![]() Western scrub jays “cache”-they hide food for later use-and studies have shown that they anticipate what they will need in the future, rather than acting on what they need now…. A few Japanese macaques learned to wash sweet potatoes and even to dip them in the sea to make them more salty, and passed that technique on to subsequent generations. New Caledonian crows make elaborate tools, shaping branches into pointed, barbed termite-extraction devices. De Waal points out various examples, and there are many more. But every one of these abilities shows up in at least some other species in at least some form. The list of candidates is long: tool use, cultural transmission, the ability to imagine the future or to understand other minds, and so on. Alison Gopnik writes for the Atlantic: “ Psychologists often assume that there is a special cognitive ability-a psychological secret sauce-that makes humans different from other animals. A new book out from Frans de Waal, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?, makes the case for what humans can learn from nonhuman cognitive processes. Concomitant with its scientific purposes, the pursuit of complicated toys during the Enlightenment laid bare the frightening symmetries between man and machine.”Īnimals: they’re just like us! They may not be able to weep or operate a rotary drill, but that doesn’t make them any less intelligent. Ultimately, automaton-making was the underground laboratory of the Industrial Revolution. But designing these trinkets led to a flood of techno-industrial breakthroughs for the savviest court mechanicians, whose tinkering would lead to the Jacquard loom and advances in hydraulics. Drawing from Vaucanson’s digesting duck to “Moxon’s Master,” the Ambrose Bierce story featuring a murderous, chess-playing android, automata can be studied as a precursor to modern fears regarding artificial intelligence. “Initially, automata were designed as frivolous objects: clockwork tableaux, begemmed tigers and swans, a prototype of the contemporary condiment spinner, dancing metal ladies. “An automaton symbolizes the creepy resemblance between us and the clockwork mechanisms we’ve invented,” Michael Peck writes in a recent piece for Lit Hub. Do cyborgs and automatons haunt your waking dreams? You’re not alone.
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