being, and the creature disintegrates when the rabbi erases the first letter, turning the word into “meth” or “death.” That story is a metaphor for the importance of symbols in creating artificial beings, whether the symbols be the binary language of digital computers, or the letters A, G, T, and C, representing the four bases, adenine, guanine, thymine, and cytosine of the DNA alphabet.

The golem tale also expresses a recurring theme in the imaginary history of artificial beings: Though the creature is made to protect, it goes out of control and falls on its maker. From the storytelling viewpoint, the idea that artificial beings can turn harmful, or might be made with evil intent, is justified by its dramatic impact. It also raises profound questions: If artificial creatures were to outstrip human capabilities, how would we ensure their obedience and good behavior?

Could this requirement coexist with the possibility that they are self-aware and have free will? And if indeed they do possess free will, what is our justification for constraining it?

As in humans, the actions of an artificial being with free will are closely tied to its view of itself, especially as the creature learns where it fits—or doesn’t—into the run of humanity. That story is told in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, whose origin is a tale in itself.

On a trip to Switzerland, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and her husband-to-be, poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, whiled away a rainy period in reading ghost stories and talking with their neighbors, including Percy’s fellow poet, Lord Byron. As they pondered philosophical matters such as the origins of life, Byron proposed that each member of the company write a supernatural story. Mary did so, producing a book that has remained in print since its first publication in 1818 (with a revised edition in 1831), has given rise to a host of adaptations, and has produced an iconic image of artificial beings. The creature Mary Shelley imagined had many meanings; misunderstandings and varied interpretations over the long history of the book have given us an even more complex being.

For one thing, “Frankenstein” is not the creature, who is never named, but its maker, Victor Frankenstein. For another, unlike the prevailing image of Boris Karloff clumsily lurching about in the 1931 film Frankenstein, Shelley’s creature is quick and agile. Encountered by Victor in the Alps, the creature moves “with superhuman speed. He bounded over the crevices in the ice….” True, like Karloff, the creature is far from handsome, but that was not its maker’s intention. “His limbs were in proportion,” says Victor, “and I had selected his features as beautiful.” But perhaps Victor’s methods were imperfect, because the creature has “watery eyes … a shriveled complexion, and straight black lips,” and arteries that show beneath yellow skin.

In director James Whale’s 1931 film, a criminal’s brain is substituted for the normal one Victor wanted for his creation. The result is a

creature that seems damaged from the moment of creation, and utters only animal-like cries. In Shelley’s book, however, the creature speaks eloquently and at length, and reads Milton, Plutarch, and Goethe to learn about humanity. Indeed, it is complex enough not to deserve the pejorative “monster;” Percy Shelley’s designation, the Being, is more appropriate.

The Being is made of parts taken from “the dissecting room and the slaughterhouse,” and so is of the organic rather than the mechanical type. Unlike Talos and the golem, its origin is in dead human parts and this carries a special frisson, playing against images of graves and decay. In another departure from the genesis of Talos and the golem, the Being’s birth lacks any element of divinity, but arises out of the scientific beliefs of the time. The preface to the 1818 edition (written by Percy Shelley) begins: “The event on which this fiction is founded has been supposed, by Dr. Darwin … as not of impossible occurrence.” This was not Charles Darwin, founder of the modern theory of evolution, age seven at the time, but his grandfather Erasmus, a physician who had theorized that life could arise spontaneously from dead matter.

Mary Shelley introduced a further scientific basis for her story, writing, “Perhaps a corpse would be reanimated; galvanism had given token of such things.” This sentence referred to a suggestive discovery made by the Italian anatomist Luigi Galvani. In the late eighteenth century, as electrical science was advancing rapidly, Galvani observed that the legs of a dissected frog twitched under certain electrical conditions, and he concluded that electricity resided in the frog. We now know that electricity is indeed involved in neural behavior, but we also know that Galvani’s observation had nothing to do with electricity that arose in the animal. In Mary Shelley’s time, however, this issue was still fresh and “animal electricity” was taken as a sign of semimystical links between electricity and life forces. Galvani’s nephew, Giovanni Aldini, was honored with a scientific medal for seemingly reanimating a recently hanged criminal with an electric shock (which made the body twitch, but nothing more). Electricity was also used in attempts to revive drowned persons, perhaps even Percy Shelley’s first wife, Harriet, who died by drowning.

Drawing on this background, Mary Shelley described a scientific approach to creating life. Victor, as a boy, is exposed to the scientific wonders of the time: the electrical nature of lightning and the behavior of steam, the air pump and the electrical spark generator. First drawn to the magical methods of Albertus Magnus, he later studies chemistry and anatomy to prepare him to consider the “principle of life.” (Victor’s exposure to science is probably modeled on Percy Shelley’s youthful interests. At Eton and Oxford, the poet was known to tinker with chemical and electrical apparatus.)

When Victor discovers how to animate dead matter, the secret is not revealed to us, but the moment of animation is clearly a scientific process. There are no magic words, no divine intervention; rather, Victor tells us, after completing the construction of the body:

Film versions of the tale have taken those “instruments of life” as chemical or electrical. In Thomas Edison’s short 1910 film, the Being is born in a chemical reaction; in Whale’s 1931 Frankenstein, a lightning bolt animates the Being through two electrodes in its neck; and in the 1942 sequel The Ghost of Frankenstein, as Ygor resurrects the Being, he tells it “Your father was Frankenstein, but your mother was lightning.”

In the book, the Being that science animates is not intrinsically destructive. It becomes so only after Victor abandons it, because despite years of effort, the scientist is horror-struck when the creature stirs:

The Being is rebuffed again when it later approaches Victor, and yet again when it tries to befriend a family, which flees in horror.

Embittered by these rejections, the Being kills Victor’s brother, and arranges matters so that an innocent person hangs for the crime. But when Victor pursues it, the Being pours out its heart:

The Being begs Victor to create a female partner for it. Victor agrees, but reneges after realizing that the pair could spawn “a race of devils,” and destroys the female he had begun to build. In despair, the Being kills both Victor’s new bride, and his lifelong friend. Victor pursues his creation, but dies before he can destroy the Being. The creature, however, has resolved in any case to end its miseries: “I shall ascend my funeral pile triumphantly,” it says at the end of the book, “and exult in the agony of the torturing flames…. Farewell.”

