Simon Schaffer's Essay Enlightened Automata

Simon Schaffer’s essay Enlightened Automata discusses the effects of automata on past and present society. As the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment Era dominated society, the creation of automata furthered many scientific and philosophic ideas. As more machines were created, people think about their world differently, and most often these machines were used for visual show as different forms of entertainment. In line with these movements, the relationship between vision and knowledge became increasingly important. What the eyes were able to see became more significant than what was felt, and in a sense, to see was to believe. The importance of visual experience became closely tied with truth and knowledge, but the fact remains that the human eye can be easily influenced. The best example of sight and its weakness would be the Mechanical Turk, which took the world by storm in the 18th and 19th centuries. The mystery of what made the Turk tick baffled people for generations. There was also a showman-like quality to the Turk, and its performance was often a grand visual spectacle. There was also a sense of challenge to those that were viewing the Turk. Who would be the one to

Maltzer, the doctor behind Deirdre’s robot body, explains sight on page 259, “Sight…is the most highly civilized of the senses…The other senses tie us in closely with the very roots of life…Sight is a cold, intellectual thing compared with the other senses.” Once again, the sense of sight is tied into cool, calculated, and intellectual thought. This comparison was made throughout the Enlightenment Era and even today. Vision is seen as necessary to understand and make rational inferences regarding what is being