‘Lyke Unto A Lively Thing’: Theatre History and Social Robotics

Abstract

While Social Robotics is a relatively new field that addresses the problems of creating machine intelligences capable of sophisticated and extended social interaction with humans, the problems addressed by Social Robotics are not at all new. In the late sixteenth century, two man-made artificial intelligences became embroiled at opposite ends of an international religious conflict that would shape the modern political world. This chapter seeks to draw a parallel between these two early robots and their entwined destinies not merely to demonstrate some oppositional principles of Reformation and Counter-Reformation aesthetics, but to reveal how these histories reinforce some key observations by evolutionary psychologists on the role of performance as foundational to the development of human civilization. In so doing, the chapter suggests a practical approach to applied Social Robotics that addresses some vexing questions regarding the nature of ‘the clockwork self’.