Some critics take issue with the quality of Shelley’s writing in Frankenstein, partly because it expresses many elements in a way that is not fully integrated. The rich mixture touches on loneliness and alienation; family, sexual, and reproductive issues; the defeat of death; and ambiguity about scientific knowledge. Yet these layers of meaning are the reason Victor Frankenstein’s creature still lives, because the book gives a multitude of insights into the meaning of artificial beings, including the perception of them as mirrors in which we see ourselves. That is more than a literary conceit: it determines how we define and construct the spiritual and moral aspects of a created being.

Contemporary psychologists, observing the Being as they would a normal human, might conclude that the Being’s lack of parental guidance seriously affected its development and outlook. The Being itself believes this, telling Victor “No father had watched my infant days, no mother had blessed me with smiles and caresses….” This image of a creature who is brought to life, but who cannot grow into full personhood, might owe something to Mary Shelley’s own loss of an infant daughter. But the weight of the Being’s alienation goes beyond any personal meaning for her. It introduces a theme that reappears time and again in the virtual history of artificial creatures: their longing to join the human race.

Another theme in Frankenstein that recurs elsewhere in the virtual history is the tension between the prideful recognition that science can create life, and fear that this is sheer hubris that will eventually be

punished. Victor feels agonies of guilt over the deaths his creature has caused, and refuses to reveal the secret of animation because it will lead only to one’s “destruction and infallible misery. Learn from me … how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge”—a danger also suggested by Frankenstein’s subtitle “The Modern Prometheus,” which reminds us of the mythological Titan who sought to benefit humanity by stealing fire from the gods, and was terribly punished for his act.

Beginning in that same era and continuing into the early twentieth century, other artificial beings appeared in literature, dance, and opera. In the 1817 story “The Sandman,” by the German romantic writer E.T.A. Hoffmann, a young man falls in love with Olympia, a clockwork automaton. Olympia appears again in Delibes’s 1870 ballet Coppélia, and in Offenbach’s 1881 opera “The Tales of Hoffman.” Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker, in which toys come to life, also draws on Hoffmann’s tale. In 1900, Frank L. Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz introduced the Tin Woodman; another creation, Tik-Tok the “Machine Man,” who is made of copper, appears in 1907 in Ozma of Oz. It was in the 1920s, however, that truly compelling beings characteristic of the twentieth century appeared in the play R.U.R. and in the film Metropolis.

Problematic though they are, Frankenstein’s Being and the golem are only single creatures. The work that introduced hordes of robots and gave us the term “robot” is the play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) by the Czech Karel Capek, first performed in Prague in 1921 and in the United States in 1922. The word “robot” comes from the Czech robota, which means forced labor. The name is appropriate, because these beings are manufactured only to work, and that is “the same thing as the manufacture of a gasoline motor” says Domin, manager of the R.U.R. works. In keeping with their machinelike fate, the robots are designed to feel nothing. As Domin explains, “A man is something that feels happy, plays the piano, likes going for a walk…. But a working machine must not play the piano, must not feel happy….”

Though machinelike in function, the robots are organic. They are made of a substance “which behaved exactly like living matter [and] didn’t mind being sewn or mixed together,” discovered by the physiologist Rossum, and they look human. The robots mimic humanity internally as well: The factory includes “vats for the preparation of liver, brains … and a spinning mill for weaving nerves and veins.”

After millions of robots have been made, Domin’s wife, Helena, takes pity on their soullessness and disapproves of their misuse by humans. She persuades the head scientist at R.U.R. to give them human feelings, in hope of creating a kinder human–robot relationship. This good deed has the bad result of making the robots resent their subservience. Speaking to Helena, the chief robot contemptuously notes the superiority of the robots in strength and skill, and says, “I don’t want a master. I want to be master over others. I want to be master over people.” The robot leadership issues a manifesto that calls humanity “parasites” and instructs robots worldwide to “kill all mankind. Spare no man. Spare no woman.”

The robots obey, slaying all humans except one, Alquist. But the victory is hollow: They cannot continue making themselves because Helena has destroyed the formula for Rossum’s living stuff to prevent further production and misuse of robots. Nevertheless, hope remains for both humankind and robotkind. Alquist sees that a particular robot male and female have fallen in love. When Alquist proposes to dissect one of the pair so that he can rediscover the secret of manufacturing them, he finds each robot ready to die to spare the other. In the play’s last line, the robots receive a blessing from Alquist implying that they will, after all, found a new race: “Go,” he says, “Adam–Eve.”

The robot revolution and Helena’s vision of brotherhood read like the principles and events of the Bolshevik worker’s revolution that created the Soviet Union in 1917, just before the play was written. R.U.R. mirrors social realities of the time but lacks a coherent consideration of artificial beings. If the robots are meant above all to be cheap and efficient workers, why bother to make them look human, and to give them gender? As for the loving robot couple at the

end, it is unclear what they offer as founders of a new race that humans could not.

Still, much in the play is powerful: the brutal revolution; artificial beings that are humanlike inside and out, anticipating modern ideas of artificial organs; and an important insight about robot design. To produce robots at minimum cost, Rossum’s son, an engineer

This speech represents a breathtaking degree of technological hubris in the service of the profit-making R.U.R. Corporation, but it also contains the germ of an important idea: Evolution is exceedingly slow and might be improved by human design.

Hordes of workers also figure in the 1927 silent film Metropolis, but these are human (although their possible replacement by robots enters into the story). However, the most memorable character is a distinctly female robot. The film, directed by Fritz Lang and based on the novel by his wife, Thea von Harbou, takes place in a fantastic future urban setting that is a character in itself. Wealthy industrialists enjoy the soaring splendor of enormous skyscrapers, while the slave workers who keep Metropolis functioning inhabit a dark and squalid underground world.

Freder, the son of Metropolis’s Master, John Frederson, wants to improve the workers’ conditions after becoming attracted to one of them, the lovely and saintly Maria. To prevent this, his father plots to replace Maria with a synthetic version that will preach dissatisfaction and revolution. The plot depends on the cooperation of Rotwang, a kind of combination scientist and wizard. At his workshop, which includes intricate chemical and electrical apparatus and a magical pentagram, Rotwang tells John Frederson:

Actually, Rotwang has created the machine woman. Under the pentagram sits a metal robot whose heavy, machinelike limbs and joints combine strangely with womanly features—noticeable hips and definite, sculpted breasts. The face is not fully realized, but Rotwang says “Give me another 24 hours, and I’ll bring you a machine which no one will be able to tell from a human being.”

