Gramaphonomicon

“Indulge me if you will; picture this:…” he said as if speaking from the center of a circus ring or to an enamored classroom full of undergraduates. He was however speaking to his nephew who rolled his eyes so intensely the musculature controlling his eyelids ached for a moment. Jerome continued undaunted.

“Picture this: a mechanical mannequin, an automaton like Jaquet Droz’ little clockwork boy I told you about that can write different things depending on what you essentially programmed him to write, which already existed in the 1700s. Imagine if someone had been smart enough, hundreds or thousands of years earlier, to use the same basic wind-up technology to create a robot that could somehow play different pre-recorded clips in response to different questions you asked it. Well then, my young sir, you would have a near ancient steampunk AI that is essentially an immortal (as long as people maintain its machinery), an immortal version of whoever recorded the responses. You get what I’m saying?”

Jerome’s nephew did not understand but now showed patience for his rambling uncle. “I obviously can’t picture what you clearly have an image of in your mind’s eye. So somehow this android marionette understands what is being said to it and picks out a track on a record to respond and these tracks have been recorded by the person who wants to be immortalized?”

“Yes! Exactly. What if the Holy Grail was just a humanoid machine that could act like any one of us and therefore be us forever, as long as we took the time to record our responses to near infinite questions and statements? This is why there are legends of people dying around the grail, they discover it and spend their lives programming it and…”

“Ok, ok, hold on, but how would you do that without computers, get a clockwork person to be able to interpret speech?”

“I’m glad you asked. The person designing the intricate array of cogs and pinions would have to have some sort of mechanism connected to a gramophone and some kind of primitive microphone, a thin piece of cloth or mesh that reacted to vibrations in the air and recorded the persons voice…basically a reverse gramophone that registers movement of a needle attached to the thin diaphragm of a microphone by an arm so that someone speaking vibrated the needle and based on the full series of vibrations…maybe many arms with many needles would register different patterns of vibrations, so you’d need something to record and something to play back and analyze, so these needles would also then trigger a cascade of complex mechanical movements that led to the rolling of a dice like a primitive random number generator that was also connected to a jukebox-type machine that picked out one of a number of pre-recorded responses to a certain pattern of vibrations. Make sense?”

“No. Not really. Not to anybody but me Uncle J.”

“Aww, come on little man…”

“Ok, I mean I get what you’re saying, the general idea, using turn-of-the-century science and gadgets to make the equivalent of what we have today, which is animatronic humans that can speak to real flesh-and-blood people, but this would be so complicated it would probably defeat the purpose like you said, like by the time someone built it, like generations would pass away before it was finished, like a cathedral.”

“That’s a beautiful analogy, Max. And, in a way, our pursuit of artificial intelligence like that has taken centuries of compiled findings from artisans and scientists to reach; generations have died during pursuit of the technology we have today and some people died as a direct cause of this pursuit. Some people were demonized for it…like the Mechanical Turk…until it was found to be a man sitting inside a box controlling the turban-wearing, chess-playing mechanical person’s arm…it probably freaked people out and made people wary of its inventor. Would if the people who made the mechanical people in the 1700s could see what we have now…some former heretics would want to burn a few people alive themselves…Good point, young sir.”

When Jerome got excited, his train of thought fragmented a bit.

“You kind of went on a tangent or two there but thanks.”

“You’re very welcome.”

Five years after Jerome (Patterson) died of 1) exhaustion from battling for the right to do independent research and over intellectual property rights and 2) the insanity resulting from an honest man being officially labeled a liar and charlatan, in the year 2052, such a mechanical marvel was unveiled for the billionaire collector to add to his expensive watch collection and put on display in his room full of old arcade games and fortune teller machines.

Mr. Patterson did not die, however, before he had purchased software for analyzing sound waves and recorded himself saying and responding to about fifty percent of all the conversational questions and statements he could ever think to write down. For a man in a motorized wheelchair who lived alone, he sure had a lot of conversations. The paper scrap heaps that he left behind told a story of possible genius and definite heartbreak.