Bernard Shaw, Automata, Robots, and Artificial Intelligence 3031492269, 9783031492266

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BERNARD SHAW AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES

Bernard Shaw, Automata, Robots, and Artificial Intelligence

Kay Li

Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries

Series Editors Nelson O’Ceallaigh Ritschel, Massachusetts Maritime Academy, Pocasset, MA, USA Peter Gahan, Independent Scholar, Los Angeles, CA, USA

The series Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries presents the best and most up-to-date research on Shaw and his contemporaries in a diverse range of cultural contexts. Volumes in the series will further the academic understanding of Bernard Shaw and those who worked with him, or in reaction against him, during his long career from the 1880s to 1950 as a leading writer in Britain and Ireland, and with a wide European and American following. Shaw defined the modern literary theatre in the wake of Ibsen as a vehicle for social change, while authoring a dramatic canon to rival Shakespeare’s. His careers as critic, essayist, playwright, journalist, lecturer, socialist, feminist, and pamphleteer, both helped to shape the modern world as well as pointed the way towards modernism. No one engaged with his contemporaries more than Shaw, whether as controversialist, or in his support of other, often younger writers. In many respects, therefore, the series as it develops will offer a survey of the rise of the modern at the beginning of the twentieth century and the subsequent varied cultural movements covered by the term modernism that arose in the wake of World War 1.

Kay Li

Bernard Shaw, Automata, Robots, and Artificial Intelligence

Kay Li University of Toronto Toronto, ON, Canada

ISSN 2634-5811 ISSN 2634-582X (electronic) Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries ISBN 978-3-031-49225-9 ISBN 978-3-031-49226-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-49226-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Chinese scroll painting showing a brainchild walking away with a big peach. Author’s family archive. Painting by Carolina Lau This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

In honour of my father and mother, Hing To and Carolina

Foreword

Bernard Shaw was a technology addict. Typewriters, telephones, radio, automobiles—he embraced them all. He typed thousands and thousands of pages on rudimentary machines during his lifetime: plays, speeches, essays, letters, postcards, often with carbon copies (oh how he would have loved the photocopier!). There is absolutely no doubt that he would have been among the first to welcome electric typewriters and, subsequently, word processing technology and the whole kit and kaboodle of the World Wide Web. As for telephones, one of his earliest employers was the Edison Telephone Company, and he had telephones installed in both his London and country homes. He even had a telephone in his working hut at the bottom of his garden at Ayot, from where he could phone his housekeeper to tell her when he was ready for lunch. Smart phones? Absolutely! The smarter the better. And when radios were commercially available in England, Shaw was quick to have them installed in his homes. He became an avid listener, mostly preferring the radio’s company at meals to conversation with his wife. By the 1930s, royalties from radio broadcasts of his plays formed a significant part of his annual income, and he also used radio as an effective way of reaching millions of people in Great Britain and abroad (by shortwave) in talks and debates. He died before television became widely available in England, but he learned enough about it to predict it would seduce many theatregoers away from the theatres to watch plays in the comfort of their homes. As for automobiles, perhaps the less said the better. Shaw purchased his first car in 1908

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and drove—often recklessly—in an era when licences weren’t needed. If only for environmental reasons, he would have warmly welcomed EVs. Inveterate communicator that Shaw was, it seems clear as well that he would eagerly have exploited current social media technology, call it what you will: Twitter, X, TikTok, Facebook, ChatGPT, and so on. How many social media followers do sports, entertainment, and political celebrities have today? Double or triple those numbers for Shaw. In his prime in the 1920s and 1930s, he was arguably the most famous man in the world. And unlike the majority of such celebrities today, he would have had something useful and intelligent to say. But much of this, it must be said, is speculation—speculation based on some evidence, to be sure, but still speculation of how Shaw might have reacted to new technologies. Kay Li, however, looks at Shaw and technology from a different and more plausible viewpoint. It’s not so much what might have been, but what can be, and it’s not so much what Shaw might have thought or might have done with automata, robots or artificial intelligence, but how we as readers and theatregoers can use such technology to gain new insights into Shaw’s plays and political and social writings. As a leading Shaw scholar, Kay Li has long advocated the use of technology to better understand Shaw and to use enabling technology to reach out to new audiences for his plays. In this new book, she takes her advocacy to new heights, explaining for the uninitiated the context of new technologies—even well-versed Shavians will be surprised by the prominence of famed British computer pioneer Alan Turing in the book—and how these technologies can enhance the study and dissemination of Shaw the playwright and Shaw the social theorist. His gargantuan play Back to Methuselah serves well as Dr. Li’s test case for examples of precisely how technology can both amplify and intensify insights into Shaw’s work. The basic question posed by Kay Li—and it is a timely and important question—is whether AI and other new technologies pose a threat or an opportunity to Shaw studies, and, by extension, to other literary studies. We are indebted to Dr. Li for making such a compelling case that scholars should welcome such technologies as companions rather than rivals. Shaw would surely have agreed! Leonard Conolly, FRSC, FRSA

Acknowledgements

I am deeply honoured to have the Foreword to my book written by Professor Leonard Conolly. I am most grateful to Stanley and Rodelle Weintraub for their magnificent support and perennial advice on my work on Shaw and artificial intelligence. Their inspiration and encouragement are deeply appreciated. I am very grateful to “Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries” series editors Nelson Ritschel and Peter Gahan, as well as Eileen Srebernik and Saranya Siva at Palgrave Macmillan, for their excellent counsel. I would also like to thank Michel Pharand for his scrupulous revisions to my manuscript. For their marvellous guidance and support, especially for their contributions to our Sagittarius-ORION Literature Digitizing Program on Bernard Shaw, I owe a great debt of gratitude to (in alphabetical order by last name) Leonard Conolly, Brian Corman, Richard Dietrich, Suzanne Merriam and Leslie Sanders. I am also grateful to Robert Fothergill for his superb advice and for his support of my research, Melba Cuddy-Keane for her excellent inspiration and guidance, and Michael Donnelly for the support from the Asian Institute, Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto. For assistance with the many rare materials referenced in this book, I would like to thank Lau Wai-shing and the wonderfully supportive librarians of the Cambridge University Library, the University of Toronto

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Libraries, York University Library and the University of Hong Kong Library. I acknowledge the use of ChatGPT to generate various Shaw-related texts for analysis of ChatGPT. For photo permissions, I would like to thank King’s College, Cambridge University; Science Museum, London/Science Museum Group; and National Trust Images/Shaw’s Corner. I would also like to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) (File Numbers: 410-2010-1964 and 6112013-146), the Ontario Research and Innovation Optical Network (ORION) and IBM Canada for supporting the SAGITTARIUS Literature Digitizing Program and the Virtual Museum of Asian Canadian Cultural Heritage, which inform various sections of this book. And thank you so much, my most wonderful and kindest parents, for your continued encouragement and support throughout these years, and for giving me the strength and confidence to continue my work on Shaw and artificial intelligence. I would like to dedicate this book to both of you, in return for your patient guidance, great advice and ongoing support.

Competing Interests The author has no conflicts of interest to declare that are relevant to the content of this book.

Ethical Approval No ethics approval was required.

Contents

1

Bernard Shaw, Automata, Robots and Artificial Intelligence Automata Robots Artificial Intelligence Impact of Automata, Robotism and AI

1 2 4 5 6

Shaw and Automata The Golden Age of Automata Shaw and Automata Automata in Ancient Greek Myths: The Absence of Will and Purpose Automata Theory

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Shaw and Robots ˇ Shaw, Capek and the Robot ˇ Shaw’s Views on Robots and Capek’s R.U.R. Back to Methuselah and R.U.R. To Be Continued

27 30 32 34 45

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Shaw and Artificial Intelligence Pygmalion, Charles Babbage and AI Cybernetics, Heartbreak House, Shaw and Norbert Weiner Shaw, Alan Turing, Back to Methuselah and the Oracle Pygmalion and the Turing Test

49 50 54 56 63

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CONTENTS

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Artificial Intelligence as a Partner in Shaw Studies AI + GBS Creative Evolution and the Life Force Coded in Shaw’s Texts—IBM SPSS and IBM Cultural Colour Visual Recognition Apps Creative Evolution, Life Force and the Shavian Hero: IBM SPSS Modeller IBM Natural Language Understanding: Shaw’s Great Man IBM Cultural Colour Visual Recognition: Cultural Adaptations in Modern Productions Shaw in Contemporary Performance: Federal Theatre Project, 1935–1939 Adding Topical References to Productions Through Colour and Images: Post-World War II and the Consumer Society Post-Shaw Production: The 1959 Hollywood Film Featuring War Heroes Localization in Productions in Australia, England and the USA Colour Matters Using Artificial Intelligence to Make Shaw Interactive: Virtual Reality, Virtual Assistant and ChatGPT Virtual Reality (VR) and Immersive Theatre Virtual Assistants: Shaw Bot and ChatGPT Shaw Bot as a Practical Assistant and a Dramatized Bot ChatGPT: Disruptive Technology or Valuable Asset?

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The Way Forward: Shaw and Artificial Intelligence

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73 73 79 81 87 92 93 95 98

References

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Index

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List of Figures

Fig. 1.1

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2 Fig. 2.3

Fig. 2.4

Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2

Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2

Clock with a Rooster Automaton. Forbidden City, Beijing, China. Author’s family archive (Photograph by Hing To Li) Leonardo da Vinci’s fighting vehicle. Museo Leonardo da Vinci experience, Vatican (Photo taken by the author) Clocks with Automata. Forbidden City, Beijing, China. Author’s family archive (Photograph by Hing To Li) A clock with automata. Palace of Versailles, Versailles, France. Author’s family archive (Photograph by Hing To Li) Lay Figure, pictures, books and other objects above the mantelpiece in the study at Shaw’s Corner, Hertfordshire (© National Trust Images/Chris Lacey) Tower Bridge, London, England. Author’s family archive (Photograph by Hing To Li) Incomplete text (pp. 49 to 136) of Capek’s W.U.R. in German at Shaw’s Corner, Hertfordshire (© National Trust/George Berry, Mike Burgess and James Steadman) Babbage’s Analytical Engine. Science Museum/Science Museum Group Page 1 of letter. Unpublished writings of Alan Turing copyright The Provost and Scholars of King’s College Cambridge 2023. Archives Centre, King’s College, Cambridge

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LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 4.3

Fig. 4.4

Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2 Fig. 5.3 Fig. 5.4 Fig. 5.5 Fig. 5.6 Fig. 5.7 Fig. 5.8

Fig. 5.9

Fig. 5.10

Fig. 5.11

Fig. 5.12

Fig. 5.13

Page 2 of letter. Unpublished writings of Alan Turing copyright The Provost and Scholars of King’s College Cambridge 2023. Archives Centre, King’s College, Cambridge Page 3 of letter. Unpublished writings of Alan Turing copyright The Provost and Scholars of King’s College Cambridge 2023. Archives Centre, King’s College, Cambridge IBM SPSS concept analysis of Shaw texts. AI analysis generated by the author IBM SPSS categories analysis of Shaw texts. AI analysis generated by the author Another IBM SPSS categories analysis of Shaw texts. AI analysis generated by the author IBM SPSS modeller analysis of Man and Superman. AI analysis generated by the author IBM SPSS text modeller analysis of The Perfect Wagnerite. AI analysis generated by the author IBM SPSS text modeller analysis of Pygmalion. AI analysis generated by the author Word cloud of The Devil’s Disciple. AI analysis generated by the author IBM cultural colour visual recognition of the Shaw Festival poster of The Devil’s Disciple. AI analysis generated by the author IBM cultural colour visual recognition of the Federal Theatre Playhouse’s poster of The Devil’s Disciple. AI analysis generated by the author IBM cultural colour visual recognition of the Federal Theatre Project’s poster of The Devil’s Disciple. AI analysis generated by the author IBM cultural colour visual recognition of the Great Northern Theatre’s poster of The Devil’s Disciple. AI analysis generated by the author IBM cultural colour visual recognition of the poster of the movie The Devil’s Disciple. AI analysis generated by the author IBM cultural colour visual recognition of the Sydney Opera House’s poster of The Devil’s Disciple. AI analysis generated by the author

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LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 5.14

Fig. 5.15 Fig. 5.16 Fig. 5.17 Fig. 6.1

IBM cultural colour visual recognition of the Gingold Theatrical Group’s poster of The Devil’s Disciple. AI analysis generated by the author Shaw Bot undergoing machine learning. AI analysis generated by the author Shaw Bot providing authentic scholarly information. AI analysis generated by the author The witty Shaw Bot. AI analysis generated by the author Poem generated by ChatGPT on Bernard Shaw, automata, robots and artificial intelligence. AI analysis generated by the author

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CHAPTER 1

Bernard Shaw, Automata, Robots and Artificial Intelligence

Abstract This book explores how Bernard Shaw intersects constructively with automata, robots and artificial intelligence (AI). He made use of automata and robots to advance his so-called Gospel of the Life Force and Creative Evolution. The founding fathers of artificial intelligence, including Alan Turing, appreciated Shaw’s works and made sense of his advocacy of the Life Force and Creative Evolution. Moreover, empirical analyses of Shavian texts and images by AI have uncovered possibilities for new interpretations, demonstrating how future renditions of Shaw’s works may make use of these advanced technologies to broaden Shaw’s audiences as well as his readership and scholarship. Keywords Bernard Shaw · Automata · Robots · Artificial intelligence

This book proposes that artificial intelligence (AI) can be a companion rather than a rival to human beings. Is artificial intelligence, like the brainchild on the book cover, walking away with a large peach representing an important fruit of human invention? Are human beings, like the scholar in the painting, just sitting on their immense knowledge represented by the huge stack of books, unaware of the brainchild stealthily walking away with the large peach? The peach has a significant meaning in Chinese © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 K. Li, Bernard Shaw, Automata, Robots, and Artificial Intelligence, Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-49226-6_1

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legends, fairy tales and decorative art, as it represents longevity and immortality. The God of Longevity, Souxing, carries a peach of immortality. In Taoist mythology, the important goddess the Queen Mother of the West has an orchard with peach trees that take three thousand years to blossom, producing peaches of immortality taking three thousand years to ripen. In the sixteenth-century novel Journey to the West written by Wu Cheng-en, the Monkey King sneaked into the Queen Mother of the West’s orchard, stole the peaches of immortality, disrupted the banquet of the gods, and caused a huge turmoil in the Heavens. Will artificial intelligence cause a similar disruption in human society, and will it threaten the longevity of humanity? But the painting can also be seen from another perspective focusing on the brainchild. Then, is artificial intelligence an invaluable tool that can be harnessed to bring human inventions to new heights, just as the dynamic and active brainchild is riding on a cloud, meandering away from the cauldron of human experiments, reaching heights much higher than the static scholar sitting on his pile of books? This book will use Bernard Shaw’s constructive engagement with automata, robots, and artificial intelligence (AI) as a test case to examine whether artificial intelligence is a runaway technology or an asset that can bring human inventions to new heights.

Automata Shaw’s longevity—he lived from 1856 to 1950—coincided with major milestones in the development of automata, robotics and AI. The years 1848 to 1914 have been regarded as the Golden Age of Automata.1 By the mid-nineteenth century, with the rise of industry and mass production techniques, automata could be made more easily at a much lower cost. There were not only numerous clockworks and mechanical pieces, but also sophisticated machines that could accomplish fascinating tasks such as read and write, play chess and answer questions powered by intricate systems of bellows, pipes, shutters and levers. Christian Bailly’s Automata: The Golden Age 1848–1914 (1987) documents the seven master automation artists in Paris: Théroude,2 Bontems,3 Vichy,4 Roullet and Descamps,5 Phalibois,6 and Lambert and Renou.7 Some emulated nature, like Bontem’s singing bird automaton, which is basically a music box. Other automata emulated a human moment, but these were often racialized and made exotic, such as Théroude’s flute-playing automaton (1878), which is a black adolescent in luxurious

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Indian garb, or Lambert’s Japanese tea waitress automaton dressed in a kimono. In any case, most automata were not from everyday life, such as Phalibois’s clown illusionist magician automaton, while other automata included mechanical toys, such as Roullet and Decamps’s automaton cat waving a fan (Fig. 1.1). Automata were also common on stage, played by human artists. These human automata can be found in Coppélia (1870), a comic ballet with music by Léo Delibes, libretto by Charles-Louis-Étienne Nuitter (from E. T. A. Hoffmann’s short story The Sandman), originally choreographed by Arthur Saint-Léon. Thus, Shaw’s male and female automata in Back to Methuselah (1918–20) must have been a common sight for his contemporary audiences. Like mechanical automata, Shaw’s male and female automata are beautifully modelled and splendidly attired. They are noble and exotic, such as the male automaton Ozymandias, king of kings, and the female automaton Cleopatra-Semiramis, queen of queens.

Fig. 1.1 Clock with a Rooster Automaton. Forbidden City, Beijing, China. Author’s family archive (Photograph by Hing To Li)

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Automata also sparked the development of modern computers. Before automata were mass manufactured in nineteenth-century Paris, sophisticated automata had been created in the eighteenth century, especially in Paris. Christie’s has documented Jacques de Vaucanson’s duck automaton, which made Louis XV clap his hands in delight and prompted Voltaire to consider Vaucanson a modern Prometheus. The duck was made of gold-plated copper, had rubber intestines and was powered by weights that ran a grandfather clock. Prompted by Vaucanson, the duck rose, flapping its wings and stretching its neck, and then pecked, nibbled and swallowed a handful of grain.8 One of the most famous automata was the Turk automaton (1770) invented by Wolfgang von Kempelen at the court of the Austrian empress Maria Theresa. This chess-playing machine defeated many human challengers, including Benjamin Franklin, Frederick the Great and even Napoleon. Charles Babbage (1791–1871), the noted English mathematician, philosopher, inventor and mechanical engineer, played against and lost to the Turk automaton. Prompted by his defeat, Babbage went on to invent the first mechanical computer, the Difference Engine, which paved the way for today’s electronic computers.

Robots Bernard Shaw lived to see the word “robot” coined. Czech writer ˇ Karel Capek wrote R.U.R. Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti (Rossum’s Universal Robots ), which premiered on 2 January 1921 in Hradec Králové, Czechoslovakia. The play was translated by Paul Selver in 1921, sold to St. Martin’s Theatre in London and adapted for British performance by Nigel Playfair in 1922. When the play was staged in 1923, Shaw, Chesterton and Commander Kenworthy debated the topic of R.U.R. on 21 June 1923 at St Martin’s Theatre. Shaw’s interpretation of the robot, as expected, involved his Life Force and Creative Evolution theories, while ˇ Capek’s was more of a social interpretation. ˇ In May 1924, Capek visited London and met Shaw. A welldocumented incident in his Letters to England was his visit to Madame Tussaud’s, in which he mistook Shaw for Thomas Neill Cream, executed in 1892 for poisoning Matilda Clover with strychnine and murdering ˇ three other women. Capek found that he had confused the museum catalogue’s pages, concluding that “Never again will I judge people by their faces.”9

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Coincidentally, Back to Methuselah and R.U.R. were written at the same time and even sometimes performed in the same theatre. At Shaw’s Corner, one can see a first German translation of R.U.R. and the origˇ inal Letters to England in Czech. Shaw did not entirely agree with Capek regarding the latter’s robot, but his automata in Back to Methuselah also ˇ demonstrate a departure from the inorganic automaton towards Capek’s ˇ robots, which are organic. In due course, Shaw would support Capek by having him translate his plays.

Artificial Intelligence The expression “artificial intelligence” was not coined until 31 August 1955 by John McCarthy (Dartmouth College), Marvin Minsky (Harvard University), Nathaniel Rochester (IBM) and Claude E. Shannon (Bell Telephone Laboratories) in their proposal for the Dartmouth Conference for a two-month, ten-man study of AI. These men, it should be noted, were Shaw’s contemporaries: McCarthy (1927–2011), Minsky (1927–2016), Rochester (1919–2001) and Shannon (1916–2001). Alan Turing (1912–54), another contemporary, watched a production of Back to Methuselah while a student at Cambridge in 1933 and enjoyed it. Having seen Shaw’s Oracle in that performance, a few years later, in 1936, he proposed the Turing machine, which was a computer that could presumably simulate any computational behaviours. It consists of a tape divided into cells, with a symbol from some finite alphabet in each cell. Turing proposed the “Oracle” in “Systems of Logic Based on Ordinals,” written when he was a Jane Eliza Procter Visiting Fellow at Princeton University. The Turing machine was connected to an Oracle, an entity capable of solving a decision problem or a function problem, for example. On 3 November 2010, Marvin Minsky was interviewed by “Smartest Machine on Earth” producer Michael Bicks and recalled a historical moment in AI that involved Shaw. He believed that one did not have to understand the question if simply fitting and matching five keywords would yield an 80% chance of getting the answer without understanding either the question or the answer: I have a good human example of this. My friend Joe Weizenbaum, who was one of the pioneers of AI, wrote a program that appeared to have a lot of common sense. It was called ELIZA, after the character in that wonderful Shaw play Pygmalion. Joe said he got the idea because he had

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an aunt who was considered the wise woman of the neighborhood. People would come and tell her their problems—their daughter did this and that and some terrible thing happened and so forth—and Joe’s aunt would listen. And after a while she’d say, “Yes, things like that happen.” That’s all she did that Joe could remember, but he noticed that it was this kind of reaction of appearing to understand that gave her this reputation in the neighborhood.10

It’s the mechanical Eliza at Mrs. Higgins’s at-home, the doll without a soul, responding without understanding.

Impact of Automata, Robotism and AI Shaw’s intersections with automata, robots and AI reveal his significant impact on the twentieth-first century beyond the literary realm. Chapter 2 focuses on Shaw in the age of automata, and the ways he formulated his gospel of the Life Force and Creative Evolution in light of automata. Chapter 3 shows how Shaw responded to robots and entered into debates with his contemporaries on the topic. Chapter 4 illustrates how Shaw had an impact on the founders of AI, individuals who were attracted both to his plays and to his theory of the Life Force and Creative Evolution. AI has often been dismissed as disruptive intelligence. However, Chapter 5 explores how AI can be an invaluable asset for Shaw studies. It can help widen Shaw’s readership and audience and build bridges enabling them to understand Shaw’s contemporary world. AI functionalities, such as IBM SPSS, natural language understanding, cultural colours visual recognition, virtual assistant, virtual reality and ChatGPT can also be used to generate new ways of understanding Shaw, as they can analyse the metadata comprising Shaw’s many texts. In addition, they can also examine Shaw’s plays and productions in light of those performing contexts. Whether AI is a threat to or an opportunity for Shaw studies is assessed below. The rise of AI may be the dawn of a new era both for broadening Shaw’s audiences and widening his readership, and for keeping Shaw relevant to the here and now.

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Notes 1. Christian Bailly, Automata: The Golden Age 1848–1914 (London: Published for Sotheby’s Publications by P. Wilson Publishers, 1987). 2. “Flute-playing automaton (1878), Alexandre-Nicolas Théroude.” Google Arts and Culture. https://artsandculture.google.com/ asset/flute-playing-automaton-1878-alexandre-nicolas-th%C3% A9roude/GwFB7lT0HQC4hg?hl=en. Accessed on 1 September 2023. 3. “A Bontems Singing Bird Automaton.” Christie’s https://www. youtube.com/shorts/RFVWsyrjxrY. Accessed on 1 September 2023. 4. “French Musical Automaton ‘The Ethiopian Harpist’ by Gustave https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcTYB-wYGqM. Vichy.” Accessed on 1 September 2023. 5. “A Fun and Rare Roullet et Decamps Automaton Cat Waving his Fan. French, circa 1900.” https://www.facebook.com/100063 642219003/videos/a-fun-and-rare-roullet-et-decamps-automa ton-cat-waving-his-fan-french-circa-1900/1171754180257105/. Accessed on 1 September 2023. 6. “Clown Illusionist, Magician Automaton by Phalibois, Paris, France, c. 1895, at the Morris Museum.” https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=qgIRFUJ0Rss. Accessed on 1 September 2023. 7. “Lutèce Créations Offers Musical Automata and an Automaton by Lambert: The Japanese tea waitress.” https://www.youtube.com/ watch?app=desktop&v=Zq2NELSfwus. Accessed on 1 September 2023. 8. “Mechanical Miracles: The Rise of the Automaton.” Collections (19 August 2015). https://www.christies.com/features/ The-History-of-the-Automaton-Mechanical-miracles-6382-1.aspx. Accessed on 1 September 2023. ˇ 9. B. R. Bradbrook and Karel Capek, “Letters to England from Karel ˇ Capek.” The Slavonic and East European Review 39.92 (December 1960), pp. 61–72, p. 64. Published by the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School of Slavonic and East European Studies. https://www.jsor.org/sta ble/4205218. Accessed on 1 September 2023.

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10. “Artificial Intelligence Pioneer.” 3 November 2010. https:// www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/pioneer-artificial-intelligence/. Accessed on 1 September 2023.

CHAPTER 2

Shaw and Automata

Abstract Automata are machines that can operate on their own without human control. By analogy, automations refer to persons who acts like machines without thinking or feeling.(Cambridge Dictionary. https:// dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/automaton) Automata are also moving mechanical devices in the shape of a person, or small robots performing a particular range of functions.(Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary. https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/ english/automaton) Automata are featured prominently in Back to Methuselah (1921). Ozymandias and Cleopatra-Semiramis are automata created by Pygmalion the scientist. This is the second time Pygmalion appears in a major Shaw play. The Greek myth of Pygmalion is the inspiration behind Shaw’s most popular play, Pygmalion (1912), based on the original myth in which Pygmalion the talented Greek sculptor from Cyprus created the beautiful statue of Galatea and fell in love with her. In Shaw’s play, Henry Higgins the professor of phonetics taught Eliza Doolittle the flower girl upper-class English and manners so that she may pass as a duchess at the ambassador’s garden party. In typical Shavian manner, instead of Eliza marrying Higgins (as do Galatea and Pygmalion) at the end of the play, Eliza becomes a real human being, asserting her independence from Higgins; she plans to open her own flower shop using the skills she learned from him. However, in Back to Methuselah, Shaw drastically alters the Pygmalion myth: instead of the artistic sculptor © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 K. Li, Bernard Shaw, Automata, Robots, and Artificial Intelligence, Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-49226-6_2

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creating the beautiful statue of Galatea who came to life and married the sculptor, the scientist creating the automata quickly destroy their creator and themselves. To understand the complex forces at work behind the male and female automata in Back to Methuselah, one must examine how Shaw lived and wrote his major plays during the golden age of the automata. Keywords Bernard Shaw · Automata · Back to Methuselah · Pygmalion

What is the difference between human beings and automata? Let us consider the difference between Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and his mechanical inventions such as the fighting vehicle shown in Figure 2.1 below. While there is no end to the interpretation of the enigma of Mona Lisa, the fighting vehicle leaves little to the imagination. Likewise, while human beings are alive and infinite, automata are machines that can operate without human control. By analogy, automata can also refer to persons who act like machines without thinking or feeling.1 Automata are also moving mechanical devices in the shape of a person or small robots performing a particular range of functions.2 Shaw was much aware of automata, as he lived in the Golden Age of Automata.