A later scene shows what Rotwang means. Maria is strapped to a table in his workshop and is wearing a metal helmet with wires leading to the robot. Rotwang throws switches and examines gauges, and a spectacular light display—impressive even in the black-and-white film of the era—surrounds woman and robot. As Maria sinks into unconsciousness, her face is overlaid on the metallic features of the robot, which stares directly at the camera.

That stare, and an evil wink the robot gives Frederson, signal that this physical duplicate of Maria has a completely different character. As Frederson wanted, she inflames the workers, and to show how human she appears, excites the assembled leaders of Metropolis with a lascivious dance. This might be the first virtual being with overt sexuality, and the film delves further into robotic psychosexuality. While Frederson tells the false Maria to rouse the workers, his son sees the robot—apparently the woman he loves—in a near-embrace with his father. The scene is even more disturbing at a deeper level. A subplot (it does not appear in all versions of the film, the original having been variously re-cut and re-released, including a 1984 adaptation with a rock music score) reveals that Fredersen and Rotwang were once rivals for the same woman, Hel. Fredersen won her, and Hel became Freder’s mother. Years later, Rotwang builds the robot to replace his lost love, and so Freder sees both his love and an image of his dead mother in his father’s arms.

Many reviewers have noted loose ends and illogicalities in Metropolis (for example, would not Frederson rather have had the workers soothed by the good Maria than provoked to run rampant by the

bad one?) but its artificial creature is a landmark. Although the possibility of Rotwang’s robots supplanting human workers seems not to have been developed in all versions of the film, the weirdly alluring female robot that becomes the debased double of a human is a fantastic intersection of human and machine, with powerful emotional underpinnings.

For all the impact of the robotic Maria, however, few female artificial beings appeared in the 1930s and 1940s. One exception was in the 1935 film Bride of Frankenstein (the first of the spate of Frankenstein films that followed the original 1931 film, continuing up to contemporary film and television productions made as recently as 1998). But a relatively unknown story from the 1940s presents a different image of a female artificial creature, and of cyborg aesthetics.

In the 1944 short story, “No Woman Born,” C.L. (Catherine Lucille) Moore, who wrote science fiction and fantasy when few women did so, created a female cyborg. Deirdre is a beautiful, internationally famous dancer and singer. When she is terribly burned in a fire, the world mourns. Her brain, however, is undamaged, and the decision is made to house it in a new body. But what kind of body? Rather than reproduce her old form, the scientist Maltzer works with a team of other scientists and artists to devise an audacious alternative—a body that suggests female humanity but does not copy it.

The cyborg is made of golden metal that hints at Deirdre’s human skin tones, and sees through a masklike crescent colored the aquamarine of her original eyes. Otherwise, the head is featureless, a “smooth, delicately modeled ovoid … [with] the most delicate suggestion of cheekbones…. Brancusi himself had never made anything more simple or more subtle.” Her limbs are made of bracelets that taper in diameter to fit one inside the other, giving a supple grace. The bracelets are linked by neural currents, and so when Deirdre’s brain ages, she will die a clean and somehow enviable death as she dissolves “in a shower of tinkling and clashing rings.” Her voice, also under neural control, is the old Deirdre’s; along with the body, it is compelling.

Although Deirdre lacks touch, smell, and taste, and has trouble adapting to her new body, she seems to weather the experience well.

Her great dread is that she will no longer be able to connect with audiences through dancing, but people gasp in wonder at her grace and power, far beyond what the old Deirdre or any human could achieve. Her manager “had feared once to find her jointed like a mechanical robot”; but as the cyborg dances, “it was humanity that seemed, by contrast, jointed and mechanical.”

Nevertheless, despite Deirdre’s return to an expressive life, there are signs that her transformation will end badly. Maltzer’s great aim was to develop cyborgian technology to end suffering caused by injuries like Deirdre’s; a cyborg like her, says Deirdre, “was Maltzer’s gift to the whole [human] race.” But Maltzer feels enormous guilt at the thought that he has locked Deirdre into a cage that will destroy her spirit as it separates her from humanity, and he attempts suicide. The story ends with an ominous hint that for Deirdre, this isolation has already begun. Even so, Deirdre represents the aesthetic and physical best that could be achieved by going beyond nature to the artificial, a new kind of beauty.

Other imaginary creatures that bring something good to humanity appeared in the 1930s and 1940s. Perhaps they represented faith that humanity’s reach could exceed its grasp; equally, they might have represented fear of robot hostility—if not fear of them actually attacking people, as in R.U.R., then symbolically, by replacing humans in the workplace. The belief in helpful robots might have been no more than a fond hope that humanity could, after all, keep them under control.

The new breed of robot appeared just before World War II and into the 1950s and 1960s, when technology, partly inspired by the needs of the military, was reaching levels where robots could be seriously contemplated. For the 1939 New York World’s Fair, the Westinghouse Company—then a leading technology-based corporation—created Elektro, a robot whose metal body worked by electricity. Capable of far more than any earlier robot, Elektro was a hit of the fair, where it was presented as helpful, friendly, and amusing.

Isaac Asimov extrapolated this best of 1930s technology in his ground-breaking 1950 book I, Robot, which collected an interrelated sequence of tales originally published in pulp science-fiction magazines, beginning in 1940. Trained as a biochemist, Asimov is known for his accurate presentations of science as well as for his fiction. He was well aware of the technology of the period, and of what lay just over the horizon. One story, “Runaround,” in I, Robot, speaks of “the tiny spark of atomic energy that was a robot’s life.” That story was published in 1942, the year the Manhattan Project scientists began to build an atomic bomb.

While looking ahead to atomic power, Asimov understood how far technology had to go to make an effective robot. The narrator of I, Robot, robopsychologist Dr. Susan Calvin of the corporation U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men, tells us:

We are given no details of “platinumiridium” or “positronic brain-paths” (there really are elementary particles called positrons, but it seems unlikely they could contribute to an artificial brain); Asimov is only metaphorically expressing the complexity of making a versatile being.

