Historical books say that when the French mathematician and philosopher Rene Descartes started working as a teacher of Christina's young queen of Sweden, this wise student asked him what it would be like to say about the human body. Descartes replied that he could be considered a machine. Then the queen showed the clock that hung on the wall and demanded - take care that this person would receive the offspring.
Maybe in the seventeenth century it was a joke, but nowadays, computer scientists believe that we are on the verge of a self-growing, developing robot world.
This idea is not new - at least for science fiction fans. Stanislaw Lem by Polish writer in his 1964 The novel "The Invincible" told the story of a space ship landing on a distant planet and discovering the mechanical form of life. The inhabitants of this planet were millions of years of mechanical evolutionary products. The writer's idea has been revived after several decades in the matrix trilogy and in the real world of programming laboratories, writes telegrapho.co.uk.
But the history of self-propelled machines is much longer and more interesting.
For the first time, they were implicitly mentioned in 1802 - William Paley formulated the first teleological argument about machines that produce other machines.
William Paley proposed in his "Natural Theology" book the famous watchmaker's analogy. He believed that something as complicated as a clock could exist only if there was a clocksman. And since the universe and all its living creatures are much more complicated than the clock, God must be a heavenly watchman. Interestingly, William Paley acknowledged that his argumentation would be diminishing if the clock could be made by itself.
Recent genetic studies show that the human race has entered into the evolution of the 'rapid lane. We are becoming less and less alike...
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