Breakthrough: The Ideas That Changed the World

For most of our history,

we humans considered ourselves unique.

Our ability to shape the world we live in

set us apart from all other animals.

But now, a new, artificial species

might challenge our superiority.

Mechanical beings have the potential

to change everything.

How we got them is a story

of astonishing twists and amazing turns.

It would take an ancient Greek legend

and a chance conversation in a psychiatric hospital,

a child sheltered from the excesses

of her famous father,

and a mission to Mars,

a disaster at sea,

and a cubist painter

to give us the machine that may turn out to be the most

revolutionary technology ever conceived... the robot.

These are the inventions

that define our age

and have changed our world forever,

that allowed us to move both on the ground and in the air,

to connect and to explore

the furthest regions of the universe,

each a moment of ingenuity,

of wonder...

Oh!

Of breakthrough.

Today, robots are everywhere,

even in music videos.

They build cars,

electronics, anything you can think of.

While some are built to entertain,

all explore the limits of what a mechanical system can achieve.

But the age of the robot is just beginning.

Where we are with robots today is probably

about where we were with computers in the 1950s.

We knew the basic concepts, we've built some,

they performed some functions,

but we're only starting to explore the possibility

of our relationship with this kind of machine.

A new breed of robot is taking shape

in laboratories all over the world,

a kind of robot that can do more than just make things

or perform repetitive tasks.

Hey, iCub.

These are robots that will interact with us,

become our friends,

or perhaps our enemies.

Do we want robots as friends?

Do we want robots as sexual partners?

Do you want a plane that flies itself, or do you want

a plane with a robot pilot sitting in the pilot's seat?

It's a really fundamental question.

I actually think that we're going to need a lot more robots

than people expect.

They're not going to take away jobs.

They're going to fill the role of previously exploited,

low-cost labor.

These new robots will

fulfill a dream that is surprisingly ancient.

It begins not hundreds,

but thousands of years ago,

with the ancient Greeks.

Homer, writing in 800 BC,

told the legend of the Greek god

of fire and craftsmen...

Hephaestus.

The story goes that, expelled from mount Olympus...

He forged two mechanical handmaidens.

The tale became part of Greek culture, and the idea

of human-like machines with miraculous powers

was born.

About 800 years later,

an inventor named hero of Alexandria

decided to make the dream come true.

He designed machines that could propel themselves onto a stage.

Figurines would perform a series of actions,

such as lighting fires and pouring wine.

But it was in the 9th century ad,

using little more than wood, wires, and their own genius,

that 3 brothers built a machine that would lead

not just to robots,

but to the modern digital age.

It happened here... Baghdad, in Mesopotamia,

modern-day Iraq... and here, the house of wisdom,

a loose society of thinkers that debated

and encouraged the development of knowledge.

Three of the members are brothers...

The Banu Musa brothers.

They have a passion for automata,

so much so that they wrote this,

"the book of ingenious devices,"

which was the greatest work of its time

on the subject of automata.

It describes a hundred inventions.

Some are the work of ancient Greek engineers,

others had been created by the brothers themselves.

And then they did something extraordinary,

something that shone a light far into the future.

There already existed machines that could play tunes,

but the brothers wondered how a machine might be made

that could learn a new tune and repeat it.

They describe the machine they made in a treatise

called "the instrument that plays by itself."

It was a description and detailed instructions

as to how it was made.

One man went looking for the manuscript.

He decided to remake the machine,

to preserve the memory and the achievement

of the Banu Musa brothers.

Today, the machine is kept here,

at the ZKM center for art and media in Germany.

- So, this is it? - Yep.

That's a Banu Musa machine.

So how confident are you

that the machine that you've built is

an accurate depiction of what they had produced?

Yeah, I’m pretty confident

that they explained every detail

into why the detail should be like that

and the precise measurement, also.

Essentially, what the Banu Musa brothers

have done is build two separate machines.

One records the music,

and then that gets transferred to the second machine,

which actually plays it back again.

OK, Liang, talk me through how

this part of the machine records the sound.

OK, could you start it by pressing the pretty little button?

Ah, OK, so that gets the drum moving,

and of course, we're using an electric motor here.

Yes. They'd have used water pressure.

Exactly. Right.

OK, so you're going to play the flute,

but you have to put your fingers through

those rings at the same time.

Yes. Oh, I see.

As you pull them down,

you're actually pulling a lever,

which is activating a pen

that makes a marking on the barrel? Exactly.

So the markings on the barrel are

a record of the notes that you've played

and the duration that you played them? Yes.

It's the record of my finger movements. OK.

Heh!

That's probably as much as we want, really, isn't it?

And so, once you have the markings on the drum...

Yes. It's then transferred

across to the second machine.

Yes, it's a player here, so now we have

all of the information from my finger movements here.

We carve some grooves according to the marks we have.

So when this drum turns, the grooves are now

going to lift these levers

and play the same tune on this second flute?

Exactly. So let's listen.

OK.

So those grooves, the markings, are essentially

the very first computer program.

Mm-hmm. Looks like a hard drive, and it is a hard drive.

Now, this may not seem like a world-changing idea,

but if you think about it,

this really is a programmable machine.

And all this over a thousand years

before modern computers were built.

It also seems that the Banu Musa brothers had

this great sense of theatre and fun because in their book,

they talk about hiding the whole contraption

inside a mannequin, where the levers are disguised

as its fingers, and the flute is attached

to its mouth, where the air comes in.

And so you can imagine what a spectacle

this would have been, having this robot playing

the music in the caliph's palace.

Machines that mimic human actions

have fascinated us for generations.

And after nearly 900 years of effort, they perhaps

reached their pinnacle with this,

the writer.

Made in Switzerland in the 1770s,

it has 6,000 moving parts.

This remarkable automaton

can write sequences of text up to 40 characters in length.

The text was programmed using metal plates, installed

in the clockwork mechanism in the machine's back.

The writer was even able to dip his quill in ink

and give it a delicate shake to remove the excess.

But automata are not quite robots.

They can't learn and change their own behavior.

A true robot needs to be able to process information

so it can take actions of its own.

It needs to be a machine that can think.

And it would take a crisis in nautical navigation

and a most unlikely friendship...

Between the daughter of England’s most notorious poet

and a professor more than twice her age...

To set the cogs of a thinking machine in motion.