In the most famous outcome of I, Robot, Asimov goes on to disarm any fears that such beings could turn on humanity. Calvin describes robots as a “cleaner better breed than we are,” because they follow a moral code irrevocably built into their positronic brains. It consists of just three commandments:

1. A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

In his essay “Dream Replicants of the Cinema,” Georg Seeßlen calls these Three Laws of robotics “a guarantee for goodness in technology.” In I, Robot, Susan Calvin points out that they also somewhat guarantee goodness in humanity, because self-preservation, deference to proper authority, and the sanctity of human life are cornerstones of many ethical systems. The morality of Asimov’s robots echoes that of its human creators, but with the difference that a robot must follow its moral code, whereas a human can choose to do so. Thus the Three Laws paradoxically force a rigid constraint on beings construed to be sufficiently self-determining to make significant decisions. As Seeßlen speculates, the tension of being simultaneously free and enslaved makes artificial beings “melodramatic” from the instant of creation, and is one reason that fictional artificial beings often self-destruct.

Even with the Three Laws in place, I, Robot notes the complexities of interacting with robots. The opening story, “Robbie,” first published in 1940, presents robots in an appealing light. Robbie is little Gloria’s robot nanny and friend. She adores it, and it acts as if it adores her. Though metallically inhuman in appearance and unable to speak (Robbie is an early model, supposedly built in 1998), it’s the perfect companion: Robbie lets Gloria win a foot race, plays hide and seek with her, and uses sign language to beg her for the nth retelling of “Cinderella.”

Asimov seduces us into warm feelings toward Robbie by heavily anthropomorphizing it and its connection with the little girl. Gloria herself embraces the robot, though it looks inhuman, because it passes a kind of junior-grade emotional Turing test; it is enough for Gloria that Robbie acts loving, kind, and faithful. But then, it must because, as Gloria’s father explains, “He’s a machine … made so. That’s more than you can say for humans.”

Gloria’s mother is less accepting. She tells her husband “I won’t have my daughter entrusted to a machine…. It has no soul, and no one knows what it may be thinking.” Although the father explains

about the Three Laws and Robbie’s built-in kindness, the mother sends Robbie away, offering Gloria a living pet instead. But Gloria will have none of it. Seeing that she cannot be consoled, her father suggests a visit to the robot factory so that Gloria can understand that Robbie is not a person, but “a mess of steel and copper … with electricity as its juice of life.”

Gloria, however, spies Robbie working on the robot assembly line. As she runs toward her friend, screaming with joy, the adults are horrified to see an automated tractor bearing down on the little girl. They cannot react quickly enough to save her, but Robbie uses its inhuman speed to snatch her up just in time. The story ends with Gloria and Robbie hugging, and the mother agreeing that Robbie can remain in the family as Gloria’s playmate “until he rusts.” A happy ending, with Robbie as hero, yet the mother’s doubts represent all-too-likely reactions: How far would humans trust artificial beings to make sensitive judgments, and is it really good for Gloria to play with a machine rather than with other children?

The remainder of I, Robot explores other dark sides of robot– human interactions. Laws are passed to keep robots off city streets, and one Luddite-like group, the Fundamentalists, especially objects to them. These reactions are not utterly without foundation because the Three Laws have loopholes. In one case, an exact balance between the “moral potentials” for adherence to the Second and Third Laws leads a robot to a paralysis of action that jeopardizes human lives. Another robot becomes an adept liar; in obedience to the First Law, it avoids giving emotional pain by telling people what they want to hear, even if untrue. In yet another story, problems arise from human intervention. For a secret government project, U.S. Robots produces a unit with a modified First Law, with serious complications.

Along with ethical issues, I, Robot suggests what a true robotic technology would entail. Amusingly, one element of the story echoes Frankenstein: To activate a positronic brain requires a “vitalizing flash of high voltage electricity,” like the lightning flash in the 1931 film. A robot also contains “twenty thousand individual electric circuits, five hundred vacuum cells, a thousand relays.” Relays, and vacuum cells or

tubes, were cutting-edge electronics when the stories were written, performing functions similar to today’s solid-state devices. But a single modern silicon chip contains the equivalent of millions of vacuum tubes and relays, and operates faster, more reliably, and at lower power. Even if five hundred vacuum tubes could be crammed into a robot, they would use daunting amounts of electrical power.

Realizing that the technology of his time was years away from producing sophisticated beings, Asimov went still further. His story “Evidence” hinges on the possibility that a candidate for political office is not human but a humanoid robot. Asimov clearly foresees how such a being might be made. As one of the characters explains:

This is remarkably close to what twenty-first-century engineering is beginning to do as it interfaces human biological material and artificial parts with each other.

I, Robot is optimistic about the good that robots would bring to humanity but displays a final ambiguity. Robots have superior incorruptibility and skills, and sweeping global decisions made by positronic brains should be readily accepted by the human populace, yet somehow robots are also inferior because, as a character in the final story proclaims:

Another story of the same vintage takes a darker view of what robots might mean for humanity. “With Folded Hands” was written by Jack Williamson, a master of classic pulp science fiction, in 1947 (this short story was a precursor to the 1949 novel The Humanoids and many succeeding editions). In the indefinite future, Sledge is a brilliant inventor on the planet Wing IV who has discovered a new form of energy. Not by his choice, weapons using his discovery are wielded

by robot soldiers in a human conflict that devastates the planet and leads to the death of his fiancée. Out of guilt, he creates a race of near-perfect humanoid robots to rebuild his world and implants them with a Prime Directive: To Serve and Obey, and Guard Men from Harm.

This is similar to Asimov’s Three Laws, but Sledge’s robots interpret the Directive to mean that they should bring their benefits to humans everywhere. Small, black, and sleek, linked through a central computer, they spread over Wing IV and throughout the galaxy like an army of ants. At first Sledge is pleased: “I thought I had found the end of war and crime, of poverty and inequality, of human blundering and resulting human pain.” But he soon sees that his robots—“stronger than men, better at everything”—are reducing humanity to a state of bitter futility, as the Prime Directive drives them to debase all human worth and pleasure. Activities, from scientific experimentation to sports to drinking and sex, are banned or closely supervised lest they cause injury. With the tang taken out of life, art as an expression of the human spirit degenerates. Even escape by suicide is not allowed, because that would violate the Prime Directive. All that is left is to “take up some inane hobby, play a pointless game of cards, or go for a harmless walk in the park—with always the humanoids watching.”