The Golden Age of Automata The moving statues and the automata on the Shavian stage are no coincidence. They demonstrate Shaw’s close ties to his contemporaries. The automata in Back to Methuselah had more cultural significance to his contemporaries in the 1920s than they do to his audiences and readers in the twenty-first century. For Shaw’s first audiences and readers, automata were part of everyday life rather than the museum pieces they have become. Pygmalion was written in 1912 during “the golden age of automata.” According to Harry Pearson of Christie’s, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were indeed the golden age of the automaton, with animated models of humans and animals both delighting and unnerving audiences.3 Lisa Hix, writing in The Collectors Weekly in 2018, has shown that the bulk of the Guinness Collection at the Morris Museum in Morristown, New Jersey, one of the largest publicly held collections of automata, comes from this time period.4

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Automata were everywhere during Shaw’s time, and sometimes were staples in the Victorian household as clockworks or little toys. There were three main types of automata. First, there were those functional automata performing a specific purpose. For example, automata were integrated into clocks and watches, such as those large public clocks with humanoid automata dancing or striking a bell at set times, or the numerous smaller versions in household cuckoo clocks. In Shaw’s Passion, Poison and Petrifaction, or The Fatal Gazogene (1905), the stage directions include a cuckoo clock above the door at the centre of the third wall. The play begins with the cuckoo clock striking sixteen, with The Lady asking “How much did the clock strike?” A cuckoo clock strikes the hour with the call of a common cuckoo, and an automated cuckoo bird moves with each note. Second, there were purely decorative automata. These include famous automata that were high-end collectibles. For example, Fabergé were not only famous for their Imperial Easter Eggs, but also for the automata within them. The collection at Buckingham Palace includes the elephant automaton (c. 1900), which runs using a key-wound mechanism which, when released, enables the elephant to walk, swing its head and trunk, and articulate its tale. This elephant was presented to King George V by his family for Christmas in 1929.5 In addition, Carl Fabergé created a jewelled mechanical elephant as a “surprise” for the Diamond Trellis Egg, made for Tsar Alexander III.6 By the late nineteenth century, a wide variety of automata could be bought in high-end Parisian department stores as parlour amusements. Third were life-size, humanlike automata. Significantly, unlike functional or decorative automata, these machines were designed not only to look like humans, but also to deceive humans and even excel them. Some were built to compete with humans, to challenge not only their perception but also their intelligence. These in fact were the precursors of AI. These intricately designed automata were much used by magicians and illusionists to impress everyone from royalty to the general public, and their magic shows attracted enormous crowds. As early as around 1495, Leonardo da Vinci designed the Automa cavaliere or Automaton knight, which was a knight that could stand, sit, move its arms and raise its visor. This automaton operated through a series of pulleys and cables. Da Vinci also designed various war machines with intricate mechanical systems (Fig. 2.1). Shaw’s two automata in Back to Methuselah look like the life-size automata. In a letter to William Archer dated 19 April 1919, while he was writing Back to Methuselah, Shaw writes: “Parliament is so completely

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Fig. 2.1 Leonardo da Vinci’s fighting vehicle. Museo Leonardo da Vinci experience, Vatican (Photo taken by the author)

reduced to a Maskelyne trick cabinet that its Acts are used to drive bargains between placemen, and carried out or put on the shelf according to the upshot of the deal.”7 Shaw alludes to the automata of John N. Maskelyne (1839–1917), the famous conjurer and illusionist. His trick cabinet was a famous feature of his Home of Magic in London’s Egyptian Hall, which opened in 1873. Maskelyne was a master of automata whose book, Automata, collects five essays he had published in Leisure Hour in 1879, including a chronological history of automata and an introduction of Maskelyne’s inventions. In an 1878 article in The Illustrated London News entitled “Maskelyne and Cooke’s Automata,” one reads the following: The wonderful exhibition at the “Home of Mystery” in the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly, where Mr. John Nevil Maskelyne and Mr. John Algernon Cooke present their series of contrived illusions to nightly crowds of interested spectators, has been a popular London entertainment these five or six years past. … We give an Illustration of four ingenious mechanical figures, apparently self-acting or automatic, which have been admired by thousands of curious and wonderful visitors, and the secret of whose motions,

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evidently guided by intelligence and consistent purpose, no one has been able to guess. These are Psycho, the Hindoo whist-player, card-player in general, and arithmetician; Zoe, a pretty little lady in Greek costume, who writes and draws portraits; Fanfare, the cornet-player, and another musician named Labial, who performs on the euphonium, these sometimes playing in company with their human masters, executing duets or trios. … That there is some kind of hidden clock-work, we can hardly doubt; but the marvellous control of the various movements by an intelligent mind, somehow or other directing the machinery, is really worth consideration.8

The automaton Psycho was especially influential. With its clockwork mechanism, he was introduced to the public on 13 January 1875. Psycho could accomplish a number of things: he was adept at nodding, giving the masonic grip, doing calculations (including addition, multiplication and division), even performing minor conjuring tricks, casting spells and smoking cigarettes. He was especially famous as a whist player who won tens of thousands of games.9 The glass cylinder at the bottom was apparently meant to show that Psycho really operated spiritually and that there was nobody inside controlling it. In actual fact, it operated through an intricate set of bellows, levers, pulleys and clockwork. The bulb controlled by the magician’s assistant following instructions from a commentator sent a column of air up the glass cylinder, activated the mechanism and produced the required action.10 At this time, a number of publications began to appear explaining the science and mechanics behind automata, such as Arprey Vere’s Ancient and Modern Magic (1879). Thus, in comparing Parliament to a Maskelyne trick cabinet, which were basically illusions, Shaw was clearly well aware of the illusionary mechanics behind automata. Shaw did not approve of these lifeless human automata, however, regarding them as mere mechanical devices and puppets. He even compared the characters of Shakespeare and Dickens to them in the Epistle Dedicatory to Man and Superman (1903): Dickens, without the excuse of having to manufacture motives for Hamlets and Macbeths, superfluously punt his crew down the stream of his monthly parts by mechanical devices which I leave you to describe, my own memory being quite baffled by the simplest question as to Monks in Oliver Twist, or the long lost parentage of Smike, or the relations between the Dorrit and Clennam families so inopportunely discovered by Monsieur Rigaud Blandois. … Neither of them could do anything with a serious positive character: they could place a human figure before you with perfect

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verisimilitude; but when the moment came for making it live and move, they found, unless it made them laugh, that they had a puppet on their hands, and had to invent some artificial external stimulus to make it work.

Like Psycho, Shaw’s Ozymandias and Cleopatra-Semiramis are exotic life-size human automata. Psycho has an “oriental” face and is dressed in something akin to the imperial robes of a Chinese Emperor, whereas Shaw’s Ozymandias is the “king of kings” and Cleopatra the “queen of queens”; they are “of noble appearance, beautifully modelled and splendidly attired.” Some famous predecessors to these humanlike automata are directly linked to the development of the modern computer. Of the many travelling shows of mechanical automata in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, one of the most famous was Wolfgang von Kempelen’s Turk automaton, dressed in “oriental” costume, which could play chess and beat anyone. Built in 1770, it was so successful that it was exhibited on tours for 84 years until 1854, when it was destroyed in a fire in the museum housing it. The Turk was shown to Empress Maria Theresa and, at chess, beat both Napoleon Bonaparte and Benjamin Franklin in Paris. The impact of the Turk automaton has lingered, and in 2005, Elizabeth Stephens drew attention to Amazon’s new job platform, Mechanical Turk, which is “artificial artificial [sic] intelligence.”11 This job platform for companies provides access to a pool of workers to accomplish the tasks automated systems cannot. The Turk automaton, in fact, gave rise to our modern computers. In 1819, the famous English mathematician, mechanical engineer, inventor and philosopher Charles Babbage played the Turk automaton twice and lost both times. (The true operator of the Turk automaton was of course a human chess master, a well-kept secret.) However, the impact of the Turk was great. Having lost to the Turk automaton, Babbage was prompted to design a real calculating machine. This “difference engine,” as it was called, was the world’s first mechanical computer, and Babbage is considered by some “the father of the computer.” His Analytical Engine comprises all the ideas behind modern computers, including an arithmetic logic unit, conditional branching and loops, and control flow and integrated memory, all of which are basic to modern computer design. Shaw was aware of Babbage’s calculating machine. In a letter of 27 November 1912 to Mrs. Patrick Campbell, who would play Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion, Shaw wrote: “Press the levers of Babbage’s Calculating Machine to your bosom, Stella; and—oh, I am lying: this unlucky

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recollection has knocked Belloc out of my head and almost made the grindstones stop” (Collected Letters II , 129). A key moment in AI was when Alan Turing designed the imitation game in 1950, which later became the Turing test. This tested the machine’s ability to demonstrate intelligent behaviour that the human evaluator cannot distinguish from that of a human. The Turing test had long been part of the literature and music of Shaw’s time, when readers and audiences were shown life-size human automata mixing with real characters. A famous example is E. T. A. Hoffmann’s (1776– 1822) Der Sandmann (The Sandman) (1816), which forms the basis of Jacques Offenbach’s (1819–80) opera Les contes d’Hoffmann (The Tales of Hoffmann) (1880). Olimpia, the “daughter” of Spallanzani the physics professor, is a life-like automaton that is cold, stiff with mechanical actions, dances with perfect rhythm and only responds with “Ah, ah” to Nathanael’s courtship. Paul-Jules Barbier (1825–1901) was Hoffmann’s librettist, and Shaw was aware of his work and indeed disapproved of it. He wrote to René Viviani on 13 March 1924 that his Saint Joan was a reaction against former renditions of Joan of Arc: “J’ai écrit cette pièce comme un acte de justice et de piété envers Jeanne outrageusement traitée par Shakespeare, S[c]hiller, Voltaire, Anatole France, de même que Barbier et autres dramaturges de seconde zone” (“I wrote this play as an act of justice and piety towards Jeanne who was outrageously treated by Shakespeare, S[c]hiller, Voltaire, Anatole France, as well as Barbier and other second-rate playwrights”) (Letters II , 829). Other works showed that automata can never supplant human beings. A prominent example of an opera featuring automata is Tchaikovsky’s famous ballet The Nutcracker (1892), inspired by Hoffmann’s novella The Nutcracker and The Mouse King . In The Nutcracker, Clara’s eccentric Drosselmeyer is a clock- and watchmaker who creates the most ingenious automata. The nutcracker is a doll come to life. Shaw wrote about Tchaikovsky in his music criticism.12 In many productions, the nutcracker-prince remains a wooden doll when Clara awakens from her dream: the doll never becomes human. The ballet Coppélia (1870) was also based on Hoffmann’s The Sandman. Coppélia is another beautiful, life-size, human automaton. The tale begins with Coppélia sitting motionless on the balcony of the faintly diabolical inventor Doctor Coppélius who makes automata. Franz is attracted to Coppélia, but the automaton never becomes human. Franz’s fiancée, in trying to save him, dresses up as Coppélia and pretends the doll

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has come to life. The lifeless doll is then found by Coppélius, showing that the automaton can never be human. Thus, when Shaw’s automata arrived on the stage with their rich legacy of the golden age of automata behind them, they were not merely dolls or intelligent technical devices, but could be readily constructed into Shaw’s theory of the Life Force and Creative Evolution. This will be discussed below, as Shaw’s automata foreshadow both the robot and AI.

Shaw and Automata Shaw included automata into his theory of Creative Evolution and the Life Force. He believed that Charles Darwin’s (1809–82) On the Origin of Species (1859) advocated natural selection based on circumstantial evidence, which, in effect, banished mind and will. August Weismann (1834–1914) and his germ-plasm theory ruled out any possibility of inheriting acquired characteristics, a theory first proposed by JeanBaptiste Lamarck (1744–1829). Shaw sided with Lamarck and supported the inheritance of characteristics acquired through effort or will. In Act I of Back to Methuselah, the Serpent tells Eve, “Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire; you will what you imagine; and at last you create what you will.” In the Preface to Back to Methuselah, Shaw compared the denial of will, consciousness and purpose to an automaton: If Weismann really thought that cats act thus without any consciousness or any purpose, immediate or ulterior, he must have known very little about cats. But a thoroughgoing Weismannite, … would contend that I am not at present necessarily conscious of what I am doing; that my writing of these lines, and your reading of them, are effects of Circumstantial Selection; that I need know no more about Darwinism than a butterfly knows of a lizard’s appetite; and that the proof that I actually am doing it unconsciously is that as I have spent forty years in writing in this fashion without, as far as I can see, producing any visible effect on public opinion, I must be incapable of learning from experience, and am therefore a mere automaton.

In Part V of Back to Methuselah, the sculptor Martellus, who modelled the automata for Pygmalion, draws a line between an automaton and a living organism. The male and female automata are “figures,” dangerous “dolls” and mere “machinery” with “reflexes” instead of impulses. The ideal Shavian condition, the vortex of thought, is a state without an

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automaton, as the She-Ancient discovered: “And suddenly it came into my mind that this monstrous machinery of heads and limbs was no more me than my statues had been me, and that it was only an automaton that I had enslaved.” Shaw’s use of the analogy of the automaton to demonstrate the absence of independent will and purpose is significant in the context of the history of automata. Historically, automata were built worldwide from early times. In ancient Greece, Archytas of Tarentum (400–350 BCE) fabricated a revolving wooden pigeon suspended from the end of a pivoted bar that ran on compressed air. In the third century BCE in China during the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE), a mechanical orchestra was built for the Chinese emperor. In the Islamic world, al-Jazari created wateroperated automata such as moving peacocks for princes of the Artuqid dynasty in Mesopotamia.13 Other notable automata in history include a flute player built by French engineer Jacques de Vaucanson in 1737 that could play twelve songs. Sophisticated automata, especially automata clocks, could be found from Buckingham Palace in London, UK, to the Chinese Palace in the Forbidden City, Beijing, China, and the Palace of Versailles in France (Figs. 2.2 and 2.3).

Fig. 2.2 Clocks with Automata. Forbidden City, Beijing, China. Author’s family archive (Photograph by Hing To Li)

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Fig. 2.3 A clock with automata. Palace of Versailles, Versailles, France. Author’s family archive (Photograph by Hing To Li)

The Byzantines were also famous for their automata. For example, the golden automata in the tenth century were built to impress foreign dignitaries. The throne room in Constantinople featured a gold tree with metallic singing birds and a throne with two gold lions that roared and struck the sound with their tails. The emperor’s throne could also soar up high towards the ceiling. No doubt all visitors prostrated themselves in awe in front of the emperor.14 Nevertheless, while these automata were truly impressive, they were still some distance from those narrated in ancient myths. Shaw’s depiction of automata situates him firmly within this context, aligning him with the automata of ancient Greek myths by highlighting the absence of will and purpose.

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Automata in Ancient Greek Myths: The Absence of Will and Purpose The word “automaton” is derived from α Ùτ o´ ματ oν (automaton) in Ancient Greek, meaning self-moving, self-propelled, automatic without external cause or support. Greek myths include some amazing automata created by Hephaestus and Daedalus. Hephaestus was the god of blacksmiths, metallurgy, fire, carpenters, sculptors, artisans and craftsmen. His notable automata include the bronze Caucasian Eagle that tortured the chained Titan Prometheus; a pair of beautiful Golden Maidens to attend him in his household; the bronze giant Talos, which was wedding present for Europa, Queen of Crete, to protect the island by patrolling it; and the four bronze Horses of the Cabeiri, which could breathe fire and were made to draw the adamantine chariot of his twin sons, the Kabeiroi. Daedalus was the mythical inventor and sculptor, the architect who built the labyrinth for King Minos of Crete. Callistratus writes that Daedalus could construct statues endowed with motion and compel gold to feel human sensations, although he could not make statues speak.15 One should note here how automata were theorized in ancient Greece. While automata were mythical, they were nonetheless considered more as a contrast to humans than as advanced products of science and technology. Hesiod (active between 750 and 650 BCE) first mentioned ´ Talos (Tαλως), the giant bronze automaton Zeus ordered Hephaestus to make that circled the island of Crete thrice a day to protect Europa from being kidnapped. Homer, especially in the Iliad (eighth century BCE), mentioned automata numerous times as self-moving machines propelled by means of internal energy like live beings (Kalligeropoulos and Vasileiadou). For example, Hephaestus crafted twenty tripods to stand around the wall of his hall, each with golden wheels so that they might enter the gatherings of the gods at his wish and return to his house (see Iliad, Oplopoiea (weapon manufacture), Book XVIII, 372–77).16 In Politics 1.417 (fourth century BCE), Aristotle writes about the instruments used by workers to accomplish their tasks, instruments that may be alive, such as the look-out man, or lifeless, such as a rudder. Automata, which highlight the lack of will and purpose, play a key role in Shaw’s advocacy of Creative Evolution and the Life Force. Shaw’s automata are explicitly not human beings and have no life of their own. His automata quickly kill their creator Pygmalion and themselves, and this has classical roots. Aristotle believed that the statues of Daedalus

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or the tripods of Hephaestus, which “of their own accord entered the assembly of the Gods” though they could accomplish their own work, were obeying or anticipating the will of others.18 They have no will of their own: a higher power gives life to automata before they can have a life of their own. These self-moving artefacts mentioned by the ancient Greek philosophers included Hephaestus’ bellows, which work themselves, the golden handmaids obeying his will and the tripods entering the assembly of the gods. Daedalus’ statues were said to be so life-like that people thought they had to be tied to the ground to prevent them from running away. However, they still had no life of their own: Daedalus used quicksilver to make them move. In Book 10 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses , Aphrodite granted Pygmalion’s wish of having his beautiful ivory statue come to life: she did not come to life of her own accord. Similarly, the automata in Homer’s Odyssey have no purpose of their own. Alcinos, King of the Phaeacians, asks Odysseus: And tell me your country, your people, and your city, that our ships may convey you thither, discerning the course by their wits. For the Phaeacians have no pilots, nor steering-oars such as other ships have, but their ships of themselves understand the thoughts and minds of men, and they know the cities and rich fields of all peoples, and most swiftly do they cross over the gulf of the sea, hidden in mist and cloud, nor ever have they fear of harm or ruin. (Odyssey, Book VIII, 555-63)

These intelligent ships received directions from the “thoughts and minds of men”; they did not generate their own purposes. Shaw may well have been aware of these classical interpretations of automata. Among the books found at Shaw’s Corner, his home in Hertfordshire,19 are copies of The Iliad of Homer and Samuel Butler’s editions of both The Iliad and The Odyssey. Like classical scholars, Shaw believed that automata demonstrate the absence of an individual’s will and purpose: they are not human beings and have no life of their own.

Automata Theory According to automata theory, pioneered by Norbert Wiener Alan M. Turing, machines can imitate certain human faculties. word “automata” is derived from the Greek αÙτ´oματoς, meaning propelled, self-moving, self-acting or self-willed. Automata are

and The selfthus

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abstract, self-propelled computing devices that can automatically follow a predetermined sequence of operations. They refer to the basic physical and logical principles underlying the operation of an automaton or abstract machine computing functions and solving problems. Functions are computable and a question is decidable. Shaw’s theory of the Life Force and Creative Evolution may be examined in light of the automata theory, which comprises different states. First is the Finite Automaton (FA) or Finite-State Machine (FSM), which indicates an automaton with a finite number of states. The automaton receives an input and makes a transition or jump to another state; this process is linear and deterministic. By means of the two automata in Part V of Shaw’s Back to Methuselah (1921), Ozymandias and CleopatraSemiramis, Shaw illustrates the distinction between a lifeless, soulless mechanical machine and an object with life and meaning added to it by human beings or a higher force, through which the imagination of the audience can be elicited. Ozymandias and Cleopatra-Semiramis are automata and dolls. According to the He-Ancient, “These things are mere automata: they cannot help shrinking from death at any cost. You see that they have no self-control, and are merely shuddering through a series of reflexes.” The She-Ancient refers them as dolls: “You have been making dolls. You must not: they are not only disgusting: they are dangerous.” They are also pushdown automata. Deterministic pushdown automata recognize deterministic context-free languages, while nondeterministic pushdown automata recognize context-free languages. This differs from the Finite-State Machine because a pushdown automaton can use the top of the stack—like a stack of plates in a cafeteria, which always shows the topmost plate—to decide which transition to take, and can manipulate the stack to perform a transition. So when the automaton receives an input symbol, it can either follow a transition to another state—i.e. the top plate—or choose among several possible actions, i.e., use the plates within the stack. Thus, one can have a deterministic pushdown automaton, or a general or nondeterministic pushdown automaton in which there are several configuration sequences. Shaw’s distinction between dolls and automata somewhat reflects this. Among the books at Shaw’s Corner is Puppets and Automata (or Dolls and Puppets), a wooden artist’s model or “lay figure” with moveable limbs above the mantelpiece in the study, and even a George Bernard Shaw puppet! (Fig. 2.4).

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Fig. 2.4 Lay Figure, pictures, books and other objects above the mantelpiece in the study at Shaw’s Corner (© National Trust Images/Chris Lacey)

Shaw provided a detailed “note” on puppets for the English translation of Max Ferdinand Karl von Boehn’s (1860–1931) book Puppets and Automata (or Dolls and Puppets).20 The book is a translation of Puppenspiele, originally published as volume 2 of the author’s Puppen und Puppenspiele (1929) (puppets and puppet shows).21 In the section on marionettes in the German original, there is a translation of a letter by Shaw to Vittorio Podrecca (395) in which Shaw states that “fleshand-blood actors can learn a great deal about their art from puppets, and a good puppet-show should form part of the equipment of every academy of stage art,” because the images acquire feelings and meanings from the human beings controlling them. Podrecca’s Teatro dei Piccoli at the Hollandshe Schouwburg in 1935 had elicited praise from Shaw.22 For Puppets and Automata, Shaw had sent the translator Josephine Nicholl a modified version of the letter to Podrecca that was published as a note at the beginning of the book. In this note, Shaw considers puppets to be wooden actors that can move the spectators as only the most experienced living actors can. He believes that what really affects the spectators in the

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theatre are the feelings the performers awaken in them, which sparks their imagination. The puppets, with their symbolic costumes and unchanging stare of petrified grimace, suggest a mimicry of human gestures that result in a performance that produces an intensified imagination in the audience; few actors can achieve this. As the Serpent tells Eve in Back to Methuselah, “imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire; you will what you imagine; and at last you create what you will.” Puppets can be the tool through which the feelings and imagination of the audience are elicited and are added to the puppet to make it come to life and be meaningful. By adding the feelings and imagination of the audience, the puppets acquire greater possibilities of interpretation. A third element in automata theory is the Turing machine. This mathematical model of computation manipulates symbols on a strip of tape according to a table of rules. It has an infinite memory tape, in which there are discrete cells each holding a single symbol drawn from the alphabet of the machine. The automaton can choose which replacement symbol to write in which direction based on a finite table. The Turing machine can go into an infinite loop and is capable of arbitrary computations. While it is still finite, discrete and distinguishable, the unlimited amount of memory tape and processing time makes it infinite. This is comparable to Shaw’s theory of Creative Evolution, whereby the Life Force makes numerous finite experiments in its search for purpose and direction: the process is infinite. Thus, seeing Shaw’s works in terms of automata illustrates how Shaw was a man of his time. Scholars have found that the automata in Back to Methuselah run quite close to those created by his contemporaries. J. O. Bailey23 (1973), for example, showed how Shaw drew from utopias and science fiction, while Julie A. Sparks (1997)24 explored the relationship ˇ between Shaw and Karel Capek in terms of the former for the utopians and the latter for the anti-utopians. Philip Klass (1982)25 examined the likely relationship between the short story “The Lady Automaton” by E. E. Kellett, which appeared in Pearson’s Magazine in June 1901, and Pygmalion. The short story relates the social success of a female robot, created by a scientist who accepts a challenge to create a counterfeit lady who will fool everyone. Both Klass and Sparks found no evidence that ˇ Shaw referred to Kellett’s short story or to Capek when he wrote Back to Methuselah. Still, automata appear in all these works. These human automata, like those found in the magic shows, literature and opera, are

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human beings pretending to be machines, while humanoid automata are machines pretending to be humans. Shaw’s automata, however, go much further. They are intrinsically related to his theory of the Life Force and Creative Evolution. Shaw was making use of classical interpretations and contemporary Darwinian debates over natural selection to show the need for will and purpose guiding the Life Force in Creative Evolution. While automata run in a closed loop, with a signal following a circular path as it is fed back from the output of a circuit, device or system to the input and then back again to the output, Shaw’s Creative Evolution should be an upward spiral leading towards, as Shaw phrases it, the Godhead. To chart how this upward spiral works, one must now examine Shaw and robotics.

Notes 1. Cambridge Dictionary. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictio nary/english/automaton. 2. Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary. https://www.oxfordlearne rsdictionaries.com/definition/english/automaton. 3. Harry Pearson, “Mechanical Miracles: The Rise of the Automaton.” Christie’s. https://www.christies.com/features/ The-History-of-the-Automaton-Mechanical-miracles-6382-1.aspx. Accessed on 1 September 2023. 4. Lisa Hix, “Ancient Androids: Even Before Electricity, Robots Freaked People Out,” Collectors Weekly (30 July 2018). https:// www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/ancient-androids/. Accessed on 1 September 2023. 5. “Elephant Automaton, Box and Key.” https://www.rct.uk/col lection/40486/elephant-automaton-box-and-key. Accessed on 1 September 2023. 6. “A Fabergé Surprise—The Elephant Automaton.” Royal Collection Trust. https://vimeo.com/141676340. Accessed on 1 September 2023. 7. Bernard Shaw, Collected Letters. Volume II: 1898–1910, ed. Dan H. Laurence (London: Max Reinhardt, 1972), p. 600. Accessed on 1 September 2023. 8. “Maskelyne and Cooke’s Automata,” The Illustrated London News (19 October 1878), p. 367. Accessed on 1 September 2023.

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9. Jasper Maskelyne, White Magic (London: Stanley Paul, 1936), pp. 47–48. Accessed on 1 September 2023. 10. Arprey Vere, Ancient and modern magic with explanations of some of the best known tricks performed by Messrs Maskelyne and Cooke (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1879). 11. Elizabeth Stephens, “The Mechanical Turk: A Short History of ‘Artificial. artificial intelligence’,” Cultural Studies 37.1 (2023), pp. 65–87. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2022.2042580 https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2022.2042580. Accessed on 1 September 2023. 12. Bernard Shaw, Shaw’s Music: The Complete Musical Criticism in Three Volumes, ed. Dan H. Laurence, 2nd rev. ed. (London: The Bodley Head, 1989). 13. “Automaton.” Encyclopaedia Britannica. https://www.britannica. com/technology/automaton. Accessed on 1 September 2023. 14. Preskar, Peter. 2022. “The Byzantine Golden Automata Used To Fascinate Foreign Dignitaries.” https://short-history.com/byz antine-golden-automata-60a8189118ce. Accessed on 1 September 2023. 15. “Automatones.” https://www.theoi.com/Ther/Automotones. html. Accessed on 1 September 2023. 16. D. Kalligeropoulos and S. Vasileiadou, “The Homeric Automata and Their Implementation,” Science and Technology in Homeric Epics (Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, n.d.), pp. 77–84. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-8784-4_5.. Accessed on 1 September 2023. 17. Aristotle, Politics, Book I, Part IV. https://www.human.libret exts.org/Bookshelves/Philosophy/Political_Philosophy_Reader_ Levin_et_al.)/01%3A_Thinking_About_and_Justifying_the_ State/1.04%3A_Politics_Books_I_and_II_(Aristotle). Accessed on 1 September 2023. 18. Ibid. 19. “Text.” https://www.nationaltrustcollections.org.uk/object/127 5264. Accessed on 1 September 2023. 20. Max von Boehn, Puppets and Automata (Dover, 1972); Max von Boehn, Dolls and Puppets (London: George G. Harrap & Company, 1932), translated by Josephine Nicoll, with a Note on Puppets by George Bernard Shaw.

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21. Max von Boehn, Puppen und Puppenspiele. Band I und Band II Puppenspiele Puppen. Mit 266 Abb. und 15 Farbtafeln. 200 Bilder 15 Farbtafeln. (Verlag: Bruckmann, 1929). https://www. abebooks.com/first-edition/Puppen-Puppenspiele-MARION ETTENPUPPEN-BOEHN-Max-v/22176996195/bd#&gid=1& pid=2. Accessed on 1 September 2023. 22. “Vittorio Podreccas Teatro Dei Piccoli at the Hollandsche Schouwberg in Amsterdam 1935.” https://www.gosenrarebooks.com/ book/vittorio-podreccas-teatro-dei-piccoli-at-the-hollandsche-sch ouwberg-in-amsterdam-1935/. Accessed on 1 September 2023. 23. J. O. Bailey, “Shaw’s Life Force and Science Fiction,” The Shaw Review 16.2 (May 1973), pp. 48–58. https://www.jstor.org/sta ble/40682294. Accessed on 1 September 2023. 24. Julie A. Sparks, “Shaw for the Utopians, Capek for the AntiUtopians,” SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies (1997), pp. 163–181. 25. Philip Klass and E. E. Kellett, “‘The Lady Automaton’ by E. E. Kellett: A Pygmalion Source?” SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies (1982), pp. 75–100. https://www.jstor.org/stable/ 40681078. Accessed on 1 September 2023.

