John Agar
speaker
129 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 28 May
John Agar’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
We're going to come to Britain because there were cybernetics and cyberneticians very active in Britain then.
as well as the United States, as it were, elsewhere in the world.
Let me take you to 1951.
1951 was the year of the Festival of Britain.
And millions of people went to see exhibitions that were meant to be a tonic to the nation and cheer us all up after austerity and things like that.
What they would have seen there were pairs of little robots.
These were robot tortoises.
that were made by a neurologist called Gray Walter.
Gray Walter worked at a mental hospital just outside Bristol, but he had this intense interest in building mechanical things that seemed, and he thought actually did, produce lifelike behaviour.
So just as we just heard about brain building,
Grey Walter put what he thought was equivalent of a couple of neurons at the centre of these mechanical robot tortoises.
And these tortoises also could respond to light, they could respond to touch, and with simple feedback mechanisms, they could respond to each other.
So they would respond to each other's lights, they would see their own light in a mirror and they would move towards it.
If they bumped into something, they would recoil.
And Greywater thought that these little mechanical robot tortoises with the equivalent of a couple of neurons as electrical circuits were beginning to show absolutely mechanical, lifelike, living phenomena like attraction, like self-awareness, like movement and responding to what each other are doing.
And people saw that, saw these tortoises.
One was called Elmer, one was called Elsie.
They're acronyms that essentially stand for electronic machines of various kinds.
And they were deeply popular.
So the cyberneticians would say, absolutely, we are giving you a science that describes living and non-living, thinking, non-thinking entities, all in the same framework.
Showing 41–60 of 129 · page 3 of 7
← Previous
Next →