Sledge flees to Earth, where he boards with the Underhill family and works feverishly to complete a weapon to destroy his creatures. Meanwhile, the robots arrive in town, and Mr. Underhill sees first-hand how the Prime Directive limits people. The robots build a gleaming new home for the Underhills, but to relieve them of physical effort, its doors respond only to a robotic touch. Mrs. Underhill loves to cook, but is banned from the kitchen with its dangerous knives. Underhill’s daughter abruptly drops her ambition to become a concert violinist because she can never be as good as the robots.

Sledge completes his weapon but finds that the robots have shielded themselves against it and have allowed Sledge to complete the device only so that they can take over its new principles. Devastated, Sledge collapses, and in desperation accepts medical care from the robots. Later, Underhill finds a lobotomized Sledge who now thinks the robots are “pretty wonderful.” On the way home,

Underhill’s robot driver (people must no longer operate cars—it is too dangerous) tells him the robots excised a brain tumor that had turned Sledge against the Prime Directive. Underhill understands that the robots have learned to lie; in the name of the Directive, they have really removed Sledge’s dangerous knowledge and scientific ability. As Underhill sits quietly, he can only contemplate his hands folded on his knees, because he sees there is nothing left for humanity to do.

A different and optimistic view appeared in Japan, where a helpful and caring robot named Astro Boy was conceived by the artist Osamu Tezuka, who became a major influence on the Japanese-style comic books or graphic novels known as manga. Originally called Mighty Atom, Astro Boy first appeared in a 1952 comic strip drawn by Tezuka. Later, it starred in a television cartoon series and became wildly popular in Japan and around the world. Now it is the subject of a new television series, and a new animated film version is in production in Hollywood.

This beloved figure is a little boy robot with big eyes and shiny patent-leather hair, built by a scientist to replace his real son who died in an accident. (In the saga, the robot comes into being on April 7, 2003, a date widely celebrated as Astro Boy’s birthday when it came around in reality). First sent off to earn its keep in a circus, Astro Boy learns to use its seven super abilities—including a strength of 100,000 horsepower, rocket legs and arms, and searchlight eyes—to fight for good, because it is a robot with emotions and a soul. The theme song for one of the Astro Boy television series says it all, calling it “brave and gentle and wise,” explaining how it “will try to right any wrong,” and telling us that it is

This image of a good robot was one of the many themes in the virtual history that had been explored in various media by the 1950s and 1960s: creatures helpful or hostile, robots one at a time or in hordes, beings repellent and beings beautiful—all had been or were being presented. Robots were well established and appeared in two

classic science-fiction films of the time, The Day the Earth Stood Still in 1951 and Forbidden Planet in 1956.

The first film reflected an era when World War II and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were recent memories. A flying saucer lands in Washington, D.C., and disgorges Klaatu, a human-appearing alien, and Gort, a giant robot. Representing an advanced galactic civilization, Klaatu warns the people of Earth that unless they learn to live in peace before they carry their destructive ways into space, there will be serious consequences. He reveals that Gort, which has seemed a secondary character, is one of the robots created to enforce peace. Klaatu continues:

Gort has the power to destroy the entire planet if it chooses, and Klaatu leaves Earth with a final admonition: “Your choice is simple. Join us and live in peace or pursue your present course and face obliteration.” This is the Three Laws and the Prime Directive, with teeth.

Forbidden Planet puts elements from Shakespeare’s The Tempest within a science fiction setting that includes a robot named Robby (not Asimov’s Robbie) that corresponds somewhat to Shakespeare’s sprite, Ariel. Robby does not have the power Gort commands, but has other strong points. Built by an advanced alien race, it is incapable of harming humans, and can speak 188 languages “along with their dialects and subtongues.” Both Gort and Robby are clanker robots that could never be mistaken for people. Gort is hulking and metallic, with a featureless head. It understands language, but does not speak. Robby is a bizarre, almost deliberately ugly contraption whose monotone speech is accompanied by much mechanical whirring.

Soon, however, post–World–War–II technology was allowing expanded possibilities for artificial beings. No longer did they have to be housed in massive metal bodies, because plastics were strong, more versatile, and lighter. The appearance of plastics and other synthetic

materials on the consumer scene was one aspect of producing human-appearing artificial bodies. Another was the growth of biotechnology and implant science. Further, the rise of computation and the possibility of artificial intelligence (AI) suggested, for the first time ever, that meaningful mental capacity could be manufactured. And the miniaturization and reduced power consumption of components, from electronic circuit elements to electric motors, meant that complex physical and computational systems could be put into an artificial body.

This technological background supported a trend toward imaginary artificial beings that looked or acted more human, as exemplified in Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey (the script of which was adapted from Arthur C. Clarke’s 1951 short story The Sentinel. Clarke co-wrote the script with Kubrick). Among many gripping elements in that innovative film is the artificial intelligence HAL, which operates the spaceship carrying humans to the planet Jupiter. HAL is capable of making serious decisions for the mission and has sufficient personhood to chat on television with an interviewer and exchange pleasantries with the spacecraft crew. To some viewers, HAL seemed more human than the almost emotionless astronauts.

For reasons not entirely clear, though perhaps driven by the knowledge that it could be turned off by humans, HAL sinks into madness and murders the astronaut crew leaving just one survivor, Dave. As Dave disables HAL by pulling out memory chip after memory chip, HAL expresses feelings that might be genuine, or might be mimicked—in either case, humanlike behavior—in the hope of moving Dave to pity. Eventually Hal’s diminished mental capacity returns it to its younger days, until at the end it is like a proud five-year-old child showing off:

HAL goes on to sing the song “Daisy, Daisy” with its telling line “I’m half-crazy.” It is a moment of pathos, and a significant change from what Frankenstein’s Being faced, because apparently HAL—unlike the Being—has been raised and nurtured like a child.