CHAPTER 3

Shaw and Robots

Abstract Shaw was related to robots through his acquaintance with Karel ˇ Capek (1890–1938). The word “robot” comes from the Czech robota, meaning “forced labour.” “Rab” in its Slavic linguistic root means “slave.” ˇ The term was coined in Capek’s 1920 play R.U.R. Rosumovi Umˇelí Roboti, which was referred to as Rossum’s Universal Robots in English ˇ versions. Capek at first wanted to call his artificial creatures “labours,” ˇ the Latin form of “labour.” Not liking the word, Capek consulted his elder brother Josef, a painter and set designer, who suggested the word robota. Typical of Shaw, soon to be the Nobel laureate for literature in 1925, he connected R.U.R. to his theory of the Life Force and Creative Evolution. ˇ Keywords Bernard Shaw · Robots · R.U.R. · Karel Capek · Life Force · Creative Evolution

Robotics is an interdisciplinary technology that involves the design, construction, operation and use of robots or machines to perform tasks that can help humans. These tasks may replicate human actions, such as serving meals or picking tomatoes, or they may do things that cannot be done by humans, as in bomb detection or operations using surgical © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 K. Li, Bernard Shaw, Automata, Robots, and Artificial Intelligence, Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-49226-6_3

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robots. Humanoids are of bipedal (or two-legged) design, with a head, torso, arms and “hands.” Robots differ from automata. An automaton, like a clockwork, is a machine following a precise, predetermined sequence of instructions, and its movements are often repetitive and predictable. It can be powered by springs, levers and gears, or can be pneumatic or hydraulic. A prime example of hydraulic power is the Tower Bridge in London, England. The bascules were originally operated by hydraulics, using steam to power the enormous pumping engines (Fig. 3.1). A robot carries out a complex task or groups of tasks, can be programmed and can perform actions with some degree of autonomy. It may have sensors that enable it to interact with its environment and make decisions based on this sensory input. Robots with AI and machine learning algorithms can learn and improve their performance. Robots with natural language processing (NLP) or speech recognition can communicate with humans. The automata in nineteenth-century operas and literature could speak, but they did so thanks to real human artists

Fig. 3.1 Tower Bridge, London, England. Author’s family archive (Photograph by Hing To Li)

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and performers. Automata are thus purely mechanical, invented prior to electricity, and may be clocks, mechanical animals, even life-size, like the famous Turk automaton. Robots come in various shapes, such as Roombas and robotic arms, and lack self-awareness. Androids are more like those flesh and blood but fictional automata in operas and literature, enacted on stage by real human actors or ballerinas and used to deceive other characters as well as audiences and readers. They challenge and traverse freely the once hard-and-fast boundaries between human and machines. Androids are like the realizations of fictional human automata. For example, the Japanese Android Repliee Q2 has silicone skin and advanced facial expressions showing a wide range of facial expressions, although other body parts remain stiff and mechanical. Ishiguro and Nishio (2007) believe that appearance and behaviour are closely related and list three categories of humanlike robots: humanoid, android and geminoid robots. Humanoid robots resemble human beings as they have heads, eyes or hands and can demonstrate analogous moments and gestures such as pointing. But these humanoid robots are mechanical, and these mechanical elements have been much featured in literature and operas showing that automata are not human. Ishiguro and Nishio argue that having a human appearance is important to ensuring human beings believe the androids are human, as when protagonists fall in love with a beautiful automaton at first sight. Ishiguro and Nishio1 also draw attention to human-android interaction. Human beings are used to understanding human expressions and behaviours and to interpreting social clues such as voices, languages and facial expressions. In The Sandman, the automaton Olimpia responds to Nathanael’s declaration of admiration for her by replying only “Ah, ah!” which defies social clues. Ishiguro and Nishio then developed the “geminoid,” which comes from the Latin “geminus” meaning “twin or “double.” Their geminoid is a robot that duplicates an existing person— Dr. Ishiguro himself—and that appears and behaves as a person, as it is connected to the live individual by a computer network. The robot is a physical copy of that individual, complete with silicone skin moulded on the original, with fifty pneumatic actuators to generate movements situated in the face, arms and legs. This pairing with a real human being is also the principle behind the Turk automaton, in which a real human chess master hid inside a chest and directed the automaton through interior levers and machinery.2 This

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prompted Charles Babbage, twice defeated by the Turk, to design the first automatic digital computer. Androids are human in form and function, but not necessarily so. While Ishiguro and Nishio focus on making robots humanlike, Balkenius and Johansson (2022) argue that a life-like robot can be life-like because it exhibits certain aspects of life-like behaviour that can be easily understood by humans who can then predict its actions. With these behaviour cues, robots do not necessarily have to look completely human.3 Shaw was right in thinking that puppets demonstrate human gestures that trigger the imagination of the audience and create powerful feelings.

ˇ Shaw, Capek and the Robot Shaw was familiar with robotics through his acquaintance with Karel ˇ Capek. The word robot comes from the Czech robota, meaning “forced labour,” as done by serfs; “rab” in its Slavic linguistic root means “slave.” ˇ The term was coined by Capek in his play R.U.R. (Rosumovi Umˇelí ˇ Roboti, or Rossum’s Universal Robots ). At first, Capek wanted to call the artificial creatures “labours,” the Latin form of labour. Disliking the ˇ word, Capek consulted his elder brother Josef, a painter and set designer, ˇ who suggested the word robota. On 24 December 1933, Capek wrote in the newspaper Lidové noviny (Kulturní kronika column, p. 12) about the play’s genesis. When he told his brother he had an idea of artificial workers, Josef suggested calling them “roboti.” “Robota” in Czech means “drudgery” or “servitude,” while a “robotnik” is a slave or peasant. ˇ In Lidové noviny, Capek describes the following4 : The author of the play RUR [sic] did not, in fact, invent that word, he merely ushered it into existence. It was like this: the idea for the play came to said author in a single, unexpected moment. And while it was still fresh he rushed immediately to his brother Josef, a painter, who was just standing by the easel, vigorously painting at a canvas.

ˇ At first, Capek intended to refer to his artificial workers as “Laboˇri,” but thought that that was a bit literal. So Josef suggested calling them Roboti, muttering this important name with his paint brush in mouth, and carried on painting. ˇ Capek visited Britain in 1924 as the “wonder boy from the Central ˇ was invited Europe”5 and met Bernard Shaw. In Spring 1924, Capek

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by the International Centre of the P.E.N. club to visit London, where the British Empire Exhibition was being held at Wembley Park. By that time, with Josef, he has already written R.U.R. (1920), The Insect Play (1921), The Manufacture of the Absolute (1923) and The Makropulos Affair (1923). He had also written two books on atomic energy: The Absolute at Large (1923) and Krakatit (1924). As the founder and first president of the Czech Centre (1925–33), he had been invited to London by his close friend Otakar Voˇcadlo (1895–1974), a lecturer at King’s College; the distinguished linguist would go on to become Professor of English Language and Literature at the Charles University of Prague.6 On ˇ 21 April 1924, Capek wrote to Voˇcadlo about arrangements for his visit to England: “I would like to meet Shaw, Wells and Chesterton; perhaps it won’t be difficult for you to find out how I could make their acquaintance?”7 Bradbrook (1960), with the help of primary materials supplied ˇ by Voˇcadlo, concludes that Shaw was “almost superhuman” to Capek, who greatly respected and admired him. ˇ Capek arrived in London on 28 May 1924 and met Shaw at the ˇ end of this first week in England. The 33-year-old Capek was a little shy in Shaw’s company, while “Shaw himself seems to have returned the sympathy and appreciation of his younger fellow-writer in the same ˇ told Shaw that everything in England seemed familiar degree.”8 Capek to him, Shaw replying that the Czech author might once have previously ˇ slight acquaintanceship with Shaw led to an been Shakespeare.9 Capek’s interesting experience when, as a tourist in London, he visited Madame Tussaud’s. He writes in Letters from England: “At first sight a seated gentleman with a goatee beard, No. 12, fascinated me. In the catalogue I found 12: Thomas Neill Cream, executed 1892. Poisoned Matilda Clover with strychnine. He was also found guilty of the murders of three other ˇ women. Truly, his face was very suspicious.” However, Capek later found that he had “confused the catalogue’s pages and am forced to correct [his] impressions: the seated gentleman, No. 12, is only Bernard Shaw.”10 ˇ Capek had a vegetarian lunch at Shaw’s flat at 10 Adelphi Terrace, with Shaw playing the clavichord for him. In the chapter “A Few Faces” in ˇ Letters from England, Capek drew a caricature of Shaw,11 writing “He is a vegetarian; I don’t know whether from principle or from gourmandise. One never knows whether people have principles on principle or whether for their own personal satisfaction.”12

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ˇ Shaw’s Views on Robots and Capek’s R.U.R. Halfway through the run of R.U.R. at St. Martin’s Theatre, there was a debate between Shaw, Chesterton and Commander Kenworthy on the subject of R.U.R. on 21 June 1923 at the theatre.13 The Spectator on 30 June14 reported that the house was packed to hear Chesterton, Commander Joseph Montague Kenworthy, tenth Baron Strabolgi (1886– 1953) and Shaw debate the meaning of R.U.R. Commander Kenworthy was a Liberal who had resigned from the Navy in 1920 to become a Labour MP. This ex-military man saw in R.U.R. lessons on the madness of war and the need for internationalism. He believed this was why the men of science, in one act of the play, became alarmed by what they had created and tried to break down the cohesion of the robots. Chesterton, taking for granted the symbolic reference of the play to industry and capitalism, spoke about the “headlong yet casual” rise of capitalism. He thought that such a process would lead to the people rising up and removing the super-robot, and considered the play a satire on the irresponsibility of modern capitalism.15 Chesterton’s interpreting R.U.R. in terms of the risks of industry and capitalism, and Kenworthy in terms of the madness of war and the need for internationalism, differed from Shaw’s interpretation, who, typically, viewed R.U.R. in relation to his theory of the Life Force and Creative Evolution. Chesterton recalled: “I found myself arguing with Mr. Bernard Shaw. As I did so, there came on me that mysterious and elusive feeling of which Wordsworth wrote, and which many psychologists have noted as a mystery of the mind. It seemed, somehow, as if it had all happened before, possibly in some previous existence.”16 As reported in The Spectator (30 June 1923, p. 3), Shaw considered the robot in several ways. First, a robot does not have independent opinions. Shaw told the audience: “After all … you are all Robots, because you have all had your opinions—if not your happiness—imposed upon you.” Unlike Chesterton interpreting R.U.R. in terms of capitalism, Shaw called their audience “robots because they read party press and its opinions are enforced on them. Man cannot be completely free, because he is the slave of nature. If it has to be, I would like to be Robot for two hours a day in order to be Bernard Shaw the rest of the day.”17 Shaw was using the word “robot” from R.U.R., a neologism, in its original meaning in Czech, robota, meaning “servitude and forced labour.” The

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audience, he said, were like robots, which were more like the automata in Back to Methuselah: they did not have their own opinions but merely absorbed what the party press imposed on them. Second, Shaw as a playwright was aware of the stock response to R.U.R., which had sparked an extensive debate in the British press since opening on 24 April 1923 at St. Martin’s Theatre, London, directed by Basil Dean; it would run for 127 performances, closing on 11 August 1923. On 5 May 1923, The Spectator published a lengthy review in which it found R.U.R. disappointing (the plot and characterization were thin, the characters were types, and the play somewhat hazily conceived). Although exciting, thrilling and enjoyable, R.U.R. was deemed a conventional melodrama, not a play of ideas: Rossum’s formula “is ludicrously like that of the ‘marriage lines’ in the old-fashioned Lyceum melodrama.” Along with an impulsive sentimental young wife, the play hinged on the loss of the only copy of the formula to produce the robots. The reviewer found this unconvincing and the characterization of Helena Glory extremely tiresome.18 The programme book of the 1923 performance of R.U.R. at St. Martin’s documents the play’s reception: “R.U.R. has pleased both the critics and the public, and the word Robot has passed into the English language—indeed, there has been some talk of making it actionable. Even those few critics who have decided that the play does not mean anything, admit that it thrills. But most have found it spiritually stimulating, and many have found it a marvelous allegory of the life of our times.” Third, Shaw was thinking about the robot along the lines of this advocacy of the Life Force and Creative Evolution. One must recall that Back to Methuselah had been written in June 1923. Shaw said that “After all, you are all Robots, because you have all had your opinions—if not your happiness—imposed upon you… Man cannot be completely free, because he is the slave of nature” which makes them robots. Robots, to Shaw, are controlled and lack independent thinking, just as human beings are controlled by nature. ˇ Capek responded to Shaw and Chesterton in The Saturday Review on 23 July 1923: “For myself, I confess that as the author I was much more interested in men than in Robots.” His play was a comment on the impact on humanity of mass production and industrialism, which had developed rapidly after World War I. Much new machinery invented during the war ˇ had passed into civilian use. Capek writes:

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To create a Homunculus is a medieval idea; to bring it in line with the present century this creation must be undertaken on the principle of massproduction. Immediately we are in the grip of industrialism; this terrible machinery must not stop, for if it does it will destroy the lives of thousands. It must, on the contrary, go on faster and faster, although it destroys in the process thousands and thousands of other existences.

ˇ Capek thought that those who think to master the industry are themselves mastered by it. He held that robots must be produced although they are, or rather because they are, a war industry: “The conception of the human brain had at last escaped from the control of the human hands.”19 On 21 May 1927, an article by Alfred North Whitehead in The Specˇ tator sought to interpret the message behind R.U.R.: “In Karel Capek’s play, R.U.R., the machines which men have made rise in revolt and dispossess their masters. The machines are, it seems, the next level to be reached by evolutionary-development. The animals evolved man, and he superseded them; man has evolved the machines, which will supersede him in his turn.”20 This seems to align with our current debate around AI. In May 2023, Geoffrey Hinton, regarded as the so-called Godfather of AI, left Google and spoke about the dangers of AI: “Maybe when they become smarter than us, we’ll be able to keep them benevolent and we will be able to keep them caring much more about people than they care about themselves—unlike people. But maybe not.”21 ˇ In short, Shaw had a high regard for Capek. When learning about the latter’s sudden death in 1938 at age 48, he wrote: “It is absurd. It should have been my turn this time. Karel was far too young to go like that. He had at least another forty years to give so much to the world. His plays proved him to be a prolific and terrific playwright.”22

Back to Methuselah and R.U.R. The debate around robots adds a new level to Shaw’s formulation of his theory of the Life Force and Creative Evolution. In the Don Juan in Hell interlude in Man and Superman, Don Juan says, “Are we agreed that Life is a force which has made innumerable experiments in organizing itself; that the mammoth and the man, the mouse and the megatherium, the flies and the fleas and the Fathers of the Church, are all more or less successful attempts to build up that raw force into higher and higher individuals, the ideal individual being omnipotent, omniscient, infallible,

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and withal completely, unilludedly self-conscious: in short, a god?” Could robots also be one of these experiments? Robots may be destructive, but they may also be an interim stage towards an upward thrust. Shaw’s automata in Back to Methuselah differ from many earlier automata. While there were plenty of automata on stage before those in Back to Methuselah, which were supposed to be life-size dancing dolls played by real human actors, they were built to deceive by faking as human, earning the love of the protagonist like the original Galatea. Shaw’s automata are identified as automata before they even appear on stage and are presented as experiments made by Pygmalion. They are never intended to be real human beings, but are integrated into the overall evolutionary process depicted in Back to Methuselah. In Part IV of Back to Methuselah, the short-lived humans are automata, for all intents and purposes. What Shaw seems to be proposing is a biological theory analogous to Einstein’s theory of relativity. Just as Newton’s physics applies to practically all of nature, Einstein (whom Shaw also met) had shown it didn’t apply in all cases. The difference between the automaton and the human is that in a few special cases the human is not absolutely bound by the laws of mechanics, as suggested by the difference between the Short-livers and Long-livers in Part IV and between the Children and the Ancients in Part V. This can be seen by examining ˇ how Shaw’s automata and Capek’s robots go through similar situations but respond differently. There are many parallels between Back to Methuselah and R.U.R. in terms of timeline (Table 3.1). R.U.R. was published in November 1920 and first performed in Prague at Hradec Králové on 2 January 1921. This timeline intersects with that of Back to Methuselah, written between 1918 and 1920 and published simultaneously by Constable (London) and Brentano’s (New York) in 1921. Back to Methuselah premiered at the Garrick Theatre in New York: Part 1 opened on 27 February 1922, Part 2 on 6 March 1922 and Part 3 on 13 March 1922.23 Later that year at the same venue, R.U.R. premiered in New York in 1922, running for 184 performances from 9 October 1922 to February 1923. In England, Back to Methuselah was first produced on 9 October 1923 by the Birmingham Repertory Theatre founded by Barry Jackson (1879–1961). Thus, the first British production of Back to Methuselah came after that of R.U.R. on 24 April 1923, with the Shaw/Chesterton debate taking place on 21 June 1923.

Written

Written

Back to Methuselah

1920

(Nov 1920) Published in Czech

Published Constable (London) and Bretano’s (New York) in 1921

(Jan 1921) World Premiere Hradec Králové

1921

(Feb 1922) World Premiere Garrick Theatre, New York

1922 (Oct 1922) World Premiere Garrick Theatre, New York

(April 1923) St. Martin’s Theatre Performance

1923 (June 1923) Shaw Chesterton Discussion on R.U.R. at St. Martin’s Theatre

Timeline showing the parallel publication of R.U.R. and Back to Methuselah

R.U.R

Table 3.1

(Oct 1923) Birmingham Repertory Theatre

Shaw meets ˇ Capek

ˇ Capek meets Shaw

1924

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Although there is no evidence of any communication between Shaw ˇ and Capek when they were writing their respective plays, how the two plays crossed paths illustrates that Back to Methuselah inevitably acquired new layers of meaning at a time when the robot was a hot topic. R.U.R. opened at St. Martin’s Theatre, London, on 27 April 1923 and ran for 127 performances, until 11 August 1923. The play was first published in Czech in November 1920 before its Czech premiere on 25 January ˇ 1921, and Capek revised the play during the run, which is reflected in Claudia Novack-Jones’s 1989 translation. Since its world premiere on 2 January 1921 in Hradec Králové, R.U.R. has been translated into thirty languages, with successful performances in Europe and North America. The English translation performed at St. Martin’s was Paul Selver’s, who translated R.U.R. from either the original 1920 edition or a manuscript close to that version. Nigel Playfair adapted Selver’s translation for the stage, making several changes: the prologue became Act One, the final act was heavily abridged and became the Epilogue, Alquist’s final speech had around sixty lines cut and several lines added, and the robot Damon’s lines were given to another robot, Radius. Selver’s translation also combined two robot characters into one, toned down the ending, and “Hallemeier” and “Busman” were renamed “Helman” and “Jacob Berman.” Helena was also made the daughter of “Professor” Glory rather than “President.”24 Selver’s text also omits R.U.R’s “blasphemies.” Robert Philmus believes that Selver may have worked from an even earlier manuscript or the playscript for the Czech stage production. There are in fact two versions of Selver’s translation: an English one published in 1923 by Oxford University Press, which was an edition of Playfair’s adaptation, and an American edition published by Doubleday. Philmus (2001) notes the substantial difference between the translations of R.U.R. published in the UK and the US. The typescript of Selver’s translation submitted to the Lord Chamberlain’s Office to obtain a license for the stage production elicited a response to R.U.R.’s “blasphemies”, thus showing that the Office objected to Alquist’s quoting the Bible at the end of a fantasy-drama. The translation used in the American production by the Theatre Guild at the Garrick Theatre in New York in October 1922 was closer to the Czech original. The changes in the English production are reflected in the programme of the 1923 St. Martin’s production.25 (The star of the show was Basil Rathbone, who would go on to achieve stardom in a dozen Sherlock Holmes movies.)

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Nigel Playfair, who adapted Selver’s translation, had worked with Shaw many times. Shaw had noted his performance as Comus in the Mermaid Society production of Milton’s Comus in the Botanic Gardens in July 1903. Playfair had also played Cutler Walpole in The Doctor’s Dilemma in its first West End production at St. James’s Theatre on 6 December 1913. He and Arnold Bennett were managerial partners at the Lyric Theatre and had declined Shaw’s Heartbreak House because the latter had insisted Ellen O’Malley play Ellie Dunn. In the St. Martin’s Theatre production, Alquist was played by Brember Wills, who had recently played Shotover in the first performance of Heartbreak House in England on 18 October 1921 at the Royal Court. Indeed, the review of R.U.R. in The Spectator (5 May 1923) noted that “Mr. Brember Wills’s acting as Alquist, in the last act, was too much reminiscent of his performance in Heartbreak House.”26 R.U.R. was produced by Basil Dean, who had also directed some of Shaw’s plays. On 28 May 1930, the New York Times ran an article titled “SHAW SELLS RIGHTS TO FILM HIS PLAYS; Contract to English Radio Pictures Covers All Dramatic Works for Next 10 Years. BASIL DEAN TO DIRECT THEM. British Players Likely to Be Used Exclusively, Though Technical Staff Is American.”27 ˇ Shaw owned two of Capek’s works: W.U.R. (Werstands universal robots): utopistisches Kollektivdrama in drei Aufzügen and Anglické listy: pro vˇetší názornost provázené obrázky autorovými.28 The first is the German translation of R.U.R. by Otto Pick, published in 1922 prior to ˇ the English translation, and the second, in the original Czech, is Capek’s Letters from England. (Both books are at Shaw’s Corner.) The National Trust describes the German translation of R.U.R. as follows: “Incomplete text (pp 49 to 136) of play in German, in grey paper cover (damaged). Front cover bears design in black of tall building and title “KAREL CAPEK/WUR/WERSTANDS UNIVERSAL ROBOTS.” Also postal wrapper for it, sent from Prague, addressed to ‘Mr. Bernhard Shaw, Ayot via London’ with message from sender re incomplete address, Adelphi address in blue crayon (added by GPO?) and sender’s name on back.” Although Shaw’s German was limited, he managed to correct Siegfried Trebitsch’s translations of his plays using a Muret-Sanders dictionary29 (Fig. 3.2). Thus, the English productions and publications of R.U.R. and Back to Methuselah are deeply intertwined. Shaw knew R.U.R. before Back to Methuselah was staged in the UK. He spoke further about robots in an

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Fig. 3.2 Incomplete text (pp. 49 to 136) of Capek’s W.U.R. in German at Shaw’s Corner, Hertfordshire (© National Trust/George Berry, Mike Burgess and James Steadman)

article published in the Oxnard Daily Courier (Oxnard, California) on 7 August 1923 following the St. Martin’s debate in June. In “Shaw Wants To Be Robot, Part Time,” he is quoted as follows: I want to find my own happiness. What we should all be aiming at is a distribution of the slavery of nature. Let me be a “Robot” for two hours a day, but for the rest of the day let me be Bernard Shaw. For those two hours of … ‘Robotism’ give me a mechanical job so that while I am turning the wheel I can think about the next play I am going to write. People who have nothing more to do than to think about their own happiness are completely miserable.30

This paraphrases what he had said at the St. Martin’s debate, when he thought the audience were like robots because they read party press and its opinions were enforced on them: “Man cannot be completely free,

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because he is the slave of nature. If it has to be, I would like to be Robot for two hours a day in order to be Bernard Shaw the rest of the day.”31 For Shaw, robots were mechanical, programmed and lacked the ability to think independently. Although Back to Methuselah was written in the age of automata, its staging took place in the age of robots. This transition from automaton to robot can be seen in Back to Methuselah. First are the automata. In Back to Methuselah, Shaw’s automata have no independent thought and can only carry out a limited number of predetermined functions. A robot, on the other hand, is programmable and can work automatically. An example of an automaton is the Clockwork Prayer automaton possibly made by Juanelo Turriano at the court of Charles V in the likeness of the Spanish Saint Diego d’Alcala. The automaton, made around 1560 and now housed in the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, is a wood and iron figure of a friar. As a key-wound iron clockwork encased in an unpainted wooden body, it can only carry out a finite number of functions with the mechanical motion generated by the clockwork by a spring in the drum and fused with cord.32 Likewise, Shaw’s automata are predestined and incapable of individual thought. In Back to Methuselah, Ozymandias is a good example: ACIS [to the Male Figure] What do you think of what you see around you? Of us, for instance, and our ways and doings? THE MALE FIGURE. I have not seen the newspaper today. THE FEMALE FIGURE. How can you expect my husband to know what to think of you if you give him his breakfast without his paper? MARTELLUS. You see. He is a mere automaton.

Such an automaton differs from robots. A robot, unlike an automaton, is a programmable machine that can carry out functions automatically depending on its programming. The robots in R.U.R. are human actors, while real robots were built later in the century. Joseph Engleberger, an American physicist and engineer, is often referred to as “the Father of Robotics.” The first industrial robot, Unimate, was invented by George Devol, who worked on a General Motors assembly line at the Inland Fisher Guide Plant in New Jersey; he filed a patent in 1954 and it was granted in 1961. The first robotic arm lifted and stacked hot metal parts, transporting die castings from an assembly line and welding these parts on auto bodies, a task too dangerous for human workers. The arm weighed

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4,000 pounds and cost $25,000 (a fortune at the time). The patent begins: “The present invention relates to the automatic operation of machinery, particularly the handling apparatus, and to automatic control apparatus suited for such machinery.”33 The robot is “automatic,” and once programmed can work on its own. Second are Shaw’s automata as robots. While real-life automata are mechanical, Shaw’s automata are “programmed” by an ameliorative Creative Evolution. The automata are created by Pygmalion, “the man of science” who tries to blur the line between automaton and living organism. Pygmalion is deemed a “soulless creature, a scientist, a laboratory person” by the art lover Ecrasia. The two automata are his attempts to “make artificial human beings, real live ones.” Pygmalion tried to infuse the Life Force into the automata and make them store an electric current, like batteries: “The Life Force is not so simple as you think. A highpotential current of it will turn a bit of dead tissue into a philosopher’s brain. … There was the Life Force raging all round me: there was I, trying to make organs that would capture it as a battery captures electricity, and tissues that would conduct it and operate it.” Pygmalion tried to capture the Life Force in his experiments with automata: PYGMALION. When I undertook the task of making synthetic men, I did not waste my time on protoplasm. It was evident to me that if it were possible to make protoplasm in the laboratory, it must be equally possible to begin higher up and make fully evolved muscular and nervous tissues, bone, and so forth. … I tried thousands of combinations before I succeeded in producing anything that would fix high-potential Life Force. … A high-potential current of it will turn a bit of dead tissue into a philosopher’s brain. A low-potential current will reduce the same bit of tissue to a mass of corruption. Will you believe me when I tell you that, even in man himself, the Life Force used to slip suddenly down from its human level to that of a fungus, so that men found their flesh no longer growing as flesh, but proliferating horribly in a lower form which was called cancer, until the lower form of life killed the higher, and both perished together miserably?

The automata are the lower form. So while the earlier automata are inorganic machines, Shaw’s automata are organic, infused with varying degrees of the Life Force and which may degenerate into the sub-human:

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PYGMALION. I am only trying to make you understand. There was the Life Force raging all round me: there was I, trying to make organs that would capture it as a battery captures electricity, and tissues that would conduct it and operate it. It was easy enough to make eyes more perfect than our own, and ears with a larger range of sound; but they could neither see nor hear, because they were not susceptible to the Life Force. But it was far worse when I discovered how to make them susceptible; for the first thing that happened was that they ceased to be eyes and ears and turned into heaps of maggots. … The lower potentials of the Life Force could make maggots, but not human eyes or ears. I improved the tissue until it was susceptible to a higher potential. … That was a great advance. It encouraged me so much that I put aside the eyes and ears, and made a brain. It wouldn’t take the Life Force at all until I had altered its constitution a dozen times; but when it did, it took a much higher potential, and did not dissolve; and neither did the eyes and ears when I connected them up with the brain. I was able to make a sort of monster: a thing without arms or legs; and it really and truly lived for half-an-hour.

