Thanks again for the cite!
But I think La Mettrie belongs in the pre-history of the machine (the history of intelligent distributed computing is the key to understanding the automaton).
He *does* begin to draw mechanical analogies to understand how we and the world work, but then says that 'man' is the 'perfect example' of this mechanical organization. The machine heads will have no truck with that fleshy logic! They don't want to build more simulcrums of ourselves *externally* (automaton), but to literally reduce us to our lowest common demoninator, and recombine us as organs of the machine:
"Every kind of capitalist production, in so far as it is not only a labour- process, but also a process of creating surplus-value, has this in common, that it is not the workman that employes the instruments of labour, but the instruments of labour that employ the workman. But it is only in the factory system that this inversion for the first time acquires technical and palpable reality. By means of its conversion into an automaton, the instrument of labour confront the labourer, during the labour-process, in the shape of capital, of dead labour, that dominates and pumps dry, living labour-power. The separation of the intellectual powers of production from the manual labour, and the conversion of those powers into the might of capital over labour, is, as we have already shown, finally completed by modern industry erected on the foundation of machinery. the special skill of each individual insignificant factory operative vanishes as an infinitesimal quantity before the science, the gigantic physical forces, and the mass of labour that are embodied in the factory mechanism and, together with that mechanism, constitute the power of the 'master'" (Capital, vol. I, pp. 393-394).
Cheers,
Jonathan
================= Ian,
Oh, thanks for that! Didn't know about it. Also related to weaving equipment, makes perfect sense.
Yes, it's earlier, but it doesn't count. Vaucanson didn't make the leap from automaton to machine, or if he did he didn't write anything about it:
===================
He didn't, but La Mettrie, one of his fans, did:
"Grant only that organized matter is endowed with a principle of motion, which alone differentiates it from the inorganic (and can one deny this in the face of the most incontestable observation?) and that among animals, as I have sufficiently proved, everything depends upon the diversity of this organization: these admissions suffice for guessing the riddle of substances and of man. It thus appears that there is but one type of organization in the universe, and that man is the most perfect example. He is to the ape, and to the most intelligent animals, as the planetary pendulum of Huyghens is to a watch of Julien Leroy. More instruments, more wheels and more springs were necessary to mark the movements of the planets than to mark or strike the hours; and Vaucanson, who needed more skill for making his flute player than for making his duck, would have needed still more to make a talking man, a mechanism no longer to be regarded as impossible, especially in the hands of another Prometheus." http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/LaMettrie/Machine/
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