Autômatos e superbrinquedos à imagem e dessemelhança do homem: um estudo dos contos de Brian Aldiss e E. T. A. Hoffmann

Abstract

This work aims to investigate the relationship of man with his technologies, shown in the tale ―The automaton‖ (1818), by E. T. A Hoffmann, and in ―Supertoys last all summer‖, ―Supertoys when winter comes‖ and ―Supertoys in other seasons‖, by Brian Aldiss. The first story of this series was published in 1969. The other two stories were published only in 1999, sequelling the journey of David, in order to adapt it to the script of the film A.I. Artificial Intelligence, by Steven Spielberg. The human being assigns identities to their prototypes, but in doing so runs the risk of becoming a victim of his own creation. The oracles of the automaton Turkish speaker allow him to refer to metaphysical aspects hidden in the core of their interlocutors. David, in turn, is a state-of-the-art android who suffers because of maternal aversion; he has an advanced computer program that allows him to expose almost human feelings. The ambiguous, veiled, threatening and sometimes nonsense behavior draws them to the image of man, although its mechanical parts are dissimilar to human individual characteristics. Therefore, they seem elusive, enigmatic, crumbled reflections of reality, which loses its credibility as new inventions emerge, paradoxically inquisitors to legislations and current social standards. Hoffmann witnessed the dawn of the modernity in the Nineteenth Century, a time in which new technologies already pointed to the Industrial Revolution, a fact that definitely changed all social sectors. Aldiss, in the second half of the Twentieth Century, saw the themes of science fiction become successful technological experiments, previously only seen as objects of imagination. If once humans could travel faster thanks to locomotives and steamships, from then on they managed the impressive feat of printing their steps in the lunar soil. Thus, associating those techno-scientific advances to the disturbances generated by war conflicts in these respective contexts, we intend to focus on the analysis of the relationship between creator and creature in the way that the image of man is built in their inventions, so that in the end, we can infer how this process began and, above all, how it is continually remade. Under this perspective, we will study David\'s literary representations and the Turkish speaker, taking into account that the transformations of machines directly influence the modus vivendi of man, especially in his emotions.