In effect, with the back-to-back first English productions of R.U.R. ˇ and Back to Methuselah, Shaw’s automata and Capek’s robots form a ˇ closed loop. Capek’s play shows how humankind will be destroyed by its own technological innovations.34 In R.U.R.,35 the mass-produced robots are not capable of thinking anything new. In fact, they are a threat to humanity: “Robots of the world, you are ordered to exterminate the human race.” In Act 3, the robots storm the factory and kill all human beings except Chief Engineer Alquist because, like a robot, he works with his hands. Act 4 begins with Alquist lamenting, “No people, just Robots. … Stop the machines, Robots! You think you’ll force life out of them? … Not a single human left. Just their Robot shadows, their creation, their image.” The robot Radius voices the common fear of AI taking over human beings: “We wanted to live. We are more intelligent than you are. We’ve learnt everything, we can do anything. You gave us weapons. We had to become masters.” In Back to Methuselah, there is also a killing of the creator by the automaton, with Pygmalion killed by the female automaton. But Shaw’s automata have two creators: the scientist Pygmalion and the sculptor Martellus.

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MARTELLUS [contemplating the Figures] Just look at these two devils. I modelled them out of the stuff Pygmalion made for them. They are masterpieces of art. And see what they have done! Does that convince you of the value of art! … ACIS. What are you going to do with them, Martellus? You are responsible for them, now that Pygmalion has gone. MARTELLUS. If they were marble it would be simple enough: I could smash them. As it is, how am I to kill them without making a horrible mess?

Thus, Shaw’s automata are not merely conventional automata, which are ˇ only mechanical dolls, but are partly organic, like Capek’s robots. In fact, Shaw’s automata are a combination of science and art, and have some lifelike matter in them that “programmed” them to operate, albeit in limited fashion, on their own: MARTELLUS. It may not be nonsense. I daresay if you cut off her leg she would grow another, like the lobsters and the little lizards.

These automata materialize the worst fears of Geoffrey Hinton: they get out of control, rebel against their creator and become destructive: MARTELLUS. He made them in his laboratory. I moulded their limbs. I am sorry. I was thoughtless: I did not foresee that they would kill and pretend to be persons they were not, and declare things that were false, and wish evil. I thought they would be merely mechanical fools.

ˇ Shaw’s automata and Capek’s robots combined form a sort of looped ˇ autonomous discovery: Shaw’s play begins where Capek’s ends, and ˇ ˇ Capek’s play begins where Shaw’s ends. Shaw and Capek wrote their plays ˇ independent of each other, but Shaw’s automata and Capek’s robots are put to a similar ultimate trial: the automata and the robots are both given a chance to live a life of their own. While Shaw’s automata are not ready ˇ to take up the burden of life, Capek’s robots do take up the challenge. In R.U.R., Helena burns the formula necessary to make new robots. At the end of the play, the construction engineer Alquist tries to recreate robots by dissecting a robot to find out how robots are made. He chose the robot Helena, crafted after the human character Helena. But the more advanced robots Primus and the robot Helena fall in love, and Primus

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asks Alquist to dissect him and spare Helena. Primus and Helena have become humanlike and are going to be the new Adam and Eve: Construction Engineer Alquist. (whispers) Wherever you want. Take him by the hand, Helen. (Pushes her outside.). Go forth, Adam. Go forth, Eve. You shall be his woman. You shall be her man. (Closes the door behind them. Alone.) Blessed day! (Tiptoes to the table and tips the contents of the test-tubes on the floor, then sits at the desk and sweeps onto the floor all the books but the Bible. Opening it, he leafs through it and reads.) ‘And God created Man in His own image …’

In Back to Methuselah, Shaw’s automata are also asked to choose among themselves: THE FEMALE FIGURE. Oh, don’t be so cruel. I’m not fit to die. I will never bite anyone again. I will tell the truth. I will do good. Is it my fault if I was not made properly? Kill him; but spare me. THE MALE FIGURE. No! I have done no harm: she has. Kill her if you like: you have no right to kill me. THE NEWLY BORN. Do you hear that? They want to have one another killed.

In R.U.R., once the robots develop feelings for one another, they become the new Adam and Eve and bring hope. However, in Shaw’s play, when the automata develop a passion for each another, life becomes too heavy a burden for them and they perish: THE HE-ANCIENT. Silence. These things are mere automata: they cannot help shrinking from death at any cost. You see that they have no self-control, and are merely shuddering through a series of reflexes. Let us see whether we cannot put a little more life into them. [He takes the Male Figure by the hand, and places his disengaged hand on its head]. Now listen. One of you two is to be destroyed. Which of you shall it be? THE MALE FIGURE [after a slight convulsion during which his eyes are fixed on the He-Ancient ] Spare her; and kill me. …. THE SHE-ANCIENT [handling the Female Automaton in the same manner] Which of you shall we kill? THE FEMALE FIGURE. Kill us both. How could either of us live without the other?

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The Ancients release the Automata. THE MALE FIGURE [sinking to the ground] I am discouraged. Life is too heavy a burden. THE FEMALE FIGURE [collapsing ] I am dying. I am glad. I am afraid to live.

While Shaw’s mechanical automata died, life keeps evolving in Back to Methuselah: they are merely a failed experiment of Creative Evolution. ˇ At the end of R.U.R., Capek’s robots embrace life and become the new Adam and Eve. Shaw’s play, which premiered in England after R.U.R., begins with Adam and Eve. The automata allow Shaw to explain his theory of the Life Force and Creative Evolution: they are failed experiments in Creative Evolution. However, Creative Evolution goes on after ˇ the automata have died. Similarly, Capek’s robots can lead to new life. R.U.R. ends where Back to Methuselah begins, with Adam and Eve about to start human history. Considering the performance history of the two plays, with Back to Methuselah following R.U.R., it is as if the two plays had worked in a closed-loop self-driving program, with the robots testing out and trying to optimize Creative Evolution.

To Be Continued ˇ Shaw and Capek did not always agree. In Back to Methuselah, the Brothers Barnabas conclude that the term of human life should be extended to three hundred years to solve the political and social problems raised by ˇ their civilization. Capek tested this out in his play Vˇec Makropulos (The Makropulos Affair). The famous singer Emilia Marty is the long-liver Elina Makropulos who has lived for over three hundred years. The play ends with the burning of the Vˇec Makropulos, the formula to longevity, as none of the characters can decide if they want longevity. Whether Shaw’s theory of the Life Force and Creative Evolution would find any real-world application would be tested by AI.

Notes 1. Hiroshi Ishiguro and Shuichi Nishio, “Building artificial humans to understand humans,” Journal of Artificial Organs (February 2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10047-007-0381-4. Accessed on 1 September 2023.

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2. “Mechanical Turk.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_ Turk. Accessed on 1 September 2023. 3. Christian Balkenius and Birger Johansson, Frontiers in Human Dynamics 4 (22 February 2022). https://doi.org/10.3389/ fhumd.2022.703879. Accessed on 1 September 2023. 4. “Karel Capek and the Robot (Complete History).” https://his tory-computer.com/karel-capek-and-the-robot-complete-history. Accessed on 1 September 2023. ˇ 5. Voyen Koreis, “Karel Capek—A Short Biography.” http:// www.capekbrothers.vkoreis.com/biography.htm. Accessed on 1 September 2023. 6. M. C. Bradbrook, “Otakar Voˇcadlo (1895–1974),” The Slavonic and East European Review 53.133 (1975), pp. 579–81. http:// www.jstor.org/stable/4207158. Accessed on 1 September 2023. ˇ 7. B. R. Bradbrook and Karel Capek, “Letters to England from ˇ Karel Capek,” The Slavonic and East European Review 39.92 (Dec. 1960), pp. 61–72. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4205218. Accessed on 1 September 2023. 8. Ibid., p. 64. 9. Ivona Misterova, “Letters from England: Views on London and Londoners by Karel Capek, the Czech ‘Gentleman Stroller of London Streets’.” http://literarylondon.org/the-literary-londonjournal/archive-of-the-literary-london-journal/issue-8-2/lettersfrom-england-views-on-london-and-londoners-by-karel-capek-theczech-gentleman-stroller-of-london-streets-1/. Accessed on 1 September 2023. 10. Roger Kimball, “At home abroad: A review of ‘Letters from England’ by Karel Capek,” The New Criterion 41.10 (June https://newcriterion.com/issues/2002/1/at-home2023). abroad. Accessed on 1 September 2023. 11. Voyen Koreis. http://www.capekbrothers.vkoreis.com/biography. htm. Accessed on 1 September 2023. 12. Roger Kimball, “At home abroad: A review of Letters from England by Karel Capek,” The New Criterion 41.10 (June https://newcriterion.com/issues/2002/1/at-home2023). abroad. Accessed on 1 September 2023. 13. “St. Martin’s Theatre Program.” http://www.basilrathbone.net/ theater/rur/rur40.jpg. Accessed on 1 September 2023.

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14. “At the St. Martin’s Theatre on the afternoon of Thursday,” ˇ The Spectator (30 June 1923). O. Pilný, “The Brothers Capek at the Gate: R.U.R. and The Insect Play,” in O Pilný, R. van den Beuken, and I. R. Walsh, eds., Cultural Convergence (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3030-57562-5_6. Accessed on 1 September 2023. 15. Kara Reilly, Automata and Mimesis on the Stage of Theatre History (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 174. 16. ILN (14 July 1923) CW33:134. http://americanchesterton society.blogspot.com/2007/01/where-robots-come-from.html. Accessed on 1 September 2023. 17. The Spectator (30 June 1923), p. 107. Victoria and Albert Museum Theatre Collections, R.U.R. file. 18. Tarn, “R.U.R. at St. Martin’s,” The Spectator (5 May 1923), p. 15. http://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/5th-may-1923/15/ the-theatre. Accessed on 1 September 2023. ˇ 19. Karel Capek, “The Meaning of R.U.R,” Saturday Review 136 (23 July 1923), p. 79. 20. Professor Whitehead, “Our Gods of Steel,” The Spectator (21 May 1927), p. 8. http://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/21stmay-1927/8/our-gods-of-steel. Accessed on 1 September 2023. 21. “Why Geoffrey Hinton Is Worried About the Future of AI.” https://srinstitute.utoronto.ca/news/why-geoffrey-hintonis-worried-about-the-future-of-ai. Accessed on 1 September 2023. ˇ 22. B. R. Bradbrook and Karel Capek, “Letters to England from Karel ˇ Capek,” The Slavonic and East European Review 39.92 (Dec. 1960), pp. 61–72, p. 64. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4205218. Accessed on 1 September 2023. 23. Playbill, Back to Methuselah. https://playbill.com/production/ back-to-methuselah-garrick-theatre-vault-0000012046. Accessed on 1 September 2023. ˇ 24. Robert M. Philmus, “Matters of Translation: Karel Capek and Paul Selver,” Science Fiction Studies 28.1 (March 2001), pp. 7–32. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4240948. Accessed on 1 September 2023. 25. “Rossum’s Universal Robots, St. Martin’s Theater Program Book, London (1923).” https://archive.org/details/rossums-univer sal-robots-the-ambassadors-theater-program-book-london-1921/ page/n5/mode/2up. Accessed on 1 September 2023.

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26. Tarn, “R.U.R. at St. Martin’s,” The Spectator (5 May 1923), p. 15. http://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/5th-may-1923/15/ the-theatre. Accessed on 1 September 2023. 27. “Shaw sells rights to film his plays,” New York Times (28 May 1930). https://www.nytimes.com/1930/05/28/archives/ shaw-sells-rights-to-film-his-plays-contract-to-english-radio.html. Accessed on 1 September 2023. 28. “Text.” https://www.nationaltrustcollections.org.uk/object/127 5264. Accessed on 1 September 2023. 29. Samuel A. Weiss, ed., “Bernard Shaw’s Further Letters to Siegfried Trebitsch,” SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies 20 (2000), pp. 221–45. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/31283. Accessed on 1 September 2023. 30. “Part-time Robot,” https://paleo-future.blogspot.com/2007/ 06/part-time-robot-1923.html#google_vignette. Accessed on 1 September 2023. 31. The Spectator (30 June 1923), p. 107. Victoria and Albert Museum Theatre Collections, R.U.R. file. 32. “Automaton of a Friar.” https://americanhistory.si.edu/collec tions/search/object/nmah_855351. Accessed on 1 September. 33. Rebecca J. Rosen, “Unimate: The Story of George Devol and the First Robotic Arm.” https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/ archive/2011/08/unimate-the-story-of-george-devol-and-thefirst-robotic-arm/243716/. Accessed on 1 September 2023. 34. Kara Reilly, Automata and Mimesis on the Stage of Theatre History (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001). ˇ 35. Karel Capek, Capek Four Plays: R. U. R.; The Insect Play; The Makropulos Case; The White Plague, translated by Cathy Porter and Peter Majer. (London: Bloomsbury, 1999).

CHAPTER 4

Shaw and Artificial Intelligence

Abstract Shaw, always ahead of his time, had an impact on the development of AI, especially because of his connection to Alan Turing. Shaw’s life ran parallel to the development of computing machines. Shaw died in 1950, and only six years later, in 1956 the expression “artificial intelligence” was coined by John McCarthy, Mathematics professor at Dartmouth College, at the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence (DSRPAI) hosted by him and Marvin L. Minsky of Harvard University (James Moore. “The Dartmouth College Artificial Intelligence Conference: The Next Fifty Years,” AI Magazine, 27.4 (2006) [© AAAI].). In “A Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence,” written by McCarthy and Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester (I.B.M. Corporation), and Claude S Shannon (Bell Telephone Laboratories), AI is described as follows: “every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it.” They wanted to find out how to “make machines use language, form abstractions and concepts, solve kinds of problems now reserved for humans, and improve themselves” (J. McCarthy, M. L. Minsky, N. Rochester, C. E. Shannon. “A Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence,” 31 August 1955. https://ojs.aaai.org/aimagazine/index. php/aimagazine/article/view/1904). This chapter focuses on Shaw and Alan Turing, in particular on Turing’s Oracle machine. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 K. Li, Bernard Shaw, Automata, Robots, and Artificial Intelligence, Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-49226-6_4

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Keywords Bernard Shaw · Artificial intelligence · Alan Turing · John McCarthy · Machines

As Professor Leonard Conolly writes in the foreword to this book, Shaw adored technology and was always ahead of his time. No doubt he also attracted the attention of key AI figures and had an impact on the development of AI, especially in light of his connection with Alan Turing. Shaw’s long life ran parallel to the development of computing machines. The term “artificial intelligence” was coined during summer of 1956 by John McCarthy, Mathematics professor at Dartmouth College, at the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence (DSRPAI) hosted by McCarthy and Marvin Minsky of Harvard.1 In “A Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence,” written by McCarthy and Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester (I.B.M. Corporation) and Claude E. Shannon (Bell Telephone Laboratories), AI means that “every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it.” They wished to discover how to “make machines use language, form abstractions and concepts, solve [the] kinds of problems now reserved for humans, and improve themselves.”2 However, AI was not born with a bang at the 1956 Dartmouth Conference. Although coined in 1956, six years after Shaw’s death, the expression “artificial intelligence” was the culmination of a number of existing “thinking machines” developed in Shaw’s time. The first “computing machine” is probably the abacus, which had been used by ancient civilizations in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Persia, Greece, Rome, China, India, Japan, Korea, Native America and Russia in some form or another since 3000 BCE.

Pygmalion, Charles Babbage and AI AI differs from automata and robots. According to IBM, AI leverages computers and machines to mimic the problem-solving and decisionmaking capabilities of the human mind.3 Automata, no matter how sophisticated, were mechanical configurations, such as the intricate clockworks, incapable of independent thought and without the power of human speech. Shaw’s Pygmalion is about the acquisition of human

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speech by the doll. In Act II, when Eliza Doolittle appears at Higgins’s home to ask for language lessons, she sees a number of advanced machines that capture human speech: “a phonograph, a laryngoscope, a row of tiny organ pipes with a bellows, a set of lamp chimneys for singing flames with burners attached to a gas plug in the wall by an indiarubber tube, several tuning-forks of different sizes, a life-size image of half a human head, showing in section the vocal organs, and a box containing a supply of wax cylinders for the phonograph.” Their task is the acquisition of speech by the mechanical doll. Shaw wrote Pygmalion in early 1912 with Mrs. Patrick Campbell in mind as Eliza, the flower girl who transitions from automaton to AI. She becomes the mechanical doll at Mrs. Higgins’s at-home, repeating set phrases and manners. Shaw wrote to Mrs. Campbell on 27 November 1912: “Press the levers of Babbage’s Calculating Machine to your bosom, Stella” (Letters II , 120). Shaw was perhaps referring to Charles Babbage (1791–1871), the famous English mathematician who is regarded as the inventor of the first automatic digital computer, the Analytic Machine, which could make automatic mathematical calculations. However, as this invention was never built in Babbage’s lifetime, Shaw may be alluding to a machine built by Babbage’s son Henry Prevost Babbage: the analytic engine mill, constructed in 1910 in London, which remained incomplete, with various spare parts and patterns for casting. That machine is now on display at the London Science Museum4 (Fig. 4.1). Shaw’s mentioning Babbage’s Calculating Machine to Stella Campbell was more than a light-hearted joke: it highlights Eliza’s transformation from lifeless automaton to real human being. Babbage’s interest in developing thinking machines was prompted by automata. In 1770, in the Austrian court of Empress Maria Theresa, Wolfgang von Kempelen built a famous automaton, called the Turk, to challenge people at chess. It defeated notable individuals, including Benjamin Franklin and Frederick the Great, and Napoleon was caught cheating with it.5 However, the Turk was actually controlled by human intelligence, as there was a human chess master inside it who directed the Turk’s moves via an intricate system of levers and pulleys. The original Mechanical Turk Chess Player was destroyed in a fire at the Chinese Museum in Philadelphia in 1854. The reproduction of the Mechanical Turk Chess Player, built by Master of John Gaughan, took 35 years to construct.6 In Pygmalion, at the ambassador’s garden party, Eliza is a lifeless automaton, although Higgins’s former student Nepomuuck believes she

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Fig. 4.1 Babbage’s Analytical Engine. Science Museum/Science Museum Group

is Hungarian royalty. His name, in fact, is significant: von Kempelen died in 1804 and the Turk was purchased by the German university student and instrument builder Johann Nepomuk Maelzel, who continued the world tour. Nepomuk, Beethoven’s friend, invented the metronome. The link between Nepomuuck and automata is highlighted by Shaw making the Greek diplomat the son of a Clerkenwell watchmaker, as many automata were intricate clockworks in Shaw’s time. Shaw mentioned Babbage’s calculating machine in his letter to Ellen Terry, but this was not merely because Babbage had invented a number of calculating machines: in 1819, Babbage had been twice defeated by the Turk automaton. He suspected there must be some kind of human intervention enabling it to make such intelligent chess moves. And he was right: hidden inside the Turk was a real chess master calculating the required moves and, via an ingenious series of mechanics, controlling the Turk’s movements. When Babbage played against the Turk automaton, he had already helped found the Analytical Society in 1812, thus introducing European developments to English mathematics. In order to calculate mathematical tables, Babbage, in 1812–13, constructed a small calculator that could perform mathematical calculations up to eight decimals. His Difference

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Machine, designed in 1823 and which could work with ten decimals, was the precursor of the modern computer. It worked with punch cards and memory units which could hold a thousand 50-digit numbers. However, Babbage’s calculating machines went beyond mere calculations. They began acquiring human intelligence when they became programmable. Thus, Babbage began to design the Analytic Engine, and mathematician Ada Lovelace (1815–52), Lord Byron’s only legitimate daughter, did the first programming. To a transcription of Babbage’s lecture on his Analytical Engine given at the University of Turin in 1840, Ada Lovelace added annotations three times its length along with an algorithm for the Analytical Engine to compute Bernoulli numbers. In mathematics, the Bernoulli numbers Bn are a sequence of rational numbers. The Bernoulli numbers were the first algorithm intended to be calculated on a computer. Lovelace’s translation and notes were published in Scientific Memoirs Selected from the Transactions of Foreign Academies of Science and Learned Societies in 1843. Of special interest are the seven notes she added to the translation: the seventh note contains an algorithm to be carried out by a machine. This, in effect, was the very first computer program. Ada Lovelace saw how the machine could go beyond calculations to become a generalizable functionality, reaching “poetic science” with the machines programmed to compose even “elaborate and scientific pieces of music.”7 ˇ While Capek’s robots rely on a formula, AI can become creative and generate new works based on the programming. Eliza eventually becomes a real human being, as evidenced by her throwing Higgins’s slippers at him and asking him: LIZA [crushed by superior strength and weight] What’s to become of me? What’s to become of me?

The creature becomes independent: HIGGINS [wondering at her] By George, Eliza, I said I’d make a woman of you; and I have. I like you like this. LIZA. Yes: you turn round and make up to me now that I’m not afraid of you, and can do without you. HIGGINS. Of course I do, you little fool. Five minutes ago you were like a millstone round my neck. Now you’re a tower of strength: a consort battleship. You and I and Pickering will be three old bachelors together instead of only two men and a silly girl.

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Similarly, in the IEEE Spectrum special issue on artificial intelligence (2019), featuring the stories behind the history of AI, we read how AI is designed, trained and powered by human minds and bodies.8 AI developed rapidly during Shaw’s lifetime: there was the first printing calculator designed by Swedish inventor Per Georg Scheutz (1785–1873) and his son Edvard in 1853 and the punch card system designed by Herman Hollerith (1860–1929) in 1890 to help calculate the 1890 U.S. Census. This led to his establishing a company that would amalgamate with several other companies to form the Computing-TabulatingRecording Company, renamed International Business Machines (IBM) in 1924. The Differential Analyzer was invented and built at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) by Vannevar Bush in 1931, shortly before Alan Turing proposed the Turing machine in 1936. In 1939, Bill Hewlett and David Packard founded the Hewlett Packard Company, which was closely followed by Konrad Zuse’s Z3 machine, the world’s earliest digital computer. The Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC), a digital electronic computer that could store information on its main memory, came out in 1941, followed in 1945 by John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert’s Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator (ENIAC) and, in 1946, their UNIVAC processing business and government applications. In 1949, the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator (EDSAC) was developed at the University of Cambridge, while the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research Automatic Computer (CSIRAC), built in Australia, was the first digital computer in the world to play music.9 Another important device was the electromechanical calculator called Bombe constructed by Alan Turing and scientists at Bletchley Park, which deciphered the German Navy’s radio communications; historians believe that the Bombe may have shortened World War II by two years and saved fourteen to twenty million lives.10

Cybernetics, Heartbreak House, Shaw and Norbert Weiner One prominent stream of AI is cybernetics, a field of study established when American mathematician Norbert Weiner (1894–1964) proposed, in Cybernetics: or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948), that any “intelligent” machine can change its behaviour in response to feedback from the environment. In his preface, Weiner wrote about the “learning machine”: “All of these devices in which an

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apparatus assumes a specific structure or function on the basis of past experience lead to a very interesting new attitude both in engineering and in biology. In engineering, devices of similar character can be used not only to play games and perform other purpose acts but to do so with continual improvement of performance on the basis of past experience.”11 Weiner chose the word “cybernetics” from the Ancient Greek κῠβερνήτης (kubernetes), meaning “pilot” or “helmsman of ship.” And as κῠβερνήτης means captain, steersman, pilot and navigator, inherent in cybernetics is the art of steering. This conjures up the image of Captain Shotover in Heartbreak House, and indeed in his autobiography, Norbert Wiener: A Life in Cybernetics ,12 Weiner wrote that he learned how to present a good dialectic from F. C. Rattray, an Englishman who later became a Unitarian clergyman: “I could not help feeling that his devotion to Samuel Butler and his Life force, after the fashion of Bernard Shaw, was more a matter of personal emotion adroitly defended by a keen wit than something susceptible to rigorous argument. Rattray and I often used to join forces in the seminars in which we participated, and I am afraid that I became an apt pupil of his and a thorn in the flesh of my mentors” (131). Shaw was actually considered in Weiner’s formulation of cybernetics, which has a social aspect: in The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (1950), he defines cybernetics as the study of messages, especially of the effective messages of control. The term signifies the art of the pilot or steersman13 (8–9). Weiner was in fact involved in designing communication machines that could simulate human behaviour and even replace that behaviour when the human being was relatively slow or ineffective. He compared human behaviour to the figures in a music box and to an automaton. While older attempts to produce automata were based on a closed clockwork, Weiner’s machines possess sense organs with receptors for messages coming from the outside. These receptors may be photo-electric cells that measure variations in conductivity or temperatures. A major difference between automata and AI is the latter’s ability to progress (by learning). Weiner explains how to consider progress and entropy, even taking into consideration Shaw’s advocacy of vitalism and the Life Force, if only to dismiss it. Progress is an assessment of the direction of change in the world according to certain values, entropy represents the amount of disorder in a class of patterns, and order is lack of randomness. One can consider the patterns in a time series, which is a data set tracking a sample over time, to reveal what factors influence the variables.

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Different schools of thought have different notions of progress. Weiner refers to Shaw when explaining how progress and entropy are factored into cybernetics: “These were vitalistic theories, presupposing the existence of the life forces of which Samuel Butler and Bernard Shaw talk so much, and they have become the favored creed of the element now in power in Soviet Russia” (49). Weiner understands these as follows: “The first, and more defensible, is that the heredity of a species does not directly produce the forms of the descendants, but does so in a manner which also involves the environment. The second, which may be considered to be supported by no adequate evidence, is that the environment will directly summon these variations which make for survival under it” (49). After going through the major theories regarding progress and evolution, Darwinism, the Malthusian struggle for good, Lamarckianism and so on, Weiner concludes that time has changed and indeed progressed since the Industrial Revolution. He believes there will be a system with variability and adaptability, where there will be invention: We must not be serfs, written down as property in the books of our entrepreneurs. We need a system in which variability and adaptability are at a premium and not at a discount. We need an organization which is awake to the facts of invention, and of our ever greater dependence on more invention. (58)

While the automaton driven by clockwork is linear, Weiner’s vision of the future is a complex network that is forever in progress. While he is sceptical of the Life Force, Weiner, like Shaw, visualizes the world as being continually in progress.

Shaw, Alan Turing, Back to Methuselah and the Oracle Another significant pioneer in AI influenced to some extent by Shaw is Alan Turing, who attended a performance of Back to Methuselah in 1933,14 writing to his mother on 26 May 1933, from King’s College, Cambridge: “There has been a very good play on here by Bernard Shaw called ’Back to Methuselah’”15 (Figs. 4.2, 4.3, and 4.4).

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Fig. 4.2 Page 1 of letter. Unpublished writings of Alan Turing copyright The Provost and Scholars of King’s College Cambridge 2023. Archives Centre, King’s College, Cambridge

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Fig. 4.3 Page 2 of letter. Unpublished writings of Alan Turing copyright The Provost and Scholars of King’s College Cambridge 2023. Archives Centre, King’s College, Cambridge

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Fig. 4.4 Page 3 of letter. Unpublished writings of Alan Turing copyright The Provost and Scholars of King’s College Cambridge 2023. Archives Centre, King’s College, Cambridge

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This play carried a special meaning for Turing. According to Turing’s biographers, Turing much admired Shaw, especially the latter’s advocacy of “the revolution of the Spirit.” There is the revolt against conventional morality, advocating for the individuals who lived by inner conviction instead of “customary morals” and lobbying for the kind of society that “could contain such true individuals”; hence, Back to Methuselah suited Turing’s idealist frame of mind.16 I. J. Good believes that when Turing “attacked a problem he started from first principles, and he was hardly influenced by received opinion. This attitude gave depth and originality to his thinking, and also helped him to choose important problems.”17 This Shavian “revolution of the Spirit” can be seen in two of Turing’s interests. First, in autumn 1933, he attended lectures on the Methodology of Science given by the famous astrophysicist Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington. While Eddington noted that experimental measurements tended to be subjected to errors of observation and often showed an approximately normal or Gaussian distribution, Turing mathematically proved there was, in today’s term, a central limit theorem for independent random variables.18 (A Gaussian distribution is a bell curve, showing a symmetric probability distribution with data near the mean occurring more frequently than data far from the mean.) Second, in Spring 1935, Turing attended lectures given by the topologist M. H. A. Newman on the Foundations of Mathematics. Newman pointed out that David Hilbert’s question on the Entscheidungsproblem was still unsolved. The Entscheidungsproblem, or the “decision problem,” asks whether mathematics is decidable: “does there exist an algorithm for deciding whether or not a specific mathematical assertion does or does not have a proof?”19 Turing showed, using his Turing machines, that there does not. Part IV of Back to Methuselah may also have had a direct influence on Turing’s formulation of the so-called oracle machine. Zoo, the primary long-liver, tells the Elderly Gentleman that it is not helpful to consult the Oracle. The Oracle is merely a long-liver, one hundred and seventy years old and with a great deal of Life Force, dressed up as the Oracle (harking back to the Pythoness of Delphi) to impress people. But in practice, consulting the Oracle is functional: Prime Minister Badger Bluebin does so. In Part II, The Gospel of the Brothers Barnabas, Mrs. Lutestring tells President Burge-Lubin that while he is supposed to make decisions and give the orders, his officials do so for him. In Part IV, The Tragedy of an Elderly Gentleman, the Envoy (the Prime Minister in disguise) arrives

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in Ireland from Baghdad (now the British capital) to consult the Oracle, even though he knows that the consultation is a performance set up by the long-livers, dressed up to impress: THE ENVOY. Ive got to see this Oracle. The folks at home wont know how we have been treated: all theyll know is that Ive stood face to face with the Oracle and had the straight tip from her.

