In case you can’t open the Financial Times Article…..

FT Brian Groom JUNE 24, 2014

Robots will be everywhere soon – pouring your drinks, cleaning your house, teaching your children, performing surgery, making your car and even driving it. Perhaps a robot will take your job. According to one poll, a fifth of people would have sex with an android, but one in three believes robots will spell the end of the human race. Did you think all this was new? Not a bit. Humans have been imagining and creating self-moving, artificial objects – mechanical rather than electronic – since ancient times. And their purpose went well beyond the strictly practical. “These objects, sometimes called automata, appear as silent metal guardians, talking statues and lifelike birds in narrative texts and courtly pageantry throughout the ancient, medieval and early modern periods,” writes Elly Truitt, a historian at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania. “In these eras automata perform utilitarian functions, just as they do now, but their more abiding purpose was to model or enforce social norms of behaviour, political power or personal relationships.” Ms Truitt sets out the early history of robots as part of a collection of essays published by Nesta, a UK innovation body: Our Work Is Done: Visions of a robot economy. In Homer’s Iliad, blacksmith-god Haphaestus manufactures 20 servants mounted on wheels to serve the gods on Mount Olympus. Artificial handmaids also appear in Sanskrit literature, serving wine and spraying perfumed water from their eyes, nipples and fingernails. Al-Jazari, engineer to the Urtuqid rulers of eastern Turkey in the early 13th century, made a design for a mechanical female wine servant. Wine from a reservoir would trickle into a basin until it tipped and filled a wineglass in the girl’s hand. She would roll down an inclined plane toward the drinker, offering the wine glass in one hand and a cloth to wipe his mouth in the other. Scientists about 80BC created the Antikythera Mechanism, a programmable machine about the size of a laptop which contained gears that emulated celestial movements: it may have been used to predict astronomical events, such as eclipses. In the ninth century, Harun al-Rashid, a caliph in Baghdad, sent a water clock with multiple moving figures to Charlemagne at Aachen. Such objects aimed to demonstrate power, wealth and awe. A Byzantine emperor had a gilt tree whose branches were filled with birds made of gilded bronze, which uttered different cries according to their species; mechanical lions flanked his throne and thrashed their tails and roared when he approached. A mechanical golden angel, made by the Worshipful Company of London Goldsmiths, was lowered on to the head of Richard II during his coronation procession in 1377, showing that his right to rule came directly from God but also embodying the economic power of the goldsmiths. In the 1430s Philip III, Duke of Burgundy, restored a pleasure garden at Hesdin castle including a mechanically gesticulating king, six artificial monkeys and a treelike fountain with gilded, musical birds. He also installed a “Gallery of Delights” in which unwary courtiers would be pummelled, mocked, sprayed with dirt and flour and soaked with water. Robot teachers are nothing new either. In the 16th century Phillip II of Spain commissioned a mechanical monk that performed the proper sequence of steps, gestures and prayers for Catholic devotion. These automata tell us much about our preoccupations and fears. Robots have huge potential for innovation and economic growth but, as we ponder the boundary between natural and artificial and the ethics of drones and robocops, we might want also to keep an eye on who is using the technology and why. ‘Bourgeois’ Glasto The Glastonbury music festival, which takes place this weekend, is “the most bourgeois thing on the planet”, says Bruce Dickinson, lead singer with heavy metal band Iron Maiden. “Anywhere Gwyneth Paltrow [the actress] goes and you can live in an air-conditioned yurt is not for me.” Middle-class liberal sensibilities will be challenged, though, by seeing testosterone-driven Metallica, whose frontman James Hetfield likes hunting bears. But do not fear: a plan to make it the world’s most environmentally friendly festival by dissuading people from using plastic water bottles will comfort the yurt-dwellers.