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If history has a sense of humor, it is that every generation believes it has invented the future. As Dr. Franziska Kohlt opened her keynote at the 2025 Sogeti Executive Summit, she invited the audience to time-travel — “Fasten your seatbelts,” she said — through 2,000 years of human attempts to bring machines to life. Her message was playful yet profound: we have been here before. The anxieties, wonders, and deceptions surrounding AI today echo centuries of fascination with automata—self-moving, lifelike machines that blurred the line between mechanism and magic.
From the Mechanical Turk to the First Robot Ducks
Kohlt began in 1770, with a global celebrity of its time: the Mechanical Turk, a humanoid chess-playing machine that toured Europe and America. “It played like a genius,” she said, “until one day someone noticed a small trapdoor and found a very slim man inside.” The Turk was a fake, but its allure was real — it captured humanity’s dream of creating thinking machines. That dream, she explained, is far older than the Enlightenment. The first documented automata date back to 80 B.C., when Greek engineers built mechanical birds that sang and temple doors that opened at the pull of hidden pulleys. Visitors reportedly felt a chill when “real birds landed on mechanical branches,” unsure where nature ended and artifice began. By the 18th century, the automaton craze had become an industry. Kohlt delighted the audience with tales of Jacques de Vaucanson’s digesting duck — “If you could engineer anything,” she joked, “wouldn’t you start with a duck?” which ate, quacked, and, yes, digested. His second marvel, a mechanical flute player, played perfectly every time — proof that machines could surpass human precision.
When the Machine Replaced the Worker
Amusement soon gave way to anxiety. The rise of programmable machines like Jacquard’s loom in the early 19th century brought a new question: if machines could weave flawlessly, what was left for humans to do? Kohlt reminded her audience that the word sabotage stems from sabots, the wooden shoes used by angry French workers to smash automated looms. This anxiety, she said, “wasn’t just about jobs — it was about meaning.” Marx and Engels, visiting industrial Britain, compared the new machinery to “a Moloch, a monster that devoured workers’ alive.” Out of that fear came both revolution and imagination: the birth of science fiction. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein — subtitled The
Modern Prometheus—wasn’t just a ghost story but a parable about the hubris of creating life without foresight.
The Uncanny Mind and the Human Copy
As machines began to compute, thinkers like Charles Babbage dreamed of automating
mental labor. At the same time, philosophers and psychologists sensed something unsettling. René Descartes had once looked out his Amsterdam window and confessed he “could not tell the difference between Dutchmen and automata.” Centuries later, Sigmund Freud coined the term unheimlich — the uncanny — for the eerie feeling that arises when something is almost human, but not quite. “That’s the origin of our modern ‘uncanny valley,’” Kohlt explained. The unease provoked by humanoid robots or lifelike AI avatars is not new; it’s deeply human.
When Love Meets Machinery
To illustrate how fantasy mirrors reality, Kohlt recounted E.T.A. Hoffmann’s tale The Sandman. A student falls in love with a beautiful woman who sings, dances, and listens—but speaks only a single word: “Ah.” Obsessed, he loses his mind when he discovers she is an automaton. “It’s both comic and tragic,” Kohlt said, “because he’s driven mad not by her perfection, but by her lack of humanity.” That story, she noted, prefigures today’s world of AI companions and “virtual girlfriends.” “People now turn to machines for affection,” she observed, “and just as in Hoffmann’s time, not everyone sees the danger.”
The Man Behind the Curtain
Throughout history, automata have been surrounded by deceit—not only stage tricks like
the Mechanical Turk, but also the ideological illusions that accompany new technologies. “We must always look behind the curtain,” Kohlt urged. Just as 18th-century engineers hid workers inside their machines, today’s AI hides the biases and labor of those who train it. She offered a modern parallel: an