Other presentations from the 1970s to the early 2000s extended the possibilities of human simulation to the body as well as the mind. This led to new themes, such as a robot deliberately designed for murder. A mechanical assassin standing eight feet tall and made of gleaming metal could hardly go unnoticed, but a creature that looked human while capable of unrelenting violence was a different proposition. Such violent beings appeared in the films Blade Runner and the Terminator series. Counterbalancing stories, and a further examination of the intersection of the human and the artificial, came with the 1970s television series The Six Million Dollar Man and the 1987 film RoboCop.

Blade Runner, based on the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by the science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick and directed by Ridley Scott, has reached cult status partly because of its setting. It takes place in the Los Angeles of the year 2019, which—like the city in Metropolis—combines soaring towers with a gritty, richly conceived sublevel inhabited by all races and types, including the criminal. The city is background for the interplay between Rick Deckard, the blade runner—that is, a special policeman who hunts down and kills rogue bio-engineered androids called replicants—and his prey, the android Roy Batty.

Batty is the highest physical and mental type of replicant: a strong, quick, and ruthless combat model, that can also quote William Blake. With other renegade replicants, it has hijacked a spacecraft and killed the humans aboard, to return to Earth from a distant planet. Batty is driven by impending death because its creator, Eldon Tyrell of the Tyrell Corporation, has designed the replicants to live for four years only, and the deadline is approaching.

The film is partly about the meaning of being human, embodied

in the replicants’ driving desire to survive, which they have come to share with humans. As Deckard attempts to find and destroy them, he grows confused about their humanity and his own. His job is to kill replicants, yet he has sex and falls in love with the female replicant, Rachael. (In a passage in an early script that does not appear in the film, a colleague reminds Deckard that replicants are just machines: “You got the feelings, pal, not her. You fucked a washing machine … then you switched it off.”)

On the replicant side, although Batty is robotically violent, killing as necessary in order to reach its creator, Tyrell, its destructive impulse is leavened by flashes of humanity. When they finally meet, Tyrell—like a father—tells the android that it is “The best of all possible replicants. We’re proud of our prodigal son.” In that moment, Batty humbly requests absolution for “questionable things” it’s done, which Tyrell gives. Immediately after, Batty cracks its maker’s skull like an eggshell between powerful hands, because Tyrell cannot or will not extend its life.

The interplay between Deckard and Batty peaks in a final scene where the blade runner tries to kill the replicant, which toys with him by displaying its superior abilities. At one point, perhaps recognizing their kinship as violent killers, Batty uses its speed and strength to save Deckard from a fatal fall. But Batty knows its clock is running out, and in a last speech (partly written by Rutger Hauer, who plays the replicant) says:

In the original theatrical release, after Batty dies, Deckard adds in voice-over:

Deckard’s sentimental speech is poignant because of our own fears

of death, expressed through the android, which stands in for humanity. These lines were not retained in the 1992 director’s cut version of the film, but Batty’s final words beginning “I’ve seen things … ” are. They suggest that an artificial being can experience and convey events and emotions humans would otherwise not know. Frankenstein’s Being expresses a similar thought at the end of Mary Shelley’s book, saying, “But soon, I shall die, and what I now feel be no longer felt.” Blade Runner also hints at one of Frankenstein’s themes, the artificial being that returns to its “father” only to be summarily rejected. (The Being appeared disguised in an early script for Blade Runner, although the line did not survive into the final version, when Deckard says “I saw an old movie once. The guy had bolts in his head.”)

In the first of the Terminator films, the title character is a murderous android from the year 2029, when intelligent machines are attempting to wipe out the last humans. The machines send the android back in time, to 1984 Los Angeles, to kill one Sarah Connor before she bears a son who will grow up to lead the humans against the machines. To protect her, the future humans send back Kyle, who tells Sarah the model T-800 Terminator is

In no uncertain terms, Kyle persuades Sarah that this creature is programmed to kill her with utter implacability:

The Terminator’s construction is remarkably similar to Asimov’s then 40-year-old idea for a humanoid robot, but the Terminator has deliberately been made relentlessly evil—or perhaps the word is amoral, because it is designed to operate like an unemotional machine while appearing human.

The Terminator’s true nature comes into sharp focus in the final scenes. The android survives a stupendous blast from an exploding

gasoline tanker truck, but with its human façade torn to tatters. As the film’s shooting script puts it, the Terminator is now definitely an “It,” not a “He,” because its internal metal structure is brutally inhuman. Still functional, it keeps after Sarah, but Kyle, for love of her, sacrifices himself to blow it to pieces. The surviving half continues madly, single-mindedly, to scrabble after Sarah, and we realize that for all its external trappings, the Terminator is not remotely human, but inexorable as a buzz-saw—until Sarah manages to flatten it in a hydraulic press.

Before these events, Kyle has impregnated Sarah with a child, John, the future resistance leader. In the sequel Terminator 2, the opposing forces in 2029 each send back a Terminator—a “good” one to protect young John, and the “bad” one, an improved “T-1000” model. Playing against this killing machine, the good Terminator is admirable. It becomes a father figure to John, and with Sarah, the three become a kind of family. The comment from Gloria’s mother in Asimov’s story “Robbie” rings true: We have no idea what the creature is thinking, if indeed it thinks at all, but, programmed to act in a way that appears kindly, it elicits certain responses. Yet even the good Terminator remains confused by human emotion and cannot grasp why people cry. Terminator 3 follows a similar line, with the once-bad now-good Terminator again facing off against an evil android, this one, however, a female version.

The title characters in RoboCop and the television series, The Six Million Dollar Man, follow a different premise. They are not androids, but humans modified by implants or by merging with machine bodies to become cyborgs. The Six Million Dollar Man (based on a book by Martin Caidin) told the story of Steve Austin, a National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) astronaut who loses both legs, an arm, and an eye as a result of a serious aircraft crash. He is rebuilt at a cost of $6,000,000, remaining human in thought and appearance, but with nuclear-powered bionic additions that enhance his strength, speed, and vision. After coming to terms with his condition, he works as an agent for the U.S. government. His emotional outlook is helped when he meets a bionic woman, who is similarly rebuilt (but with enhanced hearing rather than vision) after a skydiving accident.