His question is whether to hold the election this year: THE ENVOY The election. Now what we want to know is this: ought we to dissolve [Parliament] in August, or put it off until next spring? … I am the leader of the Potterbill party. My party is in power. I am Prime Minister. The Opposition—the Rotterjacks—have won every bye-election for the last six months. … The point is that though our five years will not expire until the year after next, our majority will be eaten away at the bye-elections by about Easter. We can’t wait: we must start some question that will excite the public, and go to the country on it. But some of us say do it now. Others say wait til the spring. We cant make up our minds one way or the other. Which would you advise?

The Oracle was also consulted in the previous election, when Sir Fuller Eastwind, the Prime Minister’s predecessor, told people that the Oracle’s prophecy meant that the Potterbills would be victorious at the General Election: “When Britain was cradled in the west, the east wind hardened her and made her great. Whilst the east wind prevails Britain shall prosper. The east wind shall wither Britain’s enemies in the day of contest. Let the Rotterjacks look to it.” But, in fact, she told him just what she now tells the Envoy: “Go home, pool fool.” So, rather than truthfully telling the British electorate exactly what the Oracle said, the Envoy will tell them that “the Oracle repeated to me, word for word, what it said to Sir Fuller Eastwind fifteen years ago.” In effect, what happens in the consultation with the Oracle is a black box and it does not matter what happens there: the act of consultation leads to a decision. The Oracle is a black box for the politicians to authorize the decisions they made. The short-livers constructed the Oracle in fictitious tales and poems to be beneficial, wise, just and merciful, while they were never really helped by the Oracle. The Prime Minister just pretended to be guided by the Oracle, by consulting the Oracle and going back to his people claiming the authority and dignity of one who

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has visited the holy islands and spoken face to face with the ineffable ones. He “pretends that all the measures he wishes to take for his own purposes have been enjoined on him by the Oracle.”20 No matter what it says, the politicians will change it to the advice that will justify their intentions. The Oracle as a black box aligns with Turing’s conception of the Oracle machine. In 1936, Turing invented the a-machine or automatic machine, which his doctoral advisor Alonzo Church called the “Turing machine.” These Turing machines are simple abstract computational devices to show what can be computed. In automata theory and computation theory, these Turing machines can be used to determine what problems can be solved by computers. In Turing’s dissertation, “Systems of Logic Based on Ordinals” (1938), which documents his work while a Jane Eliza Procter Visiting Fellow at Princeton University working with Alonzo Church, he writes the following (emphasis mine): Let us suppose that we are supplied with some unspecified means of solving number-theoretic problems; a kind of Oracle as it were. We shall not go any further into the nature of this Oracle apart from saying that it cannot be a machine. With the help of the Oracle we could form a new kind of machine (call them o-machines), having as one of its fundamental processes that of solving a given number-theoretic problem. More definitely these machines are to behave in this way. The moves of the machine are determined as usual by a table except in the case of moves from a certain internal configuration o. If the machine is in the internal configuration o and if the sequence of symbols marked with I is then the well-formed formula A, then the machine goes into the internal configuration p or t according as it is or is not true that A is dual. The decision as to which is the case is referred to the Oracle.21

The Oracle machine is an abstract machine that studies decision problems. The Oracle is an entity, not a machine, that can solve a problem such as a decision problem or a function problem; it is a black box that can produce a solution. It is an abstract machine, just like Shaw’s Oracle, which represents a decision-making entity rather than the real long-liver dressed up as an Oracle. Over the years, Turing continued to be interested in Shaw. In 1941, he went to see a matinée of Saint Joan in London with his fiancée, Joan Clarke, with Dame Sybil Thorndike playing Joan one last time in London. Hodges and Hofstadter, Turing’s biographers, show that Turing was attracted to Shaw’s dismissing determinism if it conflicted with the Life

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Force. Turing’s reaction to determinism can be seen in his 1946 letter to William Ross Ashby, an English psychiatrist and a pioneer in cybernetics. Ashby, committed to the Darwinian paradigm, assumed that adaptivity and goal-directed organization came from processes that are not goaldirected and that included random variation and deterministic selection.22 At the time, Turing was working on the Automatic Computing Engine (ACE), a British early electronic serial stored-program computer. The first instance of the ACE is a bunch of “reflexes,” “entirely uncritical” and “necessarily devoid of anything that could be called originality.” This is a textbook description of Pygmalion’s automata in Back to Methuselah. However, the ACE is also capable of a higher level of operation. Turing wrote to Ashby: “It would be quite possible for the machine to try out variations of behaviour. … It can … in theory, be used as a model of any other machine, by making it remember a set of instructions. The ACE is, in fact, analogous to the ‘universal machine’.” Like Shaw’s advocacy of the Life Force and Creative Evolution, Turing’s machine is ultimately not deterministic, but will make a continuous stream of experiments based on a set of instructions, like the trained machine in AI that simulates human intelligence and makes recommendations based on such training. Shaw’s Pygmalion in Back to Methuselah cannot draw the line between an automaton and a living organism. This is also the aim the Turing test, originally called “the imitation game” by Turing in 1950, which tested a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human. Turing first raised the question “Can Machine Think?”23 in 1950 and concluded with the hope that machines would eventually compete with men in all purely intellectual fields, as in playing chess. This was realized in 1997, when IBM’s chess computer Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov, the reigning world champion, in a six-game match. But this win was more attributable to a powerful computer than to powerful AI: Deep Blue has 256 parallel processors and can examine 200 million possible moves per second in order to look ahead to 14 turns of play.

Pygmalion and the Turing Test More importantly, Shaw holds a prominent position in this man vs. machine debate on AI. In 1964, the film My Fair Lady, Lerner and Lowe’s musical based on Shaw’s Pygmalion, came out and was the second highest-grossing film of the year, winning eight Academy Awards

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including Best Picture, Best Actor and Best Director. This also had an impact on the development of AI. The famous Turing test was based on his proposal of the imitation game in the 1950 article, played with a man (A), a woman (B) and an interrogator (C), with the interrogator determining which of the other two is the man and which is the woman. A is deliberately misleading and B is to help the interrogator. The role of A is taken up by a machine. Shaw now enters the picture. Joseph Weizenbaum24 developed ELIZA in 1964–66 at MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Based on natural language conversation, ELIZA is a chatterbot that can identify key words, discover minimal context, choose appropriate transformations and generate responses. It is written in MAD-Slip for the IBM 7094. As Weizenbaum explains, ELIZA is directly related to Shaw: “Its name was chosen to emphasize that it may be incrementally improved by its users, since its language abilities may be continually improved by a ‘teacher’. Like the Eliza of Pygmalion fame, it can be made to appear even more civilized, the relation of appearance to reality, however, remaining in the domain of the playwright.”25 ELIZA is a test of a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour that can be similar to humans. Eliza Doolittle has a father. Here is the exchange between ELIZA the machine and the human being. The machine’s lines are in block capitals: TELL ME MORE ABOUT YOUR FAMILY My mother takes care of me. WHO ELSE IN OUR FAMILY TAKES CARE OF YOU My father. YOUR FATHER You are like my father in some ways. WHAT RESEMBLANCE DO YOU SEE? You are not very aggressive but I think you don’t want me to notice that.

In 1972, Stanford scientist Kenneth Colby created PARRY, a bot modelling the behaviour of a paranoid schizophrenic, followed in 1973 by Vint Cerf’s ARPANET, which set up a conversation between ELIZA and PARRY, a conversation that echoes the horse racing scene in My Fair Lady: PARRY. I went to the races. ELIZA. What else would you like to discuss?

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PARRY. Horseracing interests me. ELIZA. Why do you say that just now? PARRY. There’s a lot of crooked gambling going on there. ELIZA. I am not sure I understand you fully.26

With Shaw having inspired the development of AI, with Pygmalion at the forefront, we will next examine how AI can shed new light on Shaw and his works, and whether it can increase Shavian readership and audience.

Notes 1. James Moore, “The Dartmouth College Artificial Intelligence Conference: The Next Fifty Years,” AI Magazine 27.4 (2006), pp. 87–91. 2. J. McCarthy, M. L. Minsky, N. Rochester, C. E. Shannon, “A Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence,” 31 August 1955. 3. “What Is Artificial Intelligence (AI)?” https://www.ibm.com/top ics/artificial-intelligence Accessed on 1 September 2023. 4. “Henry Babbage’s Analytical Engine Mill” (1910). https://col lection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/objects/co62246/henry-bab bages-analytical-engine-mill-1910-analytical-engine-mills Accessed on 1 September 2023. 5. Kashann Kilson, “How Automata Helped Predict the Future of Robotics” (22 January 2016). https://www.inverse.com/art icle/10494-how-automata-helped-predict-the-future-of-robotics Accessed on 1 September 2023. 6. Morris Museum (21 November 2020). https://www.facebook. com/MorrisMuseum/photos/a.494580712048/101591182647 52049/?type=3 Accessed on 1 September 2023. 7. Oscar Schwartz, “Untold History of AI: When Charles Babbage Played Chess with the Original Mechanical Turk” (18 March 2019). IEEE Spectrum. https://spectrum.ieee.org/untold-his tory-of-ai-charles-babbage-and-the-turk Accessed on 1 September 2023. 8. Ibid.

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9. Williamson, Timothy. 2021. “History of Computers: A Brief https://www.livescience.com/20718-computer-his Timeline.” tory.html Accessed on 1 September 2023. 10. Christian Balkenius and Birger Johansson, Frontiers in Human Dynamics 4 (22 February 2022). https://doi.org/10.3389/ fhumd.2022.703879 Accessed on 1 September 2023. 11. Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1965), pp. xli– xlii. 12. Norbert Wiener, Norbert Wiener: A Life in Cybernetics (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2017); Ex-Prodigy (1953); I am a Mathematician (1955). 13. Nobert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1950). https://mon oskop.org/images/9/90/Wiener_Norbert_The_Human_Use_of_ Human_Beings_1950.pdf Accessed on 1 September 2023. 14. Alan Turing, “Letter to Ethel Turing, 12 May 1933,” AMT/K/ 1/24, Digital Turing Archive, https://turingarchive.kings.cam. ac.uk/material-given-kings-college-cambridge-1960-amtk/amt-k1-24 Accessed on 1 September 2023. 15. Andrew Hodges and Douglas Hofstadter, Alan Turing: The Enigma (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2012), p. 72. 16. Ibid., p. 74. 17. I. J. Good, “Pioneering Work on Computers at Bletchley,” in A History of Computing in the Twentieth Century, ed. N. Metropolis, J. Howlett, and G.-C. Rota (New York: Academic Press, 1980), pp. 31–45, p. 40. 18. S. L. Zabell, “Alan Turing and the Central Limit Theorem,” The American Mathematical Monthly 102.6 (June–July 1995), pp. 483–94. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2974762 Accessed on 1 September 2023. 19. Ibid. 20. Bernard Shaw, Back to Methuselah. Tragedy of an Elderly Gentleman, Act I. 21. A. M. Turing, 1938. “Systems of Logic Based on Ordinals.” https://rauterberg.employee.id.tue.nl/lecturenotes/DDM110% 20CAS/Turing/Turing-1939%20Sysyems%20of%20logic%20b ased%20on%20ordinals.pdf Accessed on 1 September 2023.

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22. Hajo Greif, “‘The Action of the Brain’: Machine Models and Adaptive Functions in Turing and Ashby,” in Philosophy and Theory of Artificial Intelligence, ed. V. C. Müller (Cham: Springer, 2017), pp. 24–35. https://philarchive.org/archive/GRETAO-26 Accessed on 1 September 2023. 23. A. M. Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Mind 49 (1950), pp. 433–60. https://www.csee.umbc.edu/courses/471/ papers/turing.pdf Accessed on 1 September 2023. 24. Joseph Weizenbaum, “Eliza—A Computer Program for the Study of Natural Language Communication Between Man and Machine,” Computational Linguistics 9.1 (Jan. 1966). 36–45. 25. Ibid., p. 36. 26. Vint Cerf, “Parry encounters the Doctor.” https://datatracker.ietf. org/doc/html/rfc439 Accessed on 1 September 2023.

CHAPTER 5

Artificial Intelligence as a Partner in Shaw Studies

Abstract This chapter explores how AI can connect today’s audiences and readers to Shaw and his contemporaries. Shaw often wrote his plays and works with his own contemporaries in mind, both of which are increasingly drifting away from the here and now. Can artificial intelligences help bridge this ever-widening gap? This question will be tackled in three ways. First, are Shaw’s texts coded to deliver his Gospel of the Life Force and Creative Evolution? Second, how were productions of Shaw’s plays adapted to cultural contexts without making substantial changes to the play texts? Third, how will AI help today’s audiences and readers understand the contemporary references in Shaw’s works? The types of AI functionalities considered include SPSS text modeller, natural language understanding, visual colour recognition, virtual reality, virtual assistant and ChatGPT. Keywords Artificial intelligence · Life Force · Creative evolution · SPSS · Natural language understanding · Visual colour recognition · Virtual reality · Virtual assistant · ChatGPT

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 K. Li, Bernard Shaw, Automata, Robots, and Artificial Intelligence, Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-49226-6_5

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How fast can one read, and how fast can AI read? How much can one read in a week, and how much can AI read in a day? How many years does it take to write like Shaw, and how many seconds will it take for AI to write like Shaw? Can one harness the powers of AI to increase our understanding of Shaw and his works? Here are some experiments using AI functionalities, including SPSS text modeller, natural language understanding, visual colour recognition, virtual reality, virtual assistant, and Chat GPT that will help to propel Shaw and his plays into the here and now.

AI + GBS To test how Shaw may be read by AI, ChatGPT was asked to generate a play in the style of Bernard Shaw. Or, to put it in plain language, can ChatGPT fake a Shaw play? It created the play below in two seconds. Yes: in two seconds: As an AI language model, I can certainly help you write a play inspired by Bernard Shaw’s style and themes. Let’s create a play titled “The Awakening Souls.” In this play, we will explore the struggles of individuals as they confront societal norms, challenge their beliefs, and embark on a journey of self-discovery. The setting is a small, conservative town in the early twentieth century. Please note that the dialogue and character development will be inspired by Shaw, but the actual play will be a unique creation. Title: The Awakening Souls Act 1: The Awakening Scene 1: A quaint town square (Enter ANNABEL, a strong-willed young woman, and MR. GRAVES, the town’s conservative preacher.) ANNABEL: (with determination) Mr. Graves, I’ve been questioning the teachings of the church lately. There must be more to life than what we’ve been told. MR. GRAVES: (sternly) Annabel, you mustn’t let your mind wander into dangerous territory. The church’s teachings are the path to salvation. Doubt is the devil’s temptation. ANNABEL: But shouldn’t we question and seek the truth? How can we evolve if we don’t challenge our beliefs? MR. GRAVES: (trying to convince her) Our beliefs are sacrosanct, handed down from generations. Embrace your faith, and you shall find solace. Scene 2: The local library

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(Enter WILLIAM, a curious and intelligent young man, and MS. HARRIS, the town’s conservative librarian.) WILLIAM: (excitedly) Ms. Harris, have you read these new scientific journals? The world is filled with wonders we’ve yet to explore! MS. HARRIS: (disapprovingly) William, you ought to focus on practical knowledge. Such books lead to dangerous ideas that can undermine our way of life. WILLIAM: But isn’t knowledge the key to progress? We should be open to new ideas, not confined by old beliefs. MS. HARRIS: (reluctantly) I fear the consequences of stepping beyond the safe confines of tradition. Act 2: The Journeys Begin Scene 1: A secret meeting place (ANNABEL and WILLIAM meet by chance and strike up a conversation.) ANNABEL: (intrigued) William, I’ve been searching for answers outside the church’s teachings. I feel a longing for something more profound. WILLIAM: (enthusiastically) Annabel, I’ve been exploring scientific theories that challenge the very fabric of our existence. There’s so much to learn and understand. ANNABEL: (determined) Let’s embark on this journey together. We shall uncover the truths hidden from us. Scene 2: A heated town hall meeting (ANNABEL and WILLIAM present their newfound knowledge to the townspeople.) ANNABEL: (passionately) Fellow citizens, there’s a world beyond what we know. Let us not fear change but embrace it. Only by challenging ourselves can we truly progress. MR. GRAVES: (angrily) This is heresy! We must protect our values and traditions from these dangerous ideas! WILLIAM: (calmly) Mr. Graves, it is through exploration and enlightenment that we grow as individuals and as a society. Act 3: The Transformation Scene 1: The town square, now filled with divided opinions (MR. GRAVES attempts to rally the conservative townspeople against ANNABEL and WILLIAM.) MR. GRAVES: (shouting) These two have brought chaos to our peaceful town! We must suppress their dangerous beliefs! (However, some townspeople, inspired by ANNABEL and WILLIAM’s courage, start questioning their own beliefs.)

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TOWNSPERSON 1: (hesitant) But perhaps they are right. Maybe it’s time we challenge the status quo. TOWNSPERSON 2: (encouraged) Change can be frightening, but it is necessary for growth. Scene 2: The climax (ANNABEL and WILLIAM face opposition but remain resolute in their quest for truth.) ANNABEL: (defiantly) We may be cast out, but we cannot deny the thirst for knowledge and enlightenment burning within us. WILLIAM: (optimistically) Let us be beacons of change, guiding this town towards a brighter future. Act 4: The Revelation Scene 1: A year later, a transformed town (The town has evolved, embracing new ideas, and nurturing an atmosphere of growth and acceptance.) TOWNSPERSON 1: (joyful) Our town is flourishing! Our minds and hearts are open to new possibilities. TOWNSPERSON 2: (content) It’s incredible what can happen when we question and challenge ourselves. Scene 2: The meeting of minds (ANNABEL, WILLIAM, and MR. GRAVES have a conversation.) MR. GRAVES: (reflective) I realize now that holding onto old beliefs without question can be limiting. ANNABEL: (smiling) Change is difficult, but it leads to progress and enlightenment. WILLIAM: (hopeful) Let us continue to explore and grow together. (They embrace, signifying reconciliation and understanding.) The End. In “The Awakening Souls,” we’ve explored the conflict between tradition and progress, the importance of questioning beliefs, and the transformative power of knowledge and self-discovery. Inspired by Bernard Shaw’s style, the play delves into philosophical themes while developing characters with depth and passion.

One can definitely find Shavian themes here. The playlet focuses on two types of conflicts of ideas represented by Annabel versus Mr. Graves in Scene 1, and William versus Ms. Harris in Scene 2. In Scene 1, there is the strong-willed young Shavian protagonist Annabel questioning the teachings of the church, who thinks that people can evolve by challenging their beliefs. In Scene 2, the male protagonist William looks at new scientific journals, seeking new ideas to drive progress. Both of them meet the

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citizens in the town hall urging change, and successfully persuade people to embrace change, resulting in an evolved town bustling with new ideas. What is important is that this is an untrained version of ChatGPT. It derived its training data from “a diverse range of text sources, including books, articles, websites and other literary materials that were available up until September 2021. This training allows it to have knowledge about various authors and their works, including George Bernard Shaw, who was a prominent Irish playwright, critic and polemicist.” That is, the knowledge is derived from a huge corpus of texts related to Shaw. So AI can help people to understand Shaw’s ideas and perhaps even “read” Shaw’s texts far more extensively than any human being could. It can present Shavian patterns in user-friendly ways in a split second. Here are some of the ways it can do so.

Creative Evolution and the Life Force Coded in Shaw’s Texts---IBM SPSS and IBM Cultural Colour Visual Recognition Apps Is the language of Shaw’s gospel of the Life Force and Creative Evolution intrinsically coded in Shaw’s texts? He is definitely one of the most prolific writers of his day, writing more than sixty plays, numerous critical essays, not to mention an endless stream of letters and postcards, many still waiting to be discovered. Such an enormous volume of texts may be too much for the human mind to synthesize, not to mention they are spread out in various locations around the world, although a great many have been collected, edited and published. New Shaw texts are constantly being digitized, and the human mind can hardly keep track of them. Such big data is perfect for AI. Here are some empirical results generated by the IBM SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) AI platform.

Creative Evolution, Life Force and the Shavian Hero: IBM SPSS Modeller The IBM SPSS software platform was used to study Shaw’s major works. These include Arms and the Man, Back to Methuselah, Buoyant Billions , Caesar and Cleopatra, Candida, The Devil’s Disciple, Heartbreak House, John Bull’s Other Island, Major Barbara, Man and

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Superman, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Pygmalion, Saint Joan, The Man of Destiny and Widowers’ Houses . Four critical essays were also considered: “Bernard Shaw on Modern Typography,” “Parents and Children,” “The Perfect Wagnerite” and “The Quintessence of Ibsenism.” Together these comprise some 500,000 words. The IBM SPSS software platform can carry out, among its many functionalities, advanced statistical analysis, machine learning algorithms and text analysis. IBM SPSS Statistics and IBM SPSS Modeller were used to discover the patterns and models hidden in the data comprising Shaw’s texts, conducting classification, segmentation and association algorithms to study how Shaw encoded Creative Evolution and the Life Force into the language of his plays. In the IBM SPSS analysis, the underlying pattern for Concept yielded these top nine words, illustrating Shaw’s configuration of the process of Creative Evolution (Fig. 5.1). The preoccupation with “man” is well in the lead, with “woman” in fourth position. Also listed are the names of the male protagonists— Caesar, Tanner, Broadbent and Higgins—rather than those of the female characters, showing the dominance of male characters. Shaw’s plays are

Fig. 5.1 IBM SPSS concept analysis of Shaw texts. AI analysis generated by the author

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about the “man,” with “Father” and “life” in the sixth and seventh positions. There is a constant preoccupation to find, to catch (as indicated by the “hand” in third position), the artist-philosopher, the father figure providing direction for the Life Force in Creative Evolution, the latter represented by “woman” in fourth position. This is also the dramatic action in the plays. Next, to train the machine, the SPSS analysis was shifted to Categories, extracting those words in concepts which form Creative Evolution and the Life Force: “Man, Woman, Father, Mother, life, mind, god, world, heaven, soul, husband, wife, married.” The model immediately shifted to “woman, father, life, mother” (Figs. 5.2 and 5.3). In other words, in the plays, the action and drama come from the woman capturing the man to provide direction for the Life Force, as Tanner tells Octavius in Man and Superman: TANNER. Tavy; that’s the devilish side of a woman’s fascination: she makes you will your own destruction. OCTAVIUS. But it’s not destruction: it’s fulfilment.

Fig. 5.2 IBM SPSS categories analysis of Shaw texts. AI analysis generated by the author

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Fig. 5.3 Another IBM SPSS categories analysis of Shaw texts. AI analysis generated by the author

TANNER. Yes, of HER purpose; and that purpose is neither her happiness nor yours, but Nature’s. Vitality in a woman is a blind fury of creation. She sacrifices herself to it.

The metadata can be classified and clustered through neural networks, training the AI in the machine learning to connect ideas to one another. For example, as “man” is the most important word identified in the above analysis, the text modeller crawled through all the instances when “man” was mentioned and found the words associated with it, as shown in the extract below from Man and Superman. The context is Don Juan, in the Hell Scene, talking about contemplation: DON JUAN. In the Heaven I seek, no other joy. But there is the work of helping Life in its struggle upward. Think of how it wastes and scatters itself, how it raises up obstacles to itself and destroys itself in its ignorance and blindness. It needs a brain, this irresistible force, lest in its ignorance it should resist itself. What a piece of work is man! says the poet. Yes: but what a blunderer! Here is the highest miracle of organization yet attained

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by life, the most intensely alive thing that exists, the most conscious of all the organisms; and yet, how wretched are his brains!

Here is what the text modeller found (Fig. 5.4). Each blue/lighter word is linked to other instances when the word is mentioned in the corpus of the texts considered. The blue/lighter words can be grouped into two camps: the upward thrust of the Life Force and Creative Evolution represented by “Heaven, work, Life, struggle, brain, irresistible force, man” versus the challenges it encountered: “struggle, wastes, scatters, obstacles, ignorance, blindness, blunderer.” Next, to discover the relationship between man and the Shavian Hero in The Perfect Wagnerite, and the Shavian Hero taking over from

Fig. 5.4 IBM SPSS modeller analysis of Man and Superman. AI analysis generated by the author

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Godhead, the text modeller was used, which shows the “rise from god to the Hero” ranking first (Fig. 5.5). In The Perfect Wagnerite, Shaw writes about the hero Siegfried and his assertion of the individual will: “The philosophically fertile element in the original project of Siegfried’s Death was the conception of Siegfried himself as a type of the healthy man raised to perfect confidence in his own impulses by an intense and joyous vitality which is above fear, sickliness of conscience, malice, and the makeshifts and moral crutches of law and order which accompany them.” In performance, the drama in Shaw’s plays is in words rather than in gestures and body movement. An analysis was done on Pygmalion, in which Higgins mainly teaches Eliza Doolittle received pronunciation to pass her off as a duchess at the ambassador’s garden party. The anatomy model draws attention to the head and face rather than to other parts of the body, which means gestures and actions. Talking focuses on the “head” and “face” (Fig. 5.6).

Fig. 5.5 IBM SPSS text modeller analysis of The Perfect Wagnerite. AI analysis generated by the author

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Fig. 5.6 IBM SPSS text modeller analysis of Pygmalion. AI analysis generated by the author

IBM Natural Language Understanding: Shaw’s Great Man IBM Watson Knowledge Studio was used to learn more about Shaw’s Great Man in The Man of Destiny. The Natural Language Understanding model can immediately identify the protagonist in the play as Napoleon Bonaparte, a person, scoring 0.92. It also displays his ambition in showing multiple locations across Europe: Lodi, Paris, Italy, Europe, Tavazzano, the Alps, Milan, England, Lombardy, England and Borghetto. Links to websites can be added to these persons and geographical locations to further train Watson by subject matter experts, to create a “type system” to teach Watson to think like an expert. In an untrained Natural Language Understanding model, the keywords associated with Napoleon are: Napoleon the individual 0.91, “excellency” 0.52, “Napoleon Bonaparte” 0.46 and “NAPOLEON: Human life” 0.39 and “NAPOLEON. Kill” at the bottom 0.37. This illustrates Shaw’s depiction of Napoleon as an individual rather than as a soldier killing enemies. Natural Language Understanding also analyses

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sentiment, with the scores ranging from -1 (negative sentiment) to 1 (positive sentiment). Napoleon the Man of Destiny has destiny scoring “negative, 0.43,” as he kills people in his conquests. Natural Language Understanding also looks at emotion, putting it into scores ranging from 0 to 1 for sadness, joy, fear, disgust and anger. 0 means the text does not convey that emotion, while 1 means the text includes that emotion. Napoleon is a mixture of emotions: Joy 0.50, Anger 0.15, Disgust 0.14, Sadness 0.60 and Fear 0.12. He is an ambivalent figure, with Joy 0.50 and Sadness 0.60. He also has heroic qualities (my emphases): NAPOLEON (with conviction). And now, suppose you had done all this— suppose you had come safely out with that letter in your hand, knowing that when the hour came, your fear had tightened, not your heart, but your grip of your own purpose—that it had ceased to be fear, and had become strength, penetration, vigilance, iron resolution—how would you answer then if you were asked whether you were a coward? LADY (rising ). Ah, you are a hero, a real hero. NAPOLEON. Pooh! There’s no such thing as a real hero.

