4 Robots and where only a minority are needed to guide the ‘bot-base economy’?” (“Digital Life in 2025” 2014, 11) Therefore, what has occurred in the field of robotics (the branch of technology that deals with the design, construction, operation, and application of robots) between Hero’s time and the present day? How has technology changed, and what are the consequences to individuals and society at large of the develop- ment of machines that can perform a vast array of “human” tasks? In this chapter, we trace the development of robotics over the past 2,500 years and ask how these developments are likely to impact human society in the coming years. The Precursors: Automata The concept of forming inanimate matter, such as clay, stone, mud, and metal, into human-like figures that can perform human-like tasks dates to the earliest days of human civiliza- tion. Even before human inventors began to develop the tech- nology for making such figures, legends describing just such objects had appeared. The most general term used for such robot-like figures is automata (singular: automaton). An autom- aton can be defined as a mechanism, made of inanimate mate- rials, that performs human-like tasks by following some set of instructions provided by a human. One of the earliest of these legends is that of the golem, which is probably first mentioned in the Bible (Psalm 139: 16), but that appears more commonly in the Jewish Talmud. The word golem can be translated as “shapeless mass” and was used by some early writers to describe the first 12 hours of Adam’s life after his creation. The story was that Adam was formed out of a mass of earthy materials that gradually took shape and became a living human. The Talmud and other Jewish docu- ments describe a number of ways in which a golem can be made: by shaping it out of soil and then walking or dancing with it or by writing the name of God on its surface, for exam- ple. Later in history, the golem took on other appearances, in
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