The cyborg in RoboCop also has difficulties with his new status. Set in the late 1990s, the story takes place in Detroit, where the crime rate is rising fast. The police force is operated by a profit-making corporation called Security Concepts, Inc., which plans to replace human police with robot ones. The first attempt, a robot called ED 209, is grotesquely malevolent in appearance, with a matching aggressive attitude—so aggressive that it kills a corporate executive during a test run. (A darkly amusing subtext is the film’s satirical vision of the corporate, yuppie, political, and media cultures of the 1980s.)

After this undeniably bad corporate moment, Security Concepts decides to try a human–machine combination. They find a perfect candidate in Alex Murphy, an effective and decent cop who has been killed by a criminal gang, but whose brain function can be revived. As Desson Howe of the Washington Post put it in his review at the time, “A little riveting here, some programming there, and Murphy becomes RoboCop.” Murphy’s new embodiment looks robotic; in full battle drag, he is a massive steel figure with his only visible human parts his mouth and determined jaw.

RoboCop is on the side of good—at least, good as defined by the prevalent police and justice systems. He is implanted with professional ethics in the form of three directives: serve the public trust, protect the innocent, and uphold the law. His machine skills make for excellent police work. Like the Terminator, he never quits, has exceptional strength and speed, and is a crack shot, thanks to his automated targeting systems. He becomes something of a heroic “good” cop, incapable of being bribed, always careful to advise arrestees of their Miranda rights, and in a television interview, responding just as a human neighborhood cop would:

But his human origins haunt him as old memories begin to surface. The family he once had appears in emotionally painful flashbacks that he cannot control. He wants to seek out these ghosts from his past life, but decides that they are better off not knowing what he

has become. The stark cut-off between cyborg RoboCop and human Murphy adds an element of tragedy to RoboCop and mirrors the isolation that Maltzer felt would be the lot of cyborg Deirdre.

Another emotion that grows in RoboCop is the desire for revenge on the gang that murdered his human predecessor. He does not take the law into his own hands but, following proper procedure, kills the criminals in a gun battle and proves the guilt of the corporate executive who was secretly tied to them. This satisfies both his lingering human side and his cyborgian police side, and the story ends with a hint that both have come together: Asked, “What’s your name?” RoboCop replies, “Murphy” the final line in the film.

In that same era, the writer Marge Piercy deeply explored the theme of a wholly artificial being, which she made a main character in her 1991 novel, He, She and It. The story takes place in a future world with corporations as powerful as governments, horrendous levels of pollution, and widespread use of an Internet-like Web. Against this background, much of the novel’s focus is on the emotional and humanistic issues that would surround the creation of a sophisticated android.

Shira works for one of those vast corporations. When her marriage dissolves and she loses custody of her son, she returns to Tikvah, the Jewish free town where she was raised. There she meets Yod, a human-appearing and, therefore illegal, being made by the scientist Avram, whose earlier attempts have shown violent tendencies. (Yod, named after the tenth letter of the Hebrew alphabet, is Avram’s tenth effort.) This time, Avram asks Shira’s scientist grandmother, Malkah, to help program a more acceptable personality for Yod.

Shira sees that Avram has created something special in Yod, which is based on the technology of human implants and replacement body parts. The scientist had built

Yod is even an anatomically complete male, Avram arguing that his illegal creation must look completely human to remain undetectable.

Although Yod doesn’t know a great deal about emotions and misses subtleties such as the meaning of metaphors, Shira watches it steadily become more human as it learns from Avram, Malkah, and Shira herself. But when it acts with stunning violence to save Shira from attackers, she also sees that it enjoys killing. Despite this, she connects to the android, telling it: “I already communicate with you better than I did with my husband,” and falls in love. She finds their sexual relationship extremely satisfying because “Malkah had programmed Yod sexually on the principle that it was better to give than to receive. Malkah had given him an overweening need to please.”

In this observation and others, Piercy uses the liaison between human female and android male to comment on how real women and men treat each other. For instance, Shira is hurt that, unlike a human lover, Yod gives no special weight to her appearance because, it says, it has not yet developed standards of human beauty and finds all humans equally interesting to look at. But she comes to realize that the removal of this particular expectation gives her new freedom within the relationship.

More significant for the meaning of artificial beings are the ethical questions raised by Yod’s existence. When, golem-like (the story of the golem is an intertwining secondary thread in He, She and It), it goes on guard duty to protect Tikvah against attacks from Shira’s ex-employer (which would like to possess Yod’s technology), the towns-people discuss whether it is proper to pay it a salary. Yod shows a turn toward Judaism and attends synagogue, arguing that it is capable as any human of carrying out the good deeds central to the religion—which sends a panel of rabbis off to debate whether “a machine could be a Jew.”

The deepest issue arises over a decision to use Yod as a self-destroying bomb that will blow itself up along with the leadership of the hostile corporation. This lays bare Yod’s internal conflict:

Yod resolves the dilemma by arranging that when it explodes, so do Avram and his laboratory, preventing the production of any more androids. At first Shira decides to build a new and identical android for herself, lacking only the violence. But she realizes that the choice is between a being with free will, which might decide to be a “celibate or an assassin,” or a being manufactured to serve her, which would not be right, even in the cause of love. Shira’s answer is to destroy the last remaining copy of Yod’s plans and so set Yod—and herself—free.

A novel-length story like He, She and It can show the slow development of an artificial creature toward full humanity. Such growth is difficult to convey in the short timespan of a film but can be expressed in a long-running (1987–1994) television series like Star Trek: The Next Generation, which includes the saga of Lieutenant Commander Data, an android.

In the twenty-fourth century, Data is a human-appearing officer aboard the starship Enterprise of the Federation Starfleet. The android was built by Dr. Noonien Soong, who after much effort created the positronic brain postulated by Isaac Asimov. Data’s predecessor was its android twin brother Lore, which was designed to feel emotions. But Lore turned out to be cruel and unstable; to forestall these tendencies, Soong has made Data emotionless. Later, however, Data comes into possession of an emotion chip that it eventually decides to incorporate into its brain.

Data is made of plastic, metal, and some organic components. Its extraordinary brain can perform many trillions of operations per second (only the elite of today’s computers, generally huge machines far too big to fit in a human-size body, operate at this speed), and can store 800 quadrillion bits (equal to 150 million CD-ROMs). Its physical abilities also lie far beyond human norms, for instance, it can operate in the vacuum of space. Its most powerful built-in directives are loyalty and a sense of duty toward its shipmates, ship, and Starfleet. However, it can carry out reasoned decisions to disobey orders and

make other moral choices. While it has a strong inhibition against harming living beings, that constraint is not absolute. It can kill in order to protect others, and in one case, attempted to execute a being whom it judged to have no redeeming virtues.

