Edison's Eve: a magical history of the quest for mechanical life

Abstract

From Publisher: Could an eighteenth-century mechanical duck really digest and excrete its food? Was the Turk, a celebrated chess-playing and -winning machine fabricated in 1769, a dazzling piece of fakery, or could it actually think? Why was Thomas Edison obsessed with making a mechanical doll - a perfect woman, mass-produced? Can a twenty-first-century robot express human emotions of its own? Taking up themes long familiar from realms of fairy tales and science fiction, Gaby Wood traces hidden prehistory of a modern idea - thinking, hoaxes, and inventions that presaged contemporary robotics and current experiments with artificial intelligence. Informed by author's scientific and historical research, Edison's Eve is also a brilliant literary, cultural, and philosophical examination of motives that have driven human beings to pursue creation of mechanical life, and effects of that pursuit - both in its successes and in its failures - on our sense of what makes us human.