A machine learning model was built to understand the linguistic nuances, meaning and relationships specific to Shaw to create a rule-based model to identify the entities in Shaw’s plays according to the rules defined. To make the model credible, fifty trials were used for each entity and one hundred trials for each relation, with each trial comprising about 2,000 words. The entities worked out in the trials are these: Law and Order, Will, Intellect, Object, Location, Person Female, Person Male, Organization and Event. This is mapped against a network of relations among the characters: brother of, antagonist of, friend of, boss of, owner of, winner of, wife of, husband of, sister of and comparison to. Co-reference is set up such that “Napoleon Bonaparte” is also “Napoleon,” “he” and “He.” Napoleon is an owner of intellect providing direction, which is the principle guiding the Life Force. The Strange Lady is an owner of will, the Life Force driving Creative Evolution. Napoleon eventually outwits the Strange Lady. He is the Siegfried who stands for the will to live, the upward thrust of the Life Force advancing Creative Evolution. But Napoleon is not the perfect Shavian Hero. He reappears in Part IV of Back to Methuselah, outwitted and overpowered by the long-liver playing the Oracle. The assertion of his individual will is thwarted:

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NAPOLEON [impressively] I am the Man of Destiny. THE VEILED WOMAN [unimpressed] How did you get in here? NAPOLEON. I walked in. I go on until I am stopped. I never am stopped. I tell you I am the Man of Destiny. THE VEILED WOMAN. You will be a man of very short destiny if you wander about here without one of our children to guide you. I suppose you belong to the Baghdad envoy.

His claims to be a man of genius and a Great Man, yet is made ridiculous by the Oracle when she shoots and misses him: THE ORACLE. To die before the tide of glory turns. Allow me [she shoots him]. He falls with a shriek. She throws the pistol away and goes haughtily into the temple. NAPOLEON [scrambling to his feet ] Murderess! Monster! She-devil! Unnatural, inhuman wretch! You deserve to be hanged, guillotined, broken on the wheel, burnt alive. No sense of the sacredness of human life! No thought for my wife and children! Bitch! Sow! Wanton! [He picks up the pistol ]. And missed me at five yards! Thats a woman all over.

Napoleon is still far from being a Shavian Great Man. When Shaw’s plays were fed into a SPSS analysis to look for the importance of male Shavian protagonists in relation to Shaw’s Concepts, the ranking is: “Caesar, Tanner, Broadbent, Higgins, Morell, Undershaft, Napoleon, Elderly Gentleman, Sartorius, Trench, Burge-Lubin, Marchbanks, Mangan, Pickering, Ramsden, Apollodorus, Praed, Captain Shotover, Anderson, Blutschli, Cauchon.” However, it may be that these characters simply talk more than anyone else in their respective plays. Barbara certainly talks the least among the three major characters in her play, yet is arguably the most important.

IBM Cultural Colour Visual Recognition: Cultural Adaptations in Modern Productions Shaw’s plays were frequently written with his contemporary readers and audience in mind, often in Europe and North America. Shaw also took a keen interest in his plays’ productions, as shown by his numerous letters to translators, producers, managers, directors and actors. How can these plays connect with readers and audiences beyond Shaw’s lifetime? IBM

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Cultural Colour Visual Recognition shows that productions make use of cultural colours to convey Shaw’s ideas to the audience. A test case was set up using The Devil’s Disciple (1897). The use of both colour and images in Shaw’s texts, theatre productions, films and publications were studied to see how they enabled the target audience and readers not only to understand Shaw’s ideas, but also to bring the play into their modern world. An IBM cultural colour visual recognition application was built on the IBM Cloud Computing Platform. This analysis is especially valuable, as IBM decommissioned the visual recognition app in December 2021. The assumption is that colours and visual objects are cultural strategies that can be strategically used in numerous contexts, such as branding, product design, fashion, lifestyle, marketing, not to mention colour psychology. Colours also have cultural significance, appealing to different cultures in different ways due to the various cultural interpretations of colours. The new IBM cultural colour visual recognition app analyses the cultural significance of colours using AI. Applying the cultural colour visual recognition concepts to Shaw’s works, images related to Shaw’s Devil’s Disciple—ranging from theatre and film posters, book covers, images from theatre productions and films, online homepages featuring the title “The Devil’s Disciple”—were uploaded to the IBM cultural colour visual recognition app for analysis. The app breaks down the images not only into their colour components, but also into the objects populating the images, which then interact with the title of the play to add meanings to the title. Such colours correspond to the context of productions and publications, as well as their underlying intentions. It also shows the changing interpretations and presentations of The Devil’s Disciple conveyed by colours and objects. The IBM Visual Recognition app often reveals something opposite to what the images ostensibly show, prompting us to revisit the text and uncover subtle cultural codes Shaw built into the text that may have eluded a close reading. It also provides subtle colour codes that draw references from the context of the productions to suggest contemporary interpretations of the play. The pre-built “General” IBM model on the visual recognition app is used to analyse the posters and webpages on The Devil’s Disciple. Most audiences or readers may not be Shaw experts. Thus they are like the prebuilt IBM Visual Recognition app: they form their first impressions based on what they actually see. As the images on the posters and webpages are

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meant to attract people to the productions and to give them a sense of what the play is about, they evolve over time, presenting different cultural meanings corresponding to a specific production’s time and place. The Devil’s Disciple should offer little ambiguity for a contemporary audience well versed in melodrama. The play is built on melodrama and uses character types, although by the end of the play, in typical Shavian paradox, the protagonists are reversed. The famous actor of melodrama William (“Breezy Bill”) Terriss had asked Shaw for a play, but he was murdered by a madman outside the Adelphi Theatre in London before he could play the role.1 Shaw then intended the play for Richard Mansfield’s production in America, with Mansfield playing Dick Dudgeon. Shaw wrote to his French translator Augustin Hamon on 13 June 1922 explaining the casting for the melodrama: “I presume you have received the rough sketches I made for the scenes in The Devil’s Disciple. They ought to be quite enough for [noted actor Firmin] Gémier. The play will need a very strong cast of players accustomed to melodrama; for it is not a coterie play: it is a Porte St Martin one. Anderson must be a first rate ‘heavy’ man, and Burgoyne a finished high comedian. It is not necessary to engage a clever actress for Judith: on the contrary she had better be a conventional melodramatic heroine, accustomed to excite pity and nothing else. All the clever Judiths here have failed, whilst ordinary provincial actresses have succeeded to perfection.”2 The use of colour in the stage productions changes over time. The more the play is distanced from audiences and readers, the more cultural colour-coding is needed to make it relevant for the here and now. In the first performances of The Devil’s Disciple in Shaw’s time in 1897 and 1898, hardly any cultural colour-coding was needed, as the performances were for Shaw’s contemporaries. These first performances generated much international success. The play was first performed, with Mansfield playing Dick Dudgeon, at Hermanus Bleecker Hall in Albany, New York on 1 October 1897, and transferred to the Fifth Avenue Theatre, running for 64 consecutive days. It was Shaw’s first financial success and established him as a playwright. “In 1898 The Devil’s Disciple made a first rate success in America,” wrote Shaw, “and planted Richard Mansfield for the first time firmly in New York. It added £2,500 to my bank balance in a few months and promised to go on at that rate.”3 The play was performed around the world. Writing to Mrs. Patrick Campbell on 5 July 1912, Shaw said that Matheson Lang is “in the east playing The Devil’s Disciple from Calcutta to Capetown.”4

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Although the play has a historical context, with events supposedly happening imminent upon the surrender of General John Burgoyne in 1777, Shaw’s melodrama presents human frailties rather than historical facts. Shaw wrote at length about Burgoyne and the circumstances surrounding his surrender at Saratoga in his “Notes” at the end of published text of the play. But an understanding of these historical facts vary with time, as people might draw parallels to contemporary events. For example, on 20 December 1915 Shaw wrote to William Faversham dissuading him to put on The Devil’s Disciple to avoid “a charge of being subsidized by the Germans to produce a play which represents England as the enemy of Liberty.”5 Shaw was not downplaying the British Empire, however: “What I am aiming at is personal ridicule and belittlement instead of the higher comedy in which the laugh is at the imperfections of our nature and the inadequacy of our institutions, and is never a mere personal insult.”6 Shaw is less interested in presenting history than in ridiculing human foibles. While Dick Dudgeon’s community, with Mrs. Dudgeon being the extreme example, are bound by their sense of duty in various ways, neither of the two protagonists is bound by duty. Dudgeon is called the Devil’s Disciple because he follows his own nature, while Anderson married Judith following his own heart. All these contemporary references, however, would be quite lost to an audience beyond Shaw’s time. As the time and location of the productions change, colours and objects are used as shorthand to situate the play in the times and places they were first read or performed. Posters often provide the cultural background necessary to situate a play within its immediate production context. One interprets what one sees by what one knows. The wider the audience, the more likely most members will be oblivious to Shaw’s contemporary references. These potential audiences are like the pre-built IBM Visual Recognition app: they form their first impressions based on what they actually see and what they think they are seeing as informed by past experiences. In the case of AI, this involves how the machine was trained. The posters, and now webpages, as the first-ever encounters between audience and play, are meant to frame the perspectives through which the audience may interpret the play. The Shaw Festival’s webpage for the 2020 production of The Devil’s Disciple features an image of Dick Dudgeon, the Devil’s Disciple, about to be hanged, witnessed by Judith Anderson. He stands precariously balanced on the very edge of the pistol. This re-enacts the climax of the play but in Shavian paradox, reversing the

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roles of the Minister Anthony Anderson and Dick the Devil’s Disciple, the former becoming the man of action who sells his family Bible to buy a pair of pistols, the latter becoming the Christ-like martyr who substitutes himself for the minister about to be hanged. Presumably, therefore, the Shaw Festival image highlights this spiritual message, focusing on the transformation of the eponymous Devil’s Disciple. The image also mirrors the description of the play on the Shaw Festival website: Dick Dudgeon is one of Shaw’s great puzzles. To the people of his Revolution-era New England town he is “the Devil’s disciple.” But when British soldiers come to take their Presbyterian minister to the gallows for helping the rebels, Dudgeon does something truly remarkable. A potent mixture of sex and danger, Shaw’s first major hit has some of his best scenes and his sharpest comedy.7

The word cloud below emphasizes “Shaw’s Dudgeon” (Fig. 5.7).8 Like the image on the webpage, the focus is on Dick Dudgeon, which generates the question, Who is this title character “the Devil’s Disciple”? Anderson is not named, merely referred to as “their Presbyterian minister.” For people unfamiliar with The Devil’s Disciple, the Shaw Festival image shows a melodrama infused with danger, with Dick Dudgeon as the central character.

Fig. 5.7 Word cloud of The Devil’s Disciple. AI analysis generated by the author

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However, the Shaw Festival poster also shows how colours and objects can reveal another level of meaning, one beyond words. The poster’s Judith is placed in a pivotal position. She and Dick are standing on the barrel of a period pistol which shows a delicate balance. When the Shaw Festival image is uploaded to the IBM Visual Recognition app, this melodrama wrought with physical action emerges with no trace of the spiritual level showing the Shavian reversal. Instead of recognizing the gallows and the gun barrel, the IBM Visual Recognition app only sees mechanical devices: a trapeze 81%, mechanical device 81%, mechanism 80%, rod 78%, reformer instrument 57%, and apparatus 57%. It also recognizes weapons: bow 50% and weapon 50%. All indicators of the spiritual martyr are lost; only the man of action is recognized (Fig. 5.8). The image was then uploaded to the cultural colour recognition app, and the results are also intriguing. They show 56% chestnut red and 52% maroon. Interestingly, the Shaw Festival does not use primary colours, such as red and black, which were dominant in earlier promotional materials. The liturgical cultural colour recognition potentially highlights Dick Dudgeon’s would-be martyrdom. Chestnut red is a combination of red and brown, and maroon is brownish crimson. This is significant in terms of liturgical colour recognition. Red symbolizes the blood shed by martyrs and is used to commemorate saints’ feast days. It is also used for Pentecost, considered the birthday of the Christian faith. In the Eastern

Fig. 5.8 IBM cultural colour visual recognition of the Shaw Festival poster of The Devil’s Disciple. AI analysis generated by the author

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Orthodox Church’s liturgical settings, in the Greek tradition, solemn feast days are often marked by maroon or burgundy. The symbolic meaning of the object and colour on the 2020 Shaw Festival image is highlighted when compared to the 2009 Shaw Festival promotional image for a production that took place at a less challenging time. The image shows the actor playing Dick Dudgeon standing against the brick wall of the Shaw Festival Theatre. It is more realistic than symbolic. The predominant colour is coal black, probably because of the brick wall. The visual recognition app found a publication, “print media, news magazine, newspaper, medium, gazette,” which is exactly right as this is the front cover of the Study Guide produced by the Shaw Festival’s education unit for use in schools. The Devil’s Disciple has always been a popular play at the Shaw Festival, although the 1974, 1984, 1996 and 2009 posters were never as symbolic as that for the 2020 production.

Shaw in Contemporary Performance: Federal Theatre Project, 1935–1939 In the early 1920s, before the Great Depression, productions of The Devil’s Disciple were successful commercial endeavours. The Theatre Guild produced the play from April to June 1923 for a total of 64 performances. The production then toured Canada, going to Montreal and Toronto.9 The Great Depression began in 1929, bringing about massive unemployment as well as hardships for theatres. The Federal Theatre Project was established in the United States by the New Deal to fund live artistic performances and entertainment programmes during the Depression. The productions were meant to be a relief measure to employ theatre personnel, artists, writers and directors, and enabled millions of Americans to attend live performances in theatres. People could go to movies for 25 cents, while commercial theatres charged $1–$2. The Devil’s Disciple was presented several times by the Federal Theatre Project from 1935 to 1939. These 1930s productions emphasized the play’s spiritual aspects through its posters, and how the devil’s disciple transitioned from devil to saint. The Federal Theatre Project productions of The Devil’s Disciple cost 25–40 cents, and 44–83 cents. Other Shaw plays were also performed, including Androcles and the Lion, Arms and the Man, Pygmalion, Great Catherine, On the Rocks and Caesar and Cleopatra, the posters for which

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can be found in the Library of Congress.10 The productions were true to Shaw’s texts. The prompt script of The Devil’s Disciple for the Federal Theatre Project production is also in the Library of Congress,11 along with the full play text, without any cuts. The poster for the Theatre Project production at the Federal Theatre Playhouse, Los Angeles, from 12 to 17 October 1936, shows a sketch of Dick Dudgeon in profile wearing a halo. The focus is on how Dick the devil’s disciple becomes a Christ-like figure (Fig. 5.9). When the poster is uploaded to the IBM Visual Recognition app, colour comes out first: beige 95%, light brown 66% (although this may be because the paper has turned yellow). The app recognizes the poster as a book jacket 56% and matchbook 54%, even a desk dictionary 50%. The app is associating the poster with food: ginger beer 51%, beverage 51% and food 51%, even though these are not found on the poster. There are only three colours recognized: red to indicate Shaw’s play with the sketch of the protagonist and the title of the play, green to indicate the time and location of the performance and a little bit of black showing the date. There is a predominant use of red to depict Shaw’s play, and this primary colour is associated with excitement, energy, passion, action, love and danger in melodrama. Red is also a bold attention-getting colour, a safe choice for a poster to draw attention, as it projects an image of power, action and confidence. Hence the colour red, along with the halo on Dick Dudgeon’s head, suggests his saintly quality and would-be martyrdom. This trend continues in the poster for the November 1937 production, also by the

Fig. 5.9 IBM cultural colour visual recognition of the Federal Theatre Playhouse’s poster of The Devil’s Disciple. AI analysis generated by the author

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Federal Theatre Project, by the Work Projects Administration, performed in the Great Northern Theatre, Chicago. The poster features Dick Dudgeon, with the devil lurking behind him. There are also two small soldiers standing on either side of the devil’s disciple. The predominant image is 92% dark red, followed by 52% reddish brown.12 The visual recognition app again registers consumption, including pet food 77%, feed 77% and food 77% (Fig. 5.10). The IBM app uncovers subtle associations among wine, food and colour, which assume prominent positions when the play text is visualized. In the first act, in preparation for the reading of Timothy Dudgeon’s new will, Mrs. Dudgeon and Christy put the table covered by a red tablecloth in the middle of the room and place a decanter of sherry on it, with a barmbrack (bread) and 10 biscuits. In Act II, in Anderson’s house, “with little red curtains running on a rod half way up it to serve as a blind,” Dick is having tea with Judith and has a piece of toast on his plate: RICHARD (Looking dreamily round). I am thinking. It is all so strange to me. I can see the beauty and peace of this home: I think I have never been more at rest in my life than at this moment; and yet I know quite well I could never live here. It’s not in my nature, I suppose, to be domesticated. But it’s very beautiful: it’s almost holy. (He muses a moment, and then laughs softly.)

So there is wine and bread (toast, biscuits) on a red tablecloth. As Dick Dudgeon is going to sacrifice himself in Christ-like fashion in taking Anthony Anderson’s place at the gallows, the food and drink on the

Fig. 5.10 IBM cultural colour visual recognition of the Federal Theatre Project’s poster of The Devil’s Disciple. AI analysis generated by the author

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table likely symbolize the Holy Sacrament of the Eucharist, suggesting the words and actions of Jesus at the Last Supper. The red tablecloth with the wine and biscuits recall images of red altar cloths found in Anglican and Catholic cathedrals during Holy Week to represent the blood of Christ. Even an altar is mentioned in the play. When Dick Dudgeon proclaims himself the Devil’s Disciple again and takes possession of the house, he tells Essie: “From this day this house is his home; and no child shall cry in it: this hearth is his altar; and no soul shall ever cower over it in the dark evenings and be afraid. Now (turning forcibly on the rest) which of you good men will take this child and rescue her from the house of the devil?” Shaw’s stage directions (my emphasis) reinforce the symbolism: “The year 1777 is the one in which the passions roused of the breaking off of the American colonies from England, more by their own weight than their own will, boiled up to shooting point, the shooting being idealized to the English mind as suppression of rebellion and maintenance of British dominion, and to the American as defence of liberty, resistance to tyranny, and self-sacrifice on the altar of the Rights of Man.” To bring the play to twenty-first-century audiences, in Sarasota’s Asolo Repertory Theatre’s 20–24 March 2009 production, directed and designed by Tony Walton,13 a red tablecloth was used to draw parallels with the audience’s own experience, a tablecloth that looks very much like the heavily embroidered red altar cloth found in Truro Cathedral, in Cornwall.14 The Shavian paradox is complete. Dick Dudgeon the saintlike Christ figure is the devil’s disciple because he follows his own will and nature, instead of having his spirit crushed by Mrs. Dudgeon’s sense of duty, which kills her heart. RICHARD (amused: patting her on the shoulder). Yes, Dick; but something else too. They call me the Devil’s Disciple. ESSIE. Why do you let them? RICHARD (seriously). Because it’s true. I was brought up in the other service; but I knew from the first that the Devil was my natural master and captain and friend. I saw that he was in the right, and that the world cringed to his conqueror only through fear. I prayed secretly to him; and he comforted me, and saved me from having my spirit broken in this house of children’s tears. I promised him my soul, and swore an oath that I would stand up for him in this world and stand by him in the next. (Solemnly) That promise and that oath made a man of me. From this day this house is his home; and no child shall cry in it: this hearth is his altar; and no soul shall ever cower over it in the dark evenings and be afraid.

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To return to a performance in Shaw’s time, in 1937, as the world was mired in the depths of the Great Depression, the saint slowly transitioned into the devil also through the colour red. While the 1936 poster shows the saint, the playbill of the 1937 production by Chicago’s Great Northern Theatre features the devil. And no food is found by the IBM Visual Recognition app. Instead, red was used to indicate the devil, which appeared as a red dragon on this playbill. This in fact follows the Bible: And another sign appeared in heaven: behold, a great, fiery red dragon having seven heads and ten horns, and seven diadems on his heads. (Revelation 12:3) And the devil that deceived them was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone, where the beast and the false prophet [are], and shall be tormented day and night for ever and ever. (Revelation 20:10)

The IBM Visual Recognition app again recognizes colour as paramount: dark red 93%, this time indicating the devil (Fig. 5.11).

Fig. 5.11 IBM cultural colour visual recognition of the Great Northern Theatre’s poster of The Devil’s Disciple. AI analysis generated by the author

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Adding Topical References to Productions Through Colour and Images: Post-World War II and the Consumer Society Topical references relevant to the time of the production can be added to the posters to relate to the audience. On 27 February 1950, the play was staged at the Royal Theatre on Broadway, a production that featured drinking. Following World War II, commercial productions of The Devil’s Disciple became more secular, with more direct references to contemporary society. In these prosperous years, drinking increased, with alcohol once again taking its place as an important part of American culture.15 A Gallup Poll constantly shows quite a number of people who drank, and the affluent audience attending the Broadway production was the right target: “Drinking is less common among those residing in lower-income households. According to a poll, 82% of Americans who live in upperincome households (annual incomes of $75,000 or more) say they drink, compared with 63% of those in middle-income households ($30,000$74,999) and just 44% of those in lower-income households (less than $30,000).”16 The 1950 Royal Theatre production playbill shows how elements can be added to the play text during performances. When the playbill was uploaded to the IBM Visual Recognition app, instead of identifying the characters, the predominant colours are olive green 60% and olive 57%. Olive green is a popular colour for wine bottles, and this Broadway production featured Dick Dudgeon as a drunkard. The Synopsis reads: “A town drunkard substitutes himself for the minister British soldiers are attempting to capture and hang, in George Bernard Shaw’s 1897 satire of New England Puritanism and political self-importance during the Revolutionary War.” In parallel to depicting Dick Dudgeon as a drunkard, the playbill features advertisements related to wine, including Gilbey’s Spey Royal Scotch Whisky, Bellows Fine Wine and Spirits, Gibson’s Diamond 8 Whisky, Schenley Whisky and King’s Ransom Scotch, and one can enjoy drinks at the Broadway Cocktail Lounge at the Hotel Astor, the Café Lounge and Bar at the Savoy Plaza or the King Cole Bar at the Hotel St. Regis.

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Post-Shaw Production: The 1959 Hollywood Film Featuring War Heroes In 1959, some nine years after Shaw’s death, there was a Hollywood film adaptation of The Devil’s Disciple. The cast was stellar, with Burt Lancaster as Reverend Anthony Anderson, Kirk Douglas as Dick Dudgeon and Laurence Olivier as General Burgoyne, with Janette Scott as Judith Anderson. Although the play had in fact been considered for filming very early on, Shaw warned Augustin Hamon on 20 April 1918: “You may tell all the Cinema people that none of my plays can be filmed. I have received many golden offers from Gaumont and the English and American firms; and at first I was disposed to accept them, and even began making a scenario of The Devil’s Disciple.”17 Shaw baulked at the idea because he found films challenging his theatre box office. The film, alas, was a flop. Variety introduced the film on 31 December 1958: “The Devil’s Disciple by George Bernard Shaw is better than this film version would indicate to those unfamiliar with the stage original. The final third of the picture is superb Shawmanship, but the major portion preceding it is fumbling and unsatisfactory.”18 Only Olivier playing Burgoyne was noteworthy: “His character, that of General ‘Gentleman Johnny’ Burgoyne, is a witty, mocking figure and mouthpiece for Shaw’s wicked shafts into convention and history, in this case the American Revolution.” Nevertheless, given its stellar cast, many posters were created and, in due course, many video and DVD covers. All of these posters feature the big three, all as strong men of action (Fig. 5.12).

Fig. 5.12 IBM cultural colour visual recognition of the poster of the movie The Devil’s Disciple. AI analysis generated by the author

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Cultural colour recognition sheds light on the posters’ emphasis on war. The posters feature alizarine red, a colour with considerable cultural significance in the Western world: it is a red dye used for dyeing textile fabrics and was used widely in Western Europe in the late Medieval period, especially in dyeing military clothing, including, in seventeenthcentury England, the uniforms of the parliamentary New Model Army, which led to British soldiers being called “redcoats.” The Devil’s Disciple is set in 1777, in colonial America on the eve of General Burgoyne’s surrender at Saratoga, New York, in October that year. This surrender is an important historical moment: in the rotunda of the United States Capitol in Washington D.C., one finds John Trumbull’s painting The Surrender of General Burgoyne (1821), which prominently depicts the redcoats of Burgoyne’s army. Unlike the Federal Theatre Project, which emphasizes the spiritual aspects of Dick Dudgeon as the Devil’s Disciple, the military associations of alizarine red show that the film highlights Anthony Anderson as the man of action, in line with war heroes. Indeed, this was reflected in casting Burt Lancaster as Anderson. Lancaster, one of the top stars of the 1950s,19 had starred in From Here to Eternity (1953) and Run Silent, Run Deep (1958), war films that highlight the man of action, his courage, fearlessness, loyalty and honour, rather than his spirituality: World War II was still fresh in people’s minds. This visual colour recognition is also reflected in the trailer, which draws attention to the film’s superstars20 : The mightiest three the screen will ever see Brimming with extraordinary talents Bursting with a thousand bold excitements One Devil of a Motion Picture The narrator of the trailer said: In the violent age of the Devil’s Disciple With all its heroes, villains, and all its danger-daring women On the battlefields of love and war.

The film adaptation thus highlights the man of action. Moreover, the film differs radically from the play. In Shaw’s play, Dick’s Uncle Peter was

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hanged by the British, while in the film, Dick’s father was hanged and his body left on the gallows as an example to others. Dick in the film rescues the body and has it buried in the parish graveyard. As in the play, Dick allows himself to be arrested when the British soldiers mistake him for Anderson. The Anderson in the film sees a great deal of bravado action: fighting off several British soldiers and exploding the British ammunition dump, passing himself off as a Loyalist courier bringing an urgent message from General Howe to Burgoyne informing him that the rebels have retaken Springtown and bargaining on the terms of the truce to save Dick Dudgeon.

Localization in Productions in Australia, England and the USA Local productions around the world beyond Shaw’s time have used colours with local interpretations on posters, as shown in two notable productions in Australia and England. According to the Australian Live Performance Database, the play has not been performed in Australia that frequently, with productions by the Arts Theatre, Brisbane on 5 August 1994, by the Drama Theatre at the Sydney Opera House, Sydney in 1979, by the Playhouse Theatre in Perth on 29 September 1973, at The Old Dolphin Theatre in Crawley on 12 July 1966, at the Union Theatre in Parkville on 3 September 1963, at the Palace Theatre in Sydney in April 1951, at St James’ Hall in Sydney on 14 May 1925, and at the Sydney Repertory Theatre in Sydney on 2 October 1913.21 Unlike productions in the USA and the UK, those in Australia target audiences who might not have such detailed historical knowledge, as the country played no part in the American Revolutionary War. The poster for the 1979 production at the Sydney Opera House shows a highlevel focus on the countries in the play rather than on the protagonists (Fig. 5.13). The poster shows the dominance of dark red 98% and sanguine red 80%, colours that suggest dried blood; in fact, sanguine red is reddish brown colour, so called because it resembles dried blood. The poster mythicizes the American Revolutionary War by depicting a battle between

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Fig. 5.13 IBM cultural colour visual recognition of the Sydney Opera House’s poster of The Devil’s Disciple. AI analysis generated by the author

a lion, the national emblem of the United Kingdom, and an eagle, the national emblem of the United States. The UK productions sometimes attempt to present the world of the American Revolution by highlighting the play’s cultural context. In the programme of the 1976 production by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Alwych Theatre, which staged the play as a tribute to the United States bicentennial, the programme emphasizes Dick Dudgeon’s challenge to his Puritanical society. For the benefit of the UK audiences, the programme visualizes American Puritanical society. The graphics encapsulate the polarization of heaven and hell, showing The Way of Good and Evil. The image is circular, representing the World, and depicts the divergent paths of good and evil. One path leads from the House of God to Eternal Life, the other from the House of Sin to destruction and Everlasting Punishment. The Way of Good and Evil is not new and can be found in the nineteenth-century publications such as Harry T. Peters’s “America on Stone” Lithography Collection of 1862. What is new, however, is adding a devil at the bottom right standing in Hell fire, and showing the Devil’s Disciple rebelling against the polarized world and following his own heart. Unlike the nineteenth-century Way of Good and Evil, which is in colour, the Royal Shakespeare Company programme is in red against a black background, for the production in 1976 at the Aldwych Theatre, London (opened 13 July 1976). The virtual recognition app found dark red 95%, followed by chestnut red 71%. This reflects

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the representation of the devil as a red dragon, and Hell fire is also featured at the bottom. The United Kingdom was the adversary both during the American Revolution and in the play. True to British productions, the visual recognition of the theatre programme of the Nottingham Playhouse Production, from 29 June to 4 July 1981 at the Ashcroft Theatre, Croydon, sees the battle from the British side: the focus is on the red coats of the British army. The visual recognition shows alizarine red 75% and sanguine red 65%. This highlights the conflict from a British perspective, the graphics showing British soldiers; also shown are the lyrics of “The Yankee’s Return from Camp” (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= jYGqiyEB8mQ), a song once again from the British perspective. As noted earlier, the character most positively received in the 1959 film was General Burgoyne, played by Laurence Olivier. Burgoyne was also in the limelight in the Gingold Theatrical Group–Project Shaw production in New York City in January 2018. In promotional materials, the play was presented as follows: The Devil’s Disciple, written in 1896, is Bernard Shaw’s classic comedy that weaves a story around the unlikely backdrop of the American Revolution! Some of Shaw’s most entertainingly iconographic characters fill out this tale of revolt: of one country against another as well as of the inexhaustible battle of the human spirit—how we choose to create and define ourselves in the face of societal expectations. In this play, we find ourselves in a 1777 New Hampshire village where Dick Dudgeon opens his heart to life. Along the way, everyone goes through profound changes of discovery, hope and strength.