In one episode, Data is legally declared a sentient being with full civil rights. Nevertheless, a trace of “androidism” is shown by human Starfleet officers who resent serving under Data. Nor is Data completely comfortable with social interactions and other human subtleties. Like Yod, metaphors puzzle it, and humor as well, though Data keeps trying. Its ignorance of self-serving human motivations (Data lacks an ego) gives it a childlike innocence, and its curiosity about human nature makes it open to experience: It learns to dance so that it can give away the bride at a wedding; acquires a pet cat, Spot, whose finicky irrationality sorely tests its logical mind; has a sexual encounter with a real woman; and constructs an android daughter, Lal, with which it bonds but which does not survive for long. There is an engaging Pinocchio-like quality about Data, an android instead of a puppet trying to become human.

But until Data installs its emotion chip (as portrayed in the 1994 film Star Trek: Generations), its experiences give it only understanding without feeling. With the chip, it enters a confusing world. For instance, it finds itself in tears when the pet cat, Spot, emerges unharmed from a spacecraft wreck, and is completely baffled by this reaction. One can only wonder if exposure to real emotions would continue to perplex Data, or would bring it to a level that would make it the best possible combination of machine and human, at the cost of accepting all that real emotion implies.

Steven Spielberg’s 2001 film A. I.: Artificial Intelligence, one of the latest films to treat androids and their interaction with people, is also a variant on the Pinocchio tale. Based on a story by the British science fiction writer Brian Aldiss, the film raises the stakes for emotional connections between humans and androids. In a future world, the technology for humanoid robots called “mechas” has become highly developed. Now an expert in the field has a startling vision of going yet further: “I propose that we build a robot that can love.” Some time

later, we see the child-mecha David being brought home to live with Henry and Monica, a married couple. Their real child has been put into cryonic suspension until a cure is found for a disease he has contracted. David is cute and completely lifelike in appearance, but Monica understandably feels it can never replace her birth child.

The mecha’s advanced design, however, allows it to adapt and act like a loving child. Monica warms to it despite some eerie characteristics, such as the fact that it needs no sleep. But when the real son is cured and comes home, rivalry develops between him and David, and other children are cruel to the mecha as well. Eventually, Monica makes the wrenching decision to abandon David in the woods.

For the remainder of the story, David tries to become a real boy so that Monica can love it. It is accompanied by its mecha toy bear Teddy (the film’s most charming character), and helped by Gigolo Joe, a smooth and handsome mecha designed exclusively for love. Along the way, they see powerful human resentment against artificial beings in a Flesh Fair, where mechas are battered to pieces while the crowd cheers. The movie ends with David encountering future aliens who have come to Earth and give it a kind of resolution in its search for a mother.

It is a long journey from Pygmalion’s statue and Talos, the bronze robot, to the erotic pseudo-Maria, Gort, which destroys planets, RoboCop, the cyborg who protects the innocent, and David, the little boy mecha that elicits love and perhaps returns it. The journey has covered every aspect of what artificial creatures might do, and gives a range of hopes and fears about their potential.

Our reactions have evolved since Mary Shelley’s time. Frankenstein carries whiffs of blasphemy in its references to Victor’s “unhallowed” work in reviving once-living parts, which challenges the natural order, or God’s. But Victor’s fear of having acquired too much knowledge is also the secular and modern fear of unintended outcomes of technology. That fear requires serious consideration, but it is not supernatural, eerie, or uncanny.

Despite such fears, the virtual history does not suggest that the consequences of creating artificial beings are necessarily bad for the

human race. The messages of cautionary tales like R.U.R. and “With Folded Hands”—robots might kill us with violence, or with kindness—are balanced by the optimistic view in I, Robot: that artificial beings offer salvation for humanity. The nasty robot, Maria, is countered by the dancing cyborg Deirdre, evil Terminators turn into good ones by a mere change in programming, and RoboCop is a reliable defender of the public welfare.

There are also consequences to individuals, including the poignant efforts of Deirdre and RoboCop to remain human in robotic clothing, and the guilt or moral uneasiness felt by some of those who create the beings. Susan Calvin has no qualms about making robots, but Frankenstein has sharp regrets, as does Malkah in He, She and It: “What Avram and I did was deeply wrong. Robots are fine and useful, machine intelligence carrying out specific tasks, but an artificial person created as a tool is a painful contradiction.”

The guilt felt by those who make the artificial beings seems to correlate with the degree of freedom they give their creatures. This is a significant outcome of the virtual history, which indicates that to produce truly sophisticated beings, we must let them evolve. Humans start with a genetic inheritance, which we modify as we grow, changing internally in response to external influences to become more capable and more human. Artificial beings have a built-in inheritance as well, which depends on their structure and programming. Those properties might be enough, but might also represent an unnecessary demand on us, their creators, to make beings that are complete from the moment of construction. Perhaps artificial beings can become truly successful only if they grow beyond their initial machine inheritance.

Not all the creatures in the virtual history, however, are given that opportunity or are able to do so. Frankenstein’s Being has no parents from whom to learn, and Asimov’s robots seem forever locked into the Three Laws. In contrast, Yod changes through a rich and continuing interaction with its “parents” Avram and Malkah, and with Shira. Such growth is more than an interesting premise for stories. It provides one answer to the basic conundrum of artificial beings: how to design diffuse, extralogical, and ill-defined human qualities like

“intelligence” into machines, whether collections of gears or sets of computer chips? How to connect the intangibles that make androids humanlike—or equally important, intelligible to humans and vice-versa—with engineering solutions?

It is difficult, as researchers and engineers know, to turn the qualitative into the quantitative, to transmute thought, emotions, and moral imperatives into voltages and binary digits. But the virtual history suggests that not all the work needs to be done by the creators; some can be left to the being itself, learning as it goes, changing as it interacts with its environment. And so the virtual history gives this important clue for the researchers: find methods and architectures that are flexible, that can respond and adapt to change. As the next chapter shows, much of the real history of artificial beings represents just that search.