Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

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It has been said that God created man in His own image. Whether this statement is true or not has had no bearing on the desires of mankind to do as God supposedly did, and create a being in its likeness. Ancient Jewish legends tell stories of constructs, known as golems, that were made of worked dirt or mud and brought to life with magic, and would obey any command to the letter (Kopelman Foundation). As mankind turned from the arcane and began to embrace science, so too did the focus of such stories. However, the concept remained remarkably similar. A woman by the name of Mary Shelley wrote an almost universally famous novel by the title of . In it, she tells the tale of a young man named Doctor Victor Frankenstein who, obsessed with bringing the dead to life, creates a creature pieced together from human remains. It was, in essence, a golem made of flesh and animated through science and electricity. As time and science progressed, mankind’s thoughts shifted even further from the mystical and monstrous and more toward the technological. Robots emerged from the imagination of mankind, machines made of metal and synthetic materials built to resemble human beings and programmed to act and react, to think and learn for themselves, just as humans can. Half of this imagining is already a scientific fact. Automated robots fill America’s factories, and a humanoid robot, Honda’s ASIMO, is already able to run, jump, and otherwise navigate a normal human environment (American Honda Motor Co.). Still, one aspect of mankind’s dream remains in imagination: artificial intelligence. However, due to the work of Subrata Ghosh and his colleges, mankind may be just a few steps away from realizing its desire to create a thinking, evolving robot in i... ... middle of paper ... ...nformation. Vol. 5. 2014. PDF. 24 March 2014. . Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1831. Skillings, Jonathan. Newsmaker: Getting machines to think like us. 3 July 2006. 18 March 2014. . Tank, David W. and John J. Hopfield. "Collective Computation in Neuronlike Circuits." Scientific American. 1987. PDF. 24 March 2014. . Turing, Alan. "Intelligent machinery." n.d. The Turing Digital Archive. Images of typed document. 1 April 2014. . —. "Intelligent machinery, a heretical theory." n.d. The Turing Digital Archive. Images of typed document. 17 March 2014. .

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