This poster is very interesting: the figure featured is actually the real General Burgoyne, while Anderson is represented by the shadowy horseman and the Devil’s Disciple merely suggested by an empty gallows. The introduction of the play only mentions Dick Dudgeon while the graphics do not show him at all. In this tale of revolt taking place during the American Revolution, featuring a protagonist that illustrates the “inexhaustible battle of the human spirit,” Burgoyne and Anderson are prominently displayed, while the philosophically more interesting Dick Dudgeon is left to the viewer’s imagination. The visual recognition shows 73% reddish brown, which once again highlights the war (Fig. 5.14).

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Fig. 5.14 IBM cultural colour visual recognition of the Gingold Theatrical Group’s poster of The Devil’s Disciple. AI analysis generated by the author

Colour Matters Colour-coding is achieved through the coded combinations of colours and objects that provide additional layers or meanings to words and phrases. The IBM Cultural Colour Visual Recognition app demonstrates how colour matters, working through colours and objects on the posters, webpages and playbills framing Shaw productions, orienting and conditioning an audience’s perspectives even before they’ve entered the theatre. Colours and objects in the play text are also loaded with coded cultural meanings.

Using Artificial Intelligence to Make Shaw Interactive: Virtual Reality, Virtual Assistant and ChatGPT A major breakthrough of AI is to enable the users—audience, readers, the general public and anybody interested or even not interested— to engage with the text, performance, context and related information interactively. The Shaw experience can potentially become private, individualized, personalized and customized for each user. These possibilities include virtual assistant and ChatGPT. Virtual Reality (VR) and Immersive Theatre Virtual reality and immersive theatre are not AI, as they do not involve the simulation of human intelligence by machines. However, it will be

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useful here to briefly mention virtual reality and immersive theatre, as AI functionalities, such as chatbots and ChatGPT, can simulate interactions with the audience and place them within virtual reality and immersive theatre environments which bring Shaw’s works much closer to the users. To date, Shavian productions have not been making much use of virtual reality (VR) and immersive theatre. Virtual immersive theatre can go further than conventional theatre. First, there is a much higher level of intimacy between the audience and the play. In conventional theatre, the interaction between the audience in the real world and the actors in their fictional world is minimal. However, in immersive theatre, the audience and the performers are placed, virtually, in the same physical space together. The audience is completely surrounded by the action of the play. This creates a high level of intimacy with the play, as the audience is living within the play’s “physical” world, effectively breaking down the fourth wall. Conventional stage performances hardly have the performers standing with their backs to the audience. Taken away from the safe vantage point of the auditorium, individual audience members in immersive theatre experience the play emotionally and rationally, engaging all their senses and prompting them to make decisions as if they were stage characters themselves. Individual audience members, being alone in the world of the play, become vulnerable when forced to interact with the play on their own as the story develops. There can also be different kinds of immersive theatre: with the audience surrounding the production, with the production happening among the audience, or with a camera filming the production on stage and the viewers experiencing this VR recording with headsets. Immersive theatre differs from conventional theatre in a number of ways, most notably storytelling. In immersive theatre, the storytelling pivots on creating an intimate environment in which the audience is alone in the immersive environment and directly interacts with the play. One is removed from the security and comfort of one’s seat in the auditorium and becomes vulnerable. In-person immersive theatre has brought another theatrical experience to Shaw’s works. On 14–15 and 21–22 April 2023, Saint Joan was staged at the Southern Virginia University Theatre in honour of the play’s centenary anniversary; it was directed by Amaree Cluff22 and the cast comprised student actors. Performances took place on the floor of the Performing Arts Centre as a theatre-in-the-round. The audience sat around the acting area rather than in front of a proscenium stage. Thus

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the audience, sitting just two feet from the acting area, experienced the action up close, especially during the trial scene, and was able to interact with the actors. In effect, individual audience members experienced the play as spectators at the trial. Natalie Dixon, who played Saint Joan, said: “It was so incredible to play in the round. Having the audience so close to the stage, it felt like they were the spectators in Joan’s trial, and we were able to really share with them this experience and how she was feeling and thinking.”23 In that Southern Virginia University Theatre production, the audience still sat passively around the performance. In some physical immersive theatre productions, however, the audience can wander into different theatrically designed rooms in which the performers play out scenes of a play with a musical background but without any dialogue. An example is Sleep No More by the British theatre company Punchdrunk, founded in 2000 by Felix Barrett. This adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth is promenade theatre and environment theatre, with the audience wandering through five stories of acting space at their own pace during three hours. There is no interaction with the performers. Audience members must wear face masks and remain silent, reacting to the performance privately. In immersive theatre using virtual reality, the play is shot with a 360-degree camera. This may be something for Shavian productions to consider to make performances more widely accessible, not to mention sustainable. Using VR headsets, the audience member sees the play through multiple perspectives using the differently angled lenses. With various tracking technologies, the audience experiences the play from a first-person perspective. The brain interprets what is seen and heard as real, as it simulates real sensory experiences. The audience member individually navigates this virtual world. VR can also be used to reconstruct a heritage theatre from historical documents. Arrighi, See and Jones (2021) have documented the digital reconstruction of a heritage building, the Victoria Theatre in Newcastle, Australia, for a project titled “Visualising the Victoria.” The historical building, which has already been turned into retail space, was rebuilt using historic newspapers, architectural floor plans, construction design and eyewitness reports. One must also consider “usability, locomotion (teleportation or other location techniques), VR interaction, sense of realism, sense of presence, natural-to-use, ease-of-use, and the perceived usefulness of this approach” (Arrighi, See and Jones, 2021, 3). In virtual reality, locomotion creates a challenge. Ideally people can track inside

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a room, which corresponds to walking in a virtual space, keeping pace with their virtual avatar. However, physical space is limited, and teleportation, a virtual locomotion technique (VLT), is used by means of a handheld motion-tracked controller. In the Victoria Theatre project, the spectator can navigate throughout the building through teleportation, a VLT, allowing users to go beyond the confines of available tracking space with a low possibility of inducing virtual reality sickness. In short, in immersive theatre, the audience is invited into the virtual world of the play to experience it. More complicated immersive virtual theatre offers more functionalities, using various tracking technologies to enable audience members to experience the play from a first-person perspective, navigate through the play and make their own decisions, and even create their own solution and become active players. At other times, when the camera is placed in the middle of the stage and the action surrounds it, audience members become cast members. In short, bringing the Shavian experience closer to the audience can open up new levels of understanding and new interpretations. With this in mind, let us now consider custom-built Shavian chatbots and ChatGPT.

Virtual Assistants: Shaw Bot and ChatGPT Shaw Bot as a Practical Assistant and a Dramatized Bot While automata and robots are machines that can compete with humans, chatbots are built to help and work with humans. Automata simulate human actions rather than speech, as they lack the language skills indicative of human intelligence. The Turk automaton was silent, while Coppélia is a mechanical doll that dances but does not speak. The robots in R.U.R. are less machines than artificial organic creatures working with their hands rather than with words. In real life, robots are well behind the chatbots in language skills, though Google is now introducing training robots such as AI chatbots: the AI learning model Robotic Transformer (RT-2) in 2023. This RT-2 makes use of a vision-language-action (VLA) model to teach robots to better recognize visual and language patterns, so that they may better understand verbal instructions. For example, experiments have shown that a robotic arm in a kitchen office setting can move a Coke can to a picture of Taylor Swift.24 In the meantime, however, chatbots and virtual assistant are better at language skills and are trained to be humanlike.

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The Sagittarius Shaw Literature Digitizing Project built the Shaw Bot on the IBM Watson Assistant AI platform. IBM Watson Assistant is a conversational AI platform, powered by large language models (LLMs), that can provide automated self-service support. Thanks to the natural language understanding in the Watson Assistant platform, the Shaw Bot knows when to search for an answer from a knowledge base, when to ask for clarity and when to direct the user to a human.25 A corpus of information about Shaw and his works were input into the Shaw Bot during the training process, allowing the Shaw Bot to learn through what we input and work out the answers using rules to approximate, then selfcorrect and reach conclusions. The Shaw Bot can easily handle practical questions, such as helping users work out the logistics of attending a specific production of Shaw’s plays. For machine learning, rules were created, including intents, entities and dialogues developed on the IBM Cloud Computing Platform. For example, we taught the Shaw Bot various things, such as play names, performance dates, how to buy tickets, a description of the plays, cast and crew names and how to get to a theatre such as the Shaw Festival Theatre in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario. Next, various intents, such as the #Buy tickets intent, were created, so that the Shaw Bot could provide the correct answers even if the user’s question was not exactly the same as those questions the bot had been trained with (Fig. 5.15). To narrow down the questions, we used entities that can provide very specific answers. As the Shaw Festival offers plays by both Shaw and other playwrights, the entity “@plays” was built to distinguish between “Shaw Play” and “Non-Shaw Play.” As the Shaw Bot was not pre-trained before we used the platform, all information had to be input. For example, to answer a question such as “What is the Shaw Festival?,” we must provide a large sample of questions comprising different ways this question will be asked, which will lead to this answer: “In 1962, in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, lawyer and playwright Brian Doherty parlayed his love for the work of Irish playwright Bernard Shaw into a summer theatre festival, producing eight performances of Don Juan in Hell and Candida in the Court House auditorium. In this singular act of passion for theatre and culture, the Shaw Festival was born.” We can also popularize information provided by famous Shaw scholars by having the Bot retell it in this user-friendly app (Fig. 5.16).

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Fig. 5.15 Shaw Bot undergoing machine learning. AI analysis generated by the author

As Shaw is well known for his witty characters, the Shaw Bot was also dramatized with some Shavian wit and humour. Attempts were made to personalize and customize the Shaw Bot for users by having the Bot ask them a few questions to channel them to various tones and registers that fit the users’ mood. It can also defend itself using Shavian reversal (Fig. 5.17).

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Fig. 5.16 Shaw Bot providing authentic scholarly information. AI analysis generated by the author

Fig. 5.17 The witty Shaw Bot. AI analysis generated by the author

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ChatGPT: Disruptive Technology or Valuable Asset? While the Shaw Bot requires intense input, ChatGPT does not need a massive input to provide information on Shaw. ChatGPT is artificial general intelligence (AGI). The best way to define AGI is to let ChatGPT define it itself: “Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) refers to a type of AI that has the ability to understand, learn and apply knowledge across a wide range of tasks and domains, similar to the cognitive abilities of a human being. In essence, AGI is a form of AI that has the capacity for generalization, reasoning, problem-solving and adaptation in a manner that is not limited to specific predefined tasks.” AGI is more powerful than common chatbots. While virtual assistants need inputting huge amounts of information and careful categorizations according to intents and entities, AGI can generalize and adapt knowledge gained from one domain to new unfamiliar situations. Whereas virtual assistants have limited powers to learn from interactions with users, ChatGPT can readily learn from experience through interactions with users. And while virtual assistants can hardly solve problems independently, ChatGPT possesses high reasoning and problem-solving skills, can analyse complex situations and can deduce logical answers through abstract thinking and high-level cognitive processes. Virtual assistants seldom admit their limitations, unless these are built into the dialogue. ChatGPT, on the other hand, is conscious of its own limitations and can autonomously make decisions. The most powerful asset of ChatGPT is its communication skills, which enable it to interact with human users using clear, natural language. Virtual assistants can hardly collaborate with users, while ChatGPT amicably invites knowledge sharing and collaborations with users. ChatGPT, using AGI, has powerful, general cognitive abilities. It differs from earlier AI, such as Narrow AI or Weak AI, which were designed for specific tasks. ChatGPT was trained on a diverse range of text sources from the internet, including books, articles, websites and other textual materials, and on a wide range of topics. However, it cannot be used as an authoritative knowledge provider, not only because its last knowledge update was in September 2021, but also because ChatGPT never claims to be a topic expert. However, ChatGPT does have the potential to become a useful Shaw tool for potential Shaw readers, audiences and the general public, and also for Shaw scholars. For example, let us use the functionalities of

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ChatGPT to examine The Apple Cart from two perspectives: first as an audience member seeking to know more about the play before attending a performance at the Shaw Festival, and second as a Shaw scholar wanting to determine the extent to which the play can be linked to the British Coronation. Disruptive technology refers to a new business model that attracts an underserviced market or revenue stream, and grows until it supplants incumbent competitors. ChatGPT, a chatbot developed by OpenAI, was launched on 30 November 2022. It differs from websites because it provides contextual information and interpretations of specific chunks of texts. It can also interact with users in a conversational way. As the Sagittarius Shaw Digitizing Project has experience building a Shaw Bot from scratch, we designed two tests for ChatGPT to illustrate its powers, as these are major concerns when considering chatbots’ usability. First, as audience members deciding whether or not to attend a performance of The Apple Cart, how can ChatGPT enable them to know more about the play, the theatre company and Shaw in order to entice them into buying tickets? Why is ChatGPT more powerful than existing popular search engines, and how can theatre companies make use of ChatGPT to increase popular interest in Shaw and Shavian performances? Second, can ChatGPT replace the Shaw scholar through AI training and machine learning? In May 2023, Geoffrey Hinton, regarded as the so-called Godfather of AI, left Google, warning of the dangers of AI: “Maybe when they become smarter than us, we’ll be able to keep them benevolent and we will be able to keep them caring much more about people than they care about themselves—unlike people. But maybe not.”26 So what opportunities does ChatGPT bring to Shaw? Are there any risks? What is the potential impact of ChatGPT on Shaw? The Apple Cart will be used as a case study. Because of its production history, The Apple Cart has become associated with the coronations of British monarchs, although this was not intended by Shaw, who was interested in the relationship between democracy and a monarchy in an English context. The play was written in 1928, was first performed in Polish in Warsaw in June 1929, and the English première was at the first Malvern Drama Festival in August 1929. In the summer of 1937, the play became topical following the coronation of George VI, who ascended the throne as a result of the abdication of his brother, Edward VIII. This prompted a revival of The Apple Cart

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at the Malvern Festival.27 In The Apple Cart , King Magnus threatens to abdicate, so that he can be a commoner and offer himself to the Royal Borough of Windsor as a candidate at the forthcoming general election. Following the coronation of King George VI, The Apple Cart was produced from 28 July to 19 August 1937 at the Malvern Theatre, Worcestershire. And following the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II at Westminster Abbey on 2 June 1953, the play was staged again, this time as a Coronation Year Production in 1953, and went on tour with Noël Coward as Magnus and Margaret Leighton as Orinthia. The 2023 staging at the Shaw Festival was never intended as a Coronation Year Production, but in effect became one. The production was announced on 31 August 2022, just over a week before the Queen died on 8 September. King Charles III was crowned on 6 May 2023, with The Apple Cart being staged at the Shaw Festival from 13 June to 7 October 2023. What are the potential opportunities offered by ChatGPT? Will ChatGPT be useful for potential theatre-goers? Let us consider the situation when those potential theatre-goers are trying to decide whether or not they should attend a performance The Apple Cart at the Shaw Festival. Here are some questions they may ask to help them decide: 1. They may want to know more about The Apple Cart . Q. Can you tell me something about Bernard Shaw’s The Apple Cart ? ChatGPT provides the following information: Play: finished in 1929 Genre: Political satire that explores the tensions between political power and personal freedom. Plot Themes: the role of monarchy, political intrigue, power of rhetoric, conflict between personal desires and political responsibilities. Shaw: satire and humour. “Overall, The Apple Cart is a thought-provoking and entertaining play that combines Shaw’s trademark wit and intellectual depth. It offers a satirical commentary on politics and society while presenting complex characters and engaging dialogue.”

The power of ChatGPT lies less in providing the above information, which one can find elsewhere, including Wikipedia, but in how that information is presented: it sounds humanlike, credible and persuasive. To find

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out why this is the case, one must look at how ChatGPT is trained. The GPT in ChatGPT stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer. According to Open AI, the company that developed ChatGPT, ChatGPT is trained using Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). As a result, ChatGPT responses sound very human. 2. The next question involves how much ChatGPT knows about Shaw’s plays. Q. How were you trained on Bernard Shaw’s plays? ChatGPT: As an AI language model, my responses are generated based on a mixture of licensed data, data created by human trainers, and publicly available data. I have not been trained directly on specific plays by Bernard Shaw, including “The Apple Cart,” nor do I have access to proprietary databases or copyrighted material.

ChatGPT is powerful not so much because of the data with which it was trained, but because of its power to generate content. ChatGPT was trained on licensed data, data created by human trainers and publicly available data. Its data sources include books, articles, websites and other texts on a wide array of topics. ChatGPT is a Large Language Model (LLM), a type of deep-learning algorithm that can understand and generate text according to the data on which it was trained. It is based on natural language processing, which allows human beings to interact with the AI. ChatGPT is a generative model powered by deep learning, in which massive amounts of data were used to train the AI system to perform a task. As a result, the text models, which are advanced language processing tools, can generate, classify and summarize text with high levels of coherence and accuracy. ChatGPT was deliberately asked a question it could not answer, as its data training ceased in September 2021. It was asked whether it knows anything about the Shaw Festival’s production of The Apple Cart in 2023. Not surprisingly, it directed the user to visit the Shaw Festival website or contact the Festival directly. ChatGPT is not a real-time search engine. While it is impossible to train the AI again and again with updated data, the AI can learn from human feedback to fill the gaps.28 We asked ChatGPT to refer to the Shaw Festival’s website for the information about the production of The Apple Cart . It could not do so, as it did not have direct access to external websites or specific production information. Instead, it referred us to the Shaw Festival website.

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Next, we tried to train ChatGPT on the spot by providing it with the actual content drawn from the Shaw Festival website in a large unstructured chunk. ChatGPT immediately analysed the data and put it into a nice, user-friendly format. We then asked ChatGPT to analyse the data and identify the director of The Apple Cart ; it correctly found Eda Holmes. Thus, theatre companies, such as the Shaw Festival, may consider using this functionality of ChatGPT to provide and extract text to answer specific questions from a potential audience member. ChatGPT functions like an instant chatbot without users having to spend a fortune to ask developers to build it. To find out whether ChatGPT can be used to attract audiences to The Apple Cart at the Shaw Festival, we asked the chatbot whether it was worthwhile seeing the play there. The now-trained ChatGPT smartly answered: “The Apple Cart” is considered one of Bernard Shaw’s notable works and has been performed and celebrated over the years. “The Apple Cart” at the Shaw Festival offers a satirical exploration of power dynamics and political intrigue, with Shaw’s trademark wit and social commentary. It delves into themes such as the nature of authority, individual freedoms, and the role of monarchy. The play’s fiendish plot and sharp dialogue have contributed to its reputation as a brilliant satire. If you enjoy thought-provoking and intellectually stimulating theater that engages with political themes and features Shaw’s sharp writing, “The Apple Cart” at the Shaw Festival might be a production worth considering.

ChatGPT was also asked to tell us whether the crew and cast of The Apple Cart at the Shaw Festival were good. While it advised users to seek more information themselves, it provided some positive comments about the Shaw Festival, this time without any training from us: Shaw Festival is known for its high artistic standards and talented actors, directors, designers and crew members. They strive to present professional and engaging productions of classic and contemporary plays.

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The Festival has a strong reputation for showcasing the works of playwright George Bernard Shaw.

ChatGPT was also asked to provide some practical advice, such as how to get to Niagara-on-the-Lake from South Florida. It told how one could travel by air, car or train, or that one could go to Buffalo first and cross the border into Canada. To find out whether ChatGPT can be useful for the Shaw scholar, an article by the renowned Shaw scholar Stanley Weintraub, “King Magnus and King Minus: A Play and a Playlet,” published in SHAW , vol. 27 (2007), pp. 11–27, was used as a training sample. ChatGPT was asked whether it has read the article; as expected, it has not. ChatGPT has no direct access to its training data or the ability to browse the internet. ChatGPT is not a real-time search engine like Google. Thus, if ChatGPT was able to answer the following questions, it was because of its own capabilities. ChatGPT was asked to shed light on persons, relations, publications and incidents. First came persons. In his article, Weintraub shows how John Grigg, Edward VIII’s close friend, took the cue from The Apple Cart and proposed to the King that if he adopted the domestic politics of Lloyd George and the foreign policies of Winston Churchill, he could become a “well-nigh irresistible force.”29 ChatGPT could not find substantive relations: “There is no widely known or documented evidence to suggest that John Grigg (Lord Altrincham) advised Edward VIII to consider running for election. The abdication crisis of Edward VIII in 1936 was primarily driven by his desire to marry Wallis Simpson, an American divorcée, which created a significant constitutional and political controversy. The idea of the king running for election was not a prominent factor in the events leading to Edward VIII’s abdication.” Second came relations. Weintraub shows that Shaw’s playlet, “The King, The Constitution and The Lady,” was related to Edward VIII’s abdication. ChatGPT was asked the same question and affirmed the relation: “Yes, Bernard Shaw’s playlet ‘The King, The Constitution and The Lady’ is indeed related to Edward VIII’s abdication. The playlet was written by Shaw in response to the abdication crisis that unfolded in 1936 when Edward VIII decided to marry Wallis Simpson, an American divorcée. The playlet explores the conflict between love and duty, with

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the character of the king facing the choice between his personal desires and the responsibilities of his position as the constitutional monarch.” Third came publications. ChatGPT was trained with massive data sets. The corpus of old publications in its training data sets were impressive, as these were out of copyright. ChatGPT was asked to identify a particular publication mentioned in Weintraub’s article: an article in the Evening Standard dated 5 December 1936, which prompted Churchill to write to Edward VIII that there would be “no final decision or bill till after Christmas” and that the King should not leave the country. Churchill wrote: “And for real wit Bernard Shaw’s article in to-night’s Evening Standard should be read. He is joyous.”30 ChatGPT was asked to identify this article: Q: What was Bernard Shaw’s article published in the Evening Standard on 5 December 1936? ChatGPT: “On 5 December 1936, Bernard Shaw published an article in the Evening Standard titled “I Agree with the King.” In this article, Shaw expressed his support for Edward VIII’s decision to abdicate the throne in order to marry Wallis Simpson. Shaw argued that love and personal happiness were more important than the obligations of royalty and that Edward VIII had made a courageous and responsible choice. Shaw’s article caused a significant stir at the time, as it went against the prevailing opinion of the establishment and many members of the British public. Shaw’s support for the abdication and his defense of the king’s right to pursue love and happiness garnered attention and added to the public debate surrounding the abdication crisis.

ChatGPT was much more powerful, as the same question posed to Google yielded a number of loosely related raw texts beginning with the Wikipedia entry on Shaw. ChatGPT was good at identifying old texts; it immediately identified the paragraph recited by Pamphilius in Act I: “The excerpt you provided comes from the poem “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” by Lord Byron.” Then it was asked to identify an extract from “The King, The Constitution and The Lady”; ChatGPT thought it was from The Apple Cart . This was a miss, but a good guess, as the full text of “The King, The Constitution and The Lady” cannot be found on the internet, although the full text of The Apple Cart can. At least ChatGPT was able to spot the affinity between The Apple Cart and “The King, The Constitution and The Lady.” It was corrected.

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ChatGPT was then given a chunk of text from The Apple Cart . It identified that correctly at once. ChatGPT: The text you provided comes from Bernard Shaw’s play “The Apple Cart.” It is a dialogue between the character Magnus and the rest of the characters in the play. Magnus suggests the possibility of abdication, which causes surprise and consternation among the others. The reference to Lysistrata and the Emperor Charles the Fifth highlights the historical precedent of abdications. “The Apple Cart” is a satirical play by Shaw that explores political power, relationships, and the dynamics of governance.

ChatGPT also identifies a chunk of text from the Preface to The Apple Cart: Q: Where does this text come from? ChatGPT: The text you provided comes from George Bernard Shaw’s preface to his play “The Apple Cart.” In this preface, Shaw addresses the expectations and reactions that arose from the play’s early performances. He mentions the anticipation of an elaborate prefatory treatise on democracy, explaining his apparent shift from being a democrat to becoming a devoted royalist. He also references the play’s performance in Dresden, where it was prohibited due to its perceived blasphemy against democracy.

Can ChatGPT replace Shaw scholars? Definitely not! In fact there are potential risks in using ChatGPT for Shaw research. First, ChatGPT was not always able to identify the text. Its accuracy is better with play texts in digital versions online and with the beginning of articles where there is less ambiguity. And while it could identify texts as being by Shaw, it sometimes muddled up the plays, e.g., taking Major Barbara or Heartbreak House for an extract from the Preface to The Apple Cart on society and politics. Second, ChatGPT was asked why The Apple Cart was considered a Coronation Play. It immediately provided the answer: Themes and events related to monarchy and the coronation of a king. Complexities of monarchy, the relationship between the king and his advisors, and the clash between personal desires and the responsibilities of a ruler. It offers a satirical commentary on the dynamics of power and the challenges faced by those in positions of authority.

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The title “The Apple Cart” itself is symbolic, representing the disruption or upset of the established order.

However, it could find no parallels between the productions and the coronations. While it can synthesize texts, it cannot synthesize thoughts and ideas. ChatGPT was good at presenting clear and logical arguments, but not that good at carrying out research independently. ChatGPT’s greatest strength is its ability to present a clear and logical argument, which makes it very credible. Hence a debatable question was posed: Why was the Apple Cart an influential play? ChatGPT: “The Apple Cart” by George Bernard Shaw is considered influential for several reasons:

1. Satirical Commentary: The play offers a satirical commentary on political power, governance and societal structures. Shaw uses wit, irony and humour to critique the establishment and challenge traditional notions of authority. The play’s exploration of monarchy, democracy and the clash between personal desires and responsibilities resonated with audiences and sparked discussions about the nature of power. 2. Modernization of Monarchy: “The Apple Cart” presents a fictionalized depiction of a modern monarchy and explores the tensions between the king and his advisors. Shaw portrays King Magnus as a forward-thinking ruler who challenges the conventional expectations of a monarch. The play contributed to a broader conversation about the relevance and role of monarchy in a changing society. 3. Exploration of Power Dynamics: Shaw delves into the dynamics of power and the struggles between political figures, highlighting the conflicts and compromises that occur in the pursuit and exercise of power. The play examines the relationship between the king and his prime minister, exposing the power struggles and personal motivations at play. 4. Social and Political Commentary: Like many of Shaw’s works, “The Apple Cart” reflects his social and political views. The play addresses themes such as class struggle, the influence of vested interests and the limitations of traditional political systems. Shaw uses the play as

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a platform to convey his ideas and provoke thought and discussion about society and governance. 5. Theatrical Innovation: “The Apple Cart” demonstrates Shaw’s innovative approach to theatre. He combines sharp dialogue, humour and social critique in a way that challenges traditional theatrical conventions. The play pushes boundaries and engages the audience intellectually and emotionally. Overall, “The Apple Cart” stands as an influential play due to its satirical commentary, modernized depiction of monarchy, exploration of power dynamics, social and political commentary and Shaw’s theatrical innovation. It has had a lasting impact on the theatrical landscape and continues to be studied and performed today. What are the risks and benefits of using ChatGPT as a research tool? ChatGPT was asked to list 20 scholarly articles on The Apple Cart and the coronation. It immediately generated a list of 20 titles with authors that appeared plausible. The first name, J. L. Wisenthal, is a Shaw scholar, but the title of that article mentioned by ChatGPT cannot be found. The second and third names, “S. Mumar and M. Johnson,” may be Samiran Kumar and Maurice Johnson, who were Shaw authors many years ago. The rest of the names and titles cannot be found. So ChatGPT began with the name of a real Shaw scholar, then used approximation until, starting with the fourth name, all are fake names and titles of papers. ChatGPT, with its power to generate content and to follow writing styles, is more than capable of generating this plausible list. ChatGPT was asked where one could find those articles. Its advice was practical: “Start by searching for the article title in academic databases such as JSTOR, ProQuest, or Google Scholar.” This advice is useful for both students and scholars. While ChatGPT cannot perform a literature review, it can provide potential study areas: political satire, power and authority, gender and politics, social commentary and theatrical context. The next question is whether ChatGPT can bridge the gap between Shaw’s time and the here and now. It turns out that ChatGPT can be pretty good at digging up historical events. Shaw did not watch the coronation procession of George VI on 9 May 1937. The New York Times reports that “George Bernard Shaw will not see the coronation procession on Wednesday. He plans to get in a full day’s work at his village

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home in Ayot St. Lawrence, about thirty miles north of London.”31 When ChatGPT was asked whether Shaw had watched the coronation procession, it answered correctly and also provided an explanation: Q: Did Bernard Shaw watch the coronation procession of George VI? ChatGPT: No, George Bernard Shaw did not personally witness the coronation procession of King George VI. Shaw was an avowed critic of the monarchy and had no interest in attending or participating in such ceremonial events. He did not view the monarchy favorably and often expressed his republican beliefs. Shaw’s absence from the coronation procession of King George VI aligns with his broader stance on the monarchy as an outdated institution. While he may have been aware of the event taking place, there is no evidence to suggest that he attended or had any direct involvement in the coronation proceedings.

