And even a chipped pebble is a machine, for the force applied to the blunt edge by the hand is transmitted to the sharp end and, in the process, intensified. The force spread over the large area of the blunt end is equal to the force spread over the small area of the sharp end. The pressure (force per area) is therefore increased, and without ever increasing the total force, that force is intensified in action. The sharp-edge pebble could, by the greater pressure it exerts, force its way through an object, as a rounded pebble (or a man's hand) could not.
In actual practice, however, few people, other than physicists at their most rigid, would call a chipped pebble a machine. In actual practice, we think of machines as relatively complicated devices, and are more likely to use the name if the device is somewhat removed from direct human guidance and manipulation.
The further a device is removed from human control, the more authentically mechanical it seems, and the whole trend in technology has been to devise machines that are less and less under direct human control and more and more seem to have the beginning of a will of their own. A chipped pebble is almost part of the hand it never leaves. A thrown spear declares a sort of independence the moment is its released.
The clear progression away from direct and immediate control made it possible for human beings, even in primitive times, to slide forward into extrapolation, and to picture devices still less controllable, still more independent than anything of which they had direct experience. Immediately we have a form of fantasy-which some, defining the term more broadly than I would, might even call science fiction.
Man can move on his feet by direct and intimate control; or on horseback, controlling the more powerful animal muscles by rein and heel; or on ship, making use of the invisible power of the wind. Why not progress into further etherealization by way of seven-league boots, flying carpets, self-propelled boats. The power used in these cases was "magic," the tapping of the superhuman and transcendental energies of gods or demons.
Nor did these imaginings concern only the increased physical power of inanimate objects, but even increased mental power of objects which were still viewed as essentially inanimate. Artificial intelligence is not really a modern concept.
Hephaistos, the Greek god of the forge, is pictured in the Iliad as having golden mechanical women, which were as mobile and as intelligent as flesh-and-blood women, and which helped him in his palace.
Why not? After all, if a human smith makes inanimate metal objects of the base metal iron, why should not a god-smith make far more clever inanimate metal objects of the noble metal gold? It is an easy extrapolation, of the sort that comes as second nature to science fiction writers (who, in primitive times, had to be myth-makers, in default of science).
But human artisans, if clever enough, could also make mechanical human beings. Consider Talos, a bronze warrior made by that Thomas Edison of the Greek myths, Oaedalus. Talos guarded the shores of Crete, circling the island once each day and keeping off all intruders. The fluid that kept him alive was kept within his body by a plug at his heel. When the Argonauts landed on Crete, Medea used her magic to pull out the plug and Talos lost all his pseudoanimation.
(It is easy to ascribe a symbolic meaning to this myth. Crete, starting in the fourth millennium B.C., before the Greeks had yet entered Greece, had a navy, the first working navy in human history. The Cretan navy made it possible for the islanders to establish an empire over what became the nearby islands and mainland. The Greek barbarians, invading the land, were more or less under Cretan dominion to begin with. The bronze-armored warriors carried by the ships guarded the Cretan mainland for two thousand years-and then failed. The plug was pulled, so to speak, when the island of Thera exploded in a vast volcanic eruption in 1500 B.C. and a tsunami greatly weakened the Cretan civilization-and the Greeks took over. Still, the fact that a myth is a sort of vague and distorted recall of something actual does not alter its function of indicating a way of human thinking.)
From the start, then, the machine has faced mankind with a double aspect. As long as it is completely under human control, it is useful and good and makes a better life for people. However, it is the experience of mankind (and was already his experience in quite early times) that technology is a cumulative thing, that machines are invariably improved, and that the improvement is always in the direction of etherealization, always in the direction of less human control and more auto-control-and at an accelerating rate.
As the human control decreases, the machine becomes frightening in exact proportion. Even when the human control is not visibly decreasing, or is doing so at an excessively low rate, it is a simple task for human ingenuity to look forward to a time when the machine may go out of control altogether, and the fear of that can be felt in advance.
What is the fear?
The simplest and most obvious fear is that of the possible harm that comes from machinery out of control. In fact, any technological advance, however fundamental, has the double aspect of good/harm and, in response, is viewed with a double aspect of love/fear.
Fire warms you, gives you light, cooks your food, smelts your ore-and, out of control, burns and kills. Your knives and spears kill your animal enemies and your human foes and, out of your control, are used by your foes to kill you. You can run down the list and build examples indefinitely and there has never been any human activity which, on getting out of control and doing harm, has raised the sigh among many of, "Oh, if we had only stuck to the simple and virtuous lives of our ancestors who were not cursed with this new-fangled misery."
Yet is this fear of piecemeal harm from this advance or that the kind of deep-seated terror so difficult to express that it finds its way into the myths?