Thinking Beyond the Human: Mechanical Automata and Societal Upheaval in the Romantic Era
Thinking Beyond the Human: Mechanical Automata and Societal Upheaval in the Romantic Era
Tampere Insitute for Advanced Studies
Open Colloquium “Human–Non-human”
Time: Wednesday, 8 October 2025, at 13:30-17:00
Place: Tampere University, City Centre Campus, Main Building, Café Toivo & Aula, 2nd floor
Abstract
The talk traces how Romantic anxieties about the mechanisation of thinking and industrial revolution evolved into dystopias of machine uprising. Achim von Arnim’s Gräfin Dolores (1810) already imagines humans threatened by soulless automata, while Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) reworks myth of the golem to depict a human-made being turning against its creator. Samuel Butler’s “Darwin among the Machines” (1863) later framed this as the displacement of humanity by a machine race. Such nineteenth-century dystopias anticipate current debates on rogue AI and automation-driven unemployment, echoing the industrial revolution’s anxieties while illuminating today’s cultural fears of technological supremacy.