Frankenstein, Skynet, Ultron: Tall-tale signs of machines with minds

Joseph-Marie Jacquard was in his fifties when he invented the Jacquard machine.

- K Narayanan

The son of a master weaver, he apprenticed as a weaver, served as a bookbinder, hatmaker, type-founder.

In his late forties, he started tinkering with looms in his home city of Lyon, then the weaving capital of France, until he built one he thought was worthy of France’s annual industrial exhibition in Paris.

Jacquard’s machine won the bronze medal, in 1801, and he was summoned to the French National Conservatory of Arts and Crafts. There he saw a version that suggested how his machine could be improved, and by 1804, the Jacquard loom was born.

It was the first machine to separate what we would now call hardware and software. It used punch cards, and could generate an infinite variety of patterns on cloth, and do it faster than the traditional drawlooms.

The Jacquard loom was a success. Napoleon Bonaparte granted Jacquard an annuity of 3,000 francs; he would also receive a sum of 50 francs for each loom sold.

To the weavers of Lyon (called canuts), it was a disaster.

It meant unemployment, poverty, and a devaluation of their craftsmanship. They petitioned the government for relief, which never came. They responded with violence. The canut riots of the 1830s and '40s were the first real uprisings over the human costs of technological progress.

Technology has always caused both fear and wonder. It has always been a story of human hubris and its consequences. This tension has its echoes in history and myth.