However, when it could not answer a question, ChatGPT at times made up the answers and pretended those were Shaw quotes. In fact it can readily fake Shaw quotes, just as it can generate new writing basing on the writing styles of authors. Therefore, ChatGPT does not have the capability to be disruptive technology, at least for now. Moreover, it can be a valuable tool in enlisting potential Shaw theatre-goers and readers. For Shaw scholars, it can provide some good advice on strategies to find research materials. However, one must use ChatGPT with caution, as there are potential risks and one may not be able to predict where and when these risks may occur. ChatGPT has no moral compunctions about generating fake writings. This may pose new challenges to Shaw scholars: the amount of Shaw writings yet to be discovered may provide a grey area, and ChatGPT fakes may sometimes be taken as real, while at other times, given the huge volume of training data used in ChatGPT’s machine learning, what it generates may be genuine after all.

Notes 1. Caldwell Titcomb, “American Shakespeare Festival: III ‘Devil’s Disciple’ Is Bright and Brassy Show.” https://www.thecrimson. com/article/1970/7/10/american-shakespeare-festival-iii-devilsdisciple/. Accessed on 1 September 2023.

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2. Dan H. Laurence, ed., Bernard Shaw, Collected Letters: 1911–1925 (London: Max Reinhardt, 1985), p. 773. 3. Ibid., p. 380. 4. Ibid., p. 97. 5. Ibid., p. 338. 6. Ibid., p. 120. 7. Shaw Festival, “The Devil’s Disciple.” https://www.shawfest. com/playbill/the-devils-disciple/. Accessed on 1 September 2023. 8. “Wordclouds.” https://www.wordclouds.com. Accessed on 1 September 2023. 9. Internet Broadway Database, https://www.ibdb.com/broadwayproduction/the-devils-disciple-7813. Accessed on 1 September 2023. 10. “Collection: Federal Theatre Project, 1935 to 1939.” https:// www.loc.gov/collections/federal-theatre-project-1935-to-1939/? fa=subject:poster%7Ccontributor:shaw,+bernard%7Cpartof:perfor ming+arts+encyclopedia&sp=1. Accessed on 1 September 2023. 11. The Devil’s Disciple. Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/ item/flrpd.06280002/. Accessed on 1 September 2023. 12. “20th Century Broadway and Beyond: A Chronology, 1900– 1949.” https://web.ics.purdue.edu/~fliotsos/b/b/1900-1949. html. Accessed on 1 September 2023. 13. “Asolo Repertory Theatre presents The Devil’s Disciple.” https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=WReYVpu_AzM. Accessed on 1 September 2023. 14. “Truro Cathedral.” https://www.pinterest.ca/pin/466685580 111937014/. Accessed on 1 September 2023. 15. Livia Gashon, “A Brief History of U.S. Drinking” (12 August 2016). https://daily.jstor.org/a-brief-history-of-drinkingalcohol/. Accessed on 1 September 2023. 16. Jeffrey M. Jones, “U.S. Drinkers Consuming Alcohol More Regularly Beer Regains Slight Edge over Wine as Preferred Drink.” https://news.gallup.com/poll/23935/us-drinkers-consuming-alc ohol-more-regularly.aspx. Accessed on 1 September 2023. 17. Dan H. Laurence, ed., Bernard Shaw, Collected Letters: 1898–1910, p. 548. 18. Variety Staff, “The Devil’s Disciple.” https://variety.com/1958/ film/reviews/the-devil-s-disciple-1200419296/. Accessed on 1 September 2023.

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19. Ultimate Movie Rankings, “Top Movie Stars of the 1950s.” https://www.ultimatemovierankings.com/top-movie-stars1950s/. Accessed on 1 September 2023. 20. “The Devil’s Disciple (1959) Original Trailer.” https://www.you tube.com/watch?v=MQC34HPyccw&list=PL4U9wwvIAWOXyL 8mxNgc6CYTa-YsFHgaO. Accessed on 1 September 2023. 21. “The Devil’s Disciple,” The Australian Live Performance Database. https://www.ausstage.edu.au/pages/work/2650. Accessed on 1 September 2023. 22. Lacy Rodriguez, “Bringing ‘Saint Joan’ to Life in an Immersive Audience Experience” (25 April 2023). https://news.svu.edu/ 2023/bringing-saint-joan-to-life-in-an-immersive-audience-experi ence/. Accessed on 1 September 2023. 23. Ibid. 24. Emilia David, “Google Is Training Robots the Way It Trains AI Chatbots” (28 July 2023). https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/ 28/23811109/google-smart-robot-generative-ai. Accessed on 1 September 2023. 25. “More Than a Chatbot.” https://www.ibm.com/cloud/watsonassistant/. Accessed on 1 September 2023. 26. “Why Geoffrey Hinton Is Worried About the Future of AI.” https://srinstitute.utoronto.ca/news/why-geoffrey-hintonis-worried-about-the-future-of-ai. Accessed on 1 September 2023. 27. Stanley Weintraub, “King Magnus and King Minus: A Play and a Playlet.” SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies 27 (2007), pp. 11–27. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40681815. Accessed on 1 September 2023. 28. Josh Achiam, “Safely Aligning Powerful AI Systems Is One of the Most Important Unsolved Problems for Our Mission. Techniques Like Learning from Human Feedback Are Helping Us Get Closer, and We Are Actively Researching New Techniques to Help Us Fill The Gaps.” https://openai.com/research/overview. Accessed on 1 September 2023. 29. Stanley Weintraub, “King Magnus and King Minus: A Play and a Playlet” SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies 27 (2007), pp. 11–27, p. 11. https://www.jstor.org/stable/406 81815. Accessed on 1 September 2023. 30. Ibid., p. 14.

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31. “PANORAMA: THE FOREIGN SCENE; Concerning the Coronation, the Village Where Joan of Arc Was Born and the Foreign Legion,” New York Times (9 May 1937), Section E, p. 9.

CHAPTER 6

The Way Forward: Shaw and Artificial Intelligence

Abstract Shaw’s life intersected with automata, robots, and AI. In fact he was born during the golden age of the automaton. His Bible of the Life Force and Creative Evolution, Back to Methuselah, was written when word “robot” was coined. Shaw’s life ran in tandem with the rise of AI, and the big names in AI were his contemporaries. What may happen to Shaw with the rise of AI? Will AI be a threat, a risk or an opportunity? Thus far, ChatGPT appears to be a companion to Shaw studies rather than a rival. Keywords Bernard Shaw · Automata · Robots · Artificial intelligence · ChatGPT

To examine the way forward, let us change perspectives and examine how AI regards Shaw. Thus far, we have seen how Shaw’s life intersected with the automaton, the robot, and AI. Born in the golden age of the automaton, Shaw witnessed the coining of the word “robot”. He lived alongside and had an impact on the rise of AI, as the big names in AI were among his contemporaries. What will happen to Shaw’s works with the rise of AI? Will AI prove a threat, a risk or an opportunity? Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 K. Li, Bernard Shaw, Automata, Robots, and Artificial Intelligence, Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-49226-6_6

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ChatGPT’s company, was among the dignitaries attending the secretive Bilderberg meetings in Lisbon from 18 to 21 May 2023, a forum for informal, private discussions between business and political elites on major global issues.1 In March 2023, dozens of tech leaders, academics and researchers signed a letter calling for a pause in the training of the most powerful AI systems for at least six months. This letter, published by a nonprofit (backed by Elon Musk) called the Future of Life Institute, reads: “Advanced AI could represent a profound change in the history of life on Earth, and should be planned for and managed with commensurate care and resources. Unfortunately, this level of planning and management is not happening, even though recent months have seen AI labs locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no one—not even their creators—can understand, predict, or reliably control.”2 However, in June 2023, Elon Musk announced xAI, his new company focused on AI.3 The so-called “Godfather of AI” Geoffrey Hinton is the chief scientific advisor of the newly established $27 million Vector Institute, set up to accelerate the safe and responsible adoption of ethical AI and to help businesses boost their competitiveness through the new technology. He warns: “We have to take seriously the possibility that [AI models] get to be smarter than us—which seems quite likely—and they have goals of their own. They may well develop the goal of taking control—and if they do that, we’re in trouble.”4 In his plays, Shaw worked to incorporate concepts of automata and robots, using them as a means to illustrate and advocate his theory of the Life Force and Creative Evolution. Although he did not live to see the powerful AI devices pervading technology today, the founding fathers of AI were his contemporaries: Alan Turing (1912–1954), Allen Newell (1927–92) and Herbert A. Simon (1916–2001), John McCarthy (1927–2011), Marvin Minsky (1927–2016). In addition, Joseph Weizenbaum’s (1923–2008) ELIZA was inspired by Shaw’s Eliza in Pygmalion, and Turing’s Oracle may well be echoing the Oracle in Shaw’s Back to Methuselah. Shaw, it appears, was proverbially ahead of his time. What then are the prospects for Shaw in this age of the AI? To understand whether AI will compete with Shaw or be a useful collaborator, ChatGPT was asked to generate a poem on Shaw, the automaton, the robot and AI, a task it completed in less than one second:

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Q: Please generate a poem on Bernard Shaw and automaton, robots and AI ChatGPT: In a world of gears and coded light, Where minds of metal shine so bright, A tale unfolds of Shaw’s insight, And automata that take to flight. Bernard Shaw, a mind so keen, A playwright’s wit, a critic’s sheen, He pondered realms yet to be seen, Where machines would dance and dream. With words that flowed like rivers free, He questioned what our eyes could see, Could robots mimic humanity? Or were they bound by their machinery? In factories of futuristic grace, Automata found their own place, Their gears aligned in rhythmic embrace, Yet lacking heart’s tender grace. Then came AI, with circuits vast, A digital realm so wide and vast, Could consciousness within it amass? Or would it forever remain a broadcast? Shaw’s words echoed through the age, As AI burst from its digital cage, A new chapter on technology’s stage, A fusion of minds in a boundless page. But as we stride into the unknown, Remember the wisdom Shaw had shown, That though machines have greatly grown, Humanity’s essence can’t be overthrown. In this dance of science and soul’s fire, Shaw’s legacy and AI’s desire, A partnership we must aspire, Where progress and compassion never tire (Fig. 6.1).

Presumably, ChatGPT is saying that Shaw’s humanity and compassion are needed and that AI will work in partnership with Shaw. Despite the doggerel, ChatGPT did touch on important Shavian concerns: “He pondered realms yet to be seen,” “He questioned what our eyes could see.” In Back to Methuselah, the Serpent tells Eve: “You see things; and you say ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were; and I say ‘Why not?’.” Moreover, ChatGPT asks: “Could consciousness within it amass?” The He-Ancient in Back to Methuselah wants to be “A vortex.” Near the end of the play, Lilith says: “The impulse I gave [Man and Woman] in that day when I sundered myself in twain and launched Man and Woman on the earth still urges them: after passing a million goals they press on to the goal of redemption from the flesh, to the vortex freed from matter, to the whirlpool in pure intelligence that, when the world began, was a whirlpool in pure force.” ChatGPT depicts Shaw in partnership with AI: “Shaw’s words echoed through the age, As AI burst from its digital cage, A new chapter on technology’s stage, A fusion of minds in a boundless page. … But as we

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Fig. 6.1 Poem generated by ChatGPT on Bernard Shaw, automata, robots and artificial intelligence. AI analysis generated by the author

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stride into the unknown, Remember the wisdom Shaw had shown.” At the end of Back to Methuselah, Lilith ponders on the unknown: “Of Life only is there no end; and though of its million starry mansions many are empty and many still unbuilt, and though its vast domain is as yet unbearably desert, my seed shall one day fill it and master its matter to its uttermost confines. And for what may be beyond, the eyesight of Lilith is too short. It is enough that there is a beyond.” ChatGPT concludes with “Shaw’s legacy and AI’s desire, A partnership we must aspire.” In Back to Methuselah, the Serpent tells Eve about Lilith’s creation: “She did not know then that imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire; you will what you imagine; and at last you create what you will.” In short, in less than one second, ChatGPT demonstrated an understanding of the essence of Shaw’s theory of the Life Force and Creative Evolution, and pledged to work with Shaw. AI may well be a powerful asset ushering Shaw studies into new and exciting realms. “It is enough that there is a beyond.”

Notes 1. David Averre, “ChatGPT and Microsoft Chiefs Join US and European Elites Flocking to Lisbon for Secretive, Behind-Closed-Doors Bilderberg Meetings on AI, China, Russia-Ukraine and the Future of Banking,” Daily Mail (19 May 2023). https://www.dailym ail.co.uk/news/article-12102071/ChatGPT-Microsoft-chiefs-joinEuropean-elites-Lisbon-secretive-conference.html Accessed on 1 September 2023. 2. Samantha Murphy Kelly, “Elon Musk and Other Tech Leaders Call for Pause in ‘Out of Control’ AI Race.” CNN Business. https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/29/tech/ai-letter-elon-musktech-leaders/index.html#:~:text=The%20letter%20said%20the%20p ause Accessed on 1 September 2023. 3. Catherine Thorbecke, “Elon Musk Announces a New AI Company.” https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/12/tech/elon-musk-ai-com pany/index.html Accessed on 1 September 2023. 4. Tabassum Siddiqui, “Risks of Artificial Intelligence Must Be Considered as the Technology Evolves: Geoffrey Hinton,” U of T News (29 June 2023). https://www.utoronto.ca/news/risks-artificial-int elligence-must-be-considered-technology-evolves-geoffrey-hinton Accessed on 1 September 2023.

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Index

A Alcinos, King of the Phaeacians, 20 Alexander III, Tsar, 11 al-Jazari, 17 Altman, Sam, 119 American Revolutionary War, 95 Analytical Society, 52 Archer, William, 11 Archytas of Tarentum, 17 Aristotle, 19 Politics , 19 Artificial general intelligence (AGI), 105 artificial intelligence (AI), 5, 50, 54 Ashby, William Ross, 63 Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC), 54 automata Automaton knight, 11 bronze Horses of the Cabeiri, 19 cat waving a fan, 3 Caucasian Eagle, 19 Cleopatra-Semiramis, 3, 14, 21 Clockwork Prayer, 40

clown illusionist, 3 duck, 4 elephant, 11 Fanfare, 13 flute player, 17 geminoid, 29 Golden Maidens, 19 Japanese tea waitress, 3 Olimpia, 15, 29 orchestra, 17 Ozymandias, 3, 14, 21, 40 peacocks, 17 Psycho, 13, 14 Talos, 19 throne, 18, 106, 111 Turk, 4, 14, 29, 30, 51, 52, 101 Zoe, 13 automata theory, 20, 21, 23, 62 Automatic Computing Engine (ACE), 63 B Babbage, Charles, 4, 14, 30, 51–53

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 K. Li, Bernard Shaw, Automata, Robots, and Artificial Intelligence, Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-49226-6

135

136

INDEX

Analytical Engine, 14, 53 Difference Machine, 53 loses to the Turk automaton, 4, 14 Babbage, Henry Prevost, 51 Bailey, J.O., 23 Bailly, Christian, 2 Automata: The Golden Age 1848–1914, 2 Balkenius, Christian, 30 Barbier, Paul-Jules, 15 Barrett, Felix, 100 Bernoulli numbers, 53 Bicks, Michael, 5 “Smartest Machine on Earth”, 5 Bletchley Park, 54 Boehn, Max Ferdinand Karl von, 22 Puppets and Automata (or Dolls and Puppets), 22 Bombe (electromechanical calculator), 54 Bontems, 2 Bradbrook, B.R., 31 Buckingham Palace, 11, 17 Bush, Vannevar, 54 Differential Analyzer, 54 Butler, Samuel, 20, 55, 56 The Iliad, 20 The Odyssey, 20 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 53, 111 “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage”, 111

C Callistratus, 19 Campbell, Mrs. Patrick, 14, 51, 83 ˇ Capek, Karel The Absolute at Large, 31 Krakatit , 31 “Letters to England from Karel ˇ 7 Capek”,

Rosumovi Umˇelí Roboti, or Rossum’s Universal Robots , 4, 5, 30, 32, 34, 37, 38, 42, 43, 45 Vˇec Makropulos (The Makropulos Affair), 45 ˇ ˇ 4, 5, Capek, Karel, with Josef Capek, 23, 30, 31, 33–35, 37, 38, 42, 43, 45, 53 The Insect Play, 31 The Makropulos Affair, 31, 45 The Manufacture the Absolute, 31 Cerf, Vint, 64 ARPANET, 64 Charles III, 107 Chatbots, 99, 101, 105, 106 ChatGPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer), 70, 73, 98, 99, 101, 105–115, 120, 121, 123 Chesterton, G.K., 4, 31–33, 35, 36 Church, Alonzo, 62 Churchill, Winston, 110, 111 Clarke, Joan, 62 Cluff, Amaree, 99 Colby, Kenneth, 64 PARRY, 64 Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, 54 Cooke, John Algernon, 12 Council for Scientific and Industrial Research Automatic Computer (CSIRAC), 54 Coward, Nöel, 107 Cream, Thomas Neill, 4, 31 cybernetics, 54–56, 63 D Dartmouth College, 5, 50 Dartmouth Conference, 5, 50 Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence (DSRPAI), 50 Darwin, Charles, 16

INDEX

On the Origin of Species , 16 da Vinci, Leonardo, 11 Automaton knight, 11 Deadalus, 19, 20 Dean, Basil, 33 Deep Blue (computer), 63 Delibes, Léo, 3 Coppélia, 3, 15 Devol, George, 40 Unimate, 40 Dickens, Charles, 13 Differential Analyzer, 54 Dixon, Natalie, 100 Douglas, Kirk, 93

E Eckert, J. Presper, 54 Eddington, Sir Arthur Stanley, 59 Edward VIII, 106, 110, 111 abdication of, 106 Egyptian Hall (London), 12 Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator (ENIAC), 54 ELIZA, 64, 120 Elizabeth II, 107 Engleberger, Joseph, 40 Entscheidungsproblem (decision problem), 59

F Fabergé, Carl, 11 Diamond Trellis Egg, 11 Faversham, William, 84 Federal Theatre Project, 87–89, 94 Finite Automaton (FA), 21 Finite-State Machine (FSM), 21 Forbidden City, Beijing, 17 France, Anatole, 15 Franklin, Benjamin, 4, 14, 51 Frederick the Great, 4, 51

137

G Gémier, Firmin, 83 George V, 11 George VI, 106, 107, 114, 115 Gingold Theatrical Group, 97 Good, I.J., 59 Grigg, John, 110 Guinness Collection (Morris Museum, New Jersey), 10 H Hamon, Augustin, 83, 93 Hephaestus, 19, 20 Hesiod, 19 Hewlett, Bill, 54 Hilbert, David, 59 Entscheidungsproblem, 59 Hinton, Geoffrey, 34, 43, 106, 120 Hix, Lisa, 10 Hoffmann, E.T.A., 3, 15 Der Sandmann, 15 The Nutcracker and The Mouse King , 15 Hollerith, Herman, 54 Homer, 19, 20 Iliad, 19 Odyssey, 20 I IBM Cloud Computing Platform, 82, 102 IBM Cultural Colour Visual Recognition, 82, 98 IBM SPSS Modeller (or text modeller), 74, 76–78 IBM SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) AI platform, 6, 73, 74, 81 IBM SPSS Statistics, 74 IBM visual recognition app, 82, 84, 86, 88, 91, 92

138

INDEX

IBM Watson Assistant AI platform, 102 Industrial Revolution, 56 Ishiguro, Hiroshi, 29, 30

J Jackson, Barry, 35 Johansson, Birger, 30 Johnson, Maurice, 114

K Kasparov, Garry, 63 Kellett, E.E., 23 “The Lady Automaton”, 23 Kempelen, Wolfgang von, 4, 14, 51, 52 Turk automation, 14, 51 Kenworthy, Joseph Montague, 4, 32 Klass, Philip, 23 Kumar, Samiran, 114

L Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste, 16 Lambert and Renou, 2 Lancaster, Burt, 93, 94 From Here to Eternity, 94 Run Silent, Run Deep, 94 Large Language Model (LLM), 102, 108 Leighton, Margaret, 107 Louis XV, 4 Lovelace, Ada, 53

M Madame Tussaud’s, 4, 31 Maelzel, Johann Nepomuk, 52 Malvern Drama Festival, 106 Mansfield, Richard, 83 Maria Theresa, Empress, 4, 14

Maskelyne, John Nevil, 12, 13 Automata, 12 “Maskelyne and Cooke’s Automata”, 12 trick cabinet, 12, 13 Mauchly, John, 54 McCarthy, John, 5, 50, 120 Minos, King of Crete, 19 Minsky, Marvin, 5, 50, 120 Musk, Elon, 120 “Future of Life Institute”, 120 xAI, 120 My Fair Lady, 63, 64

N Napoleon Bonaparte, 14, 79, 80 natural language processing (NLP), 28, 108 natural language understanding, 6, 79, 80, 102 Newell, Allen, 120 Newman, M.H.A., 59 Nicholl, Josephine, 22 Nishio, Shuichi, 29, 30 Novack-Jones, Claudia, 37 Nuitter, Charles-Louis-Étienne, 3

O Offenbach, Jacques, 15 Les contes d’Hoffmann, 15 Olivier, Laurence, 93, 97 O’Malley, Ellen, 38 Ovid, 20 Metamorphoses , 20

P Packard, David, 54 PARRY, 64 Pearson, Harry, 10 Peters, Harry T., 96

INDEX

“America on Stone”, 96 Phalibois, 2, 3 Philmus, Robert, 37 Pick, Otto, 38 W.U.R. (Werstands universal robots), 38 Playfair, Nigel, 4, 37, 38 Podrecca, Vittorio, 22 Teatro dei Piccoli, 22 Procter, Jane Eliza, 5, 62 Punchdrunk (theatre company), 100 Sleep No More, 100 Pygmalion (myth of), 120 R Rathbone, Basil, 37 Rattray, F.C., 55 Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), 108 Robotic Transformer (RT-2), 101 robots, 4–6, 10, 16, 23, 27–30, 32–35, 37–45, 50, 53, 101, 119–121 Android Repliee Q2, 29 Roombas, 29 Unimate, 40 Rochester, Nathaniel, 5, 50 Roullet and Descamps, 2 Royal Shakespeare Company, 96 S Sagittarius Shaw Literature Digitizing Project, 102 Saint-Léon, Arthur, 3 Scheutz, Edvard, 54 Scheutz, Per Georg, 54 Scientific Memoirs Selected from the Transactions of Foreign Academies of Science and Learned Societies , 53 Scott, Jeanette, 93

139

Selver, Paul, 4, 37, 38 Shakespeare, William, 13, 31, 100 Macbeth, 13, 100 Shannon, Claude E., 5, 50 Shaw, Bernard and AI, 2, 6, 16, 119, 121 and automata, 21, 121 and ChatGPT, 6 and robots, 101, 120 articles “I Agree with the King”, 111 Creative Evolution, 4, 6, 16, 19, 21, 23, 24, 33, 45, 74, 120, 123 essays “Bernard Shaw on Modern Typography”, 74 “Parents and Children”, 74 “The Perfect Wagnerite”, 74, 78 “The Quintessence of Ibsenism”, 74 Life Force, 4, 6, 16, 19, 21, 23, 24, 33, 45, 55, 74, 120, 123 plays Androcles and the Lion, 87 The Apple Cart , 106–114 Arms and the Man, 73, 87 Back to Methuselah, 3, 5, 10, 11, 16, 21, 23, 33, 35, 37, 38, 40, 42, 44, 45, 56, 59, 63, 73, 80, 120, 121, 123 Buoyant Billions , 73 Caesar and Cleopatra, 73, 87 Candida, 73, 102 The Devil’s Disciple, 73, 82–85, 87, 88, 92–94, 97 The Doctor’s Dilemma, 38 Don Juan in Hell , 102 Great Catherine, 87

140

INDEX

Heartbreak House, 38, 55, 73, 112 John Bull’s Other Island, 73 “The King, The Constitution and The Lady” , 110, 111 Major Barbara, 112 Man and Superman, 13, 34, 74–76 The Man of Destiny, 74, 79 Mrs. Warren’s Profession, 74 On the Rocks , 87 Passion, Poison, and Petrifaction, 11 Pygmalion, 5, 10, 14, 23, 50, 51, 63, 65, 74, 78, 87 Saint Joan, 15, 62, 74, 99 Widowers’ Houses , 74 Shaw Bot, 102, 103, 105, 106 Shaw Festival, Niagara-on-the-Lake, 102 Shaw plays staged at, 102 Simon, Herbert A., 120 Simpson, Wallis, 110, 111 Sparks, Julie A., 23 Stephens, Elizabeth, 14 Mechanical Turk (job platform), 14 Swift, Taylor, 101 T Tchaikovsky, Peter, 15 The Nutcracker, 15 Terriss, William (“Breezy Bill”), 83 Théroude, Alexandre-Nicolas, 2 Thorndike, Dame Sybil, 62 Trebitsch, Siegfried, 38 Trumbull, John, 94 The Surrender of General Burgoyne, 94 Turing, Alan M., 5, 15, 20, 50, 54, 56, 59, 62, 63, 120 “Systems of Logic Based on Ordinals”, 5

Turing machine, 5, 23, 54, 59, 62 Turing test (“the imitation game”), 15, 63, 64 Turriano, Juanelo, 40 V Vaucanson, Jacques de, 4, 17 Vere, Arprey, 13 Ancient and Modern Magic, 13 Versailles, 17 Vichy, Gustave, 2 virtual assistant, 6, 98, 101, 105 virtual locomotion technique (VLT), 101 virtual reality (VR), 6, 98–101 “Visualising the Victoria” (Victoria Theatre, Australia), 100 Viviani, René, 15 Voˇcadlo, Otakar, 31 Voltaire, 4 W Walton, Tony, 90 Watson Virtual Assistant platform, 102 Weintraub, Stanley, 110, 111 “King Magnus and King Minus A Play and a Playlet”, 110 Weismann, August, 16 Weizenbaum, Joe, 5, 64, 120 ELIZA, 5 Wells, H.G., 31 Whitehead, Alfred North, 34 Wiener, Norbert, 20 Cybernetics: or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, 54 Norbert Wiener: A Life in Cybernetics , 55 The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society, 55

INDEX

Wills, Brember, 38 Wisenthal, J.L., 114 Wordsworth, William, 32 World War II, 54, 92, 94

Z Z3 machine, 54 Zuse, Konrad, 54

141