Did people in the late 1800s and earlier really think that there would be, or already exist, "mechanical men"?
Upvote:-2
After reading this question, the novel Time Machine, by HG Wells came to mind. He wrote that in the 1890s and his fantasy was definelty unique. If you have not read it, it may give you an idea of what they thought back then. Those science fiction writers of that Era may be the best ones to answer your curiosity.
Today the movies that are made about historical times are almost like time travel into the past. It may be all you want to experience of the past. On the other hand most of us get to time travel into the future about 8 hours a night. That's all for now.
Upvote:0
Automaton have existed for many centuries. So yes, people in the 19th century were justified in thinking that `mechanical men' were a real possibility.
If you want to learn more about this, I suggest this In Our Time: Automata podcast. In my opinion, to a certain extent, they bring to life what ancient opinions about automata were.
Upvote:12
It's hard to say what people "really think". Certainly in the 19th century the seed had already been planted. Beginning with a series of pulp novels starting with "The Steam Man of the Priaries" in 1868, mechanical men were nearly a subgenre in the 19th century.
Knowing what we know now, yes, it seems completely ridiculous that an intelligent being could be made from cogs and wheels, but that is due to 20-20 hindsight. Prior to actually trying to create human level intelligence, people greatly underestimated its difficulty. As late as 1970, people were still predicting real artificial intelligence in 15-20 years. When combined with fakery like the allegedly mechanical turk, it isn't hard to see that some thought such a thing was conceivable.
The core reason why people vastly underestimated the difficulty of artificial intelligence is that people assumed that if a machine could do what is hard for humans to do, then that machine must have close to a person's general intelligence. The thought was that since people have trouble with chess, and we could make machines that competed with humans at chess, that those machines were nearing our level. The fallacy is that those machines were designed for chess, while the human brain is not designed for chess. The human brain is designed to survive on the African plains. The brain power required to detect a lion in the grass is many orders of magnitude higher than that required to compete at chess. We don't see it because we're designed for that. Which is why computers can beat any human at chess but still can't compete at the image recognition tasks that would allow the driving of a car.
We know this now. Prior to the second half of the twentieth century we did not, and hence, that people thought you could do it with cogs and wheels is somewhat reasonable.
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