Humans as Numbers

JF Ptak Science Books  

The idea of the human machine, the machine human, the technological man, the robot, the anthropomorphization of artificial life, goes back a long way. One of my favorites comes from the 1830s and features a steam-driven automaton of some sort that was also a preacher--that was very cool, and was the subject of an article I wrote for the magazine at Mensa. I mean, an artificial semi-replacement life form that was created by humans that was having-forth on the gods and associated interpretations that humans also created--seems like an uncomfortable (and temporary?) middle space to be in. And that is a clear-cut anthropo image. There are many others that have appeared over the years showing gearworks in the brain, min-staffed miniature computer consoles in a head cutaway, tiny versions of the brain's owner running around in the brain looking for paper in file cabinets (that one is just Spongebob Squarepants), and so on.

These two images, however, are a little different than what I have seen over the years. 

The first one, on the left, is almost computer art, and almost art imaging a human as a computer component, but not quite. It is on the cover of one of the early issues of the "new" Physics Today magazine (volume 2, number 10), in October 1949--it is the artwork of Paul Bond, who created this portrait of a juggler "on a matrix sheet used for plotting computor [sic] plug board diagrams", and is one of 11 such images. So, it does show a person composed of computer bits, and is pretty early for whatever it is that it is, so long as we're talking about the modern computer and not something that was made-up in 1932.

I wrote about this in more detail here: http://longstreet.typepad.com/thesciencebookstore/2014/10/human-computer-art-1949.html

The second image was one I found today, and was published in 1957. The cover implies some sort of human control being replaced by a computer-driven machine, hence the punch card. It is in some way similar to the compu-juggler, though the control aspect is far more obvious. 

In any event even though I have looked at a lot of material in this field for a long time I don't see very many computer-anthropomorphic images at all, and so present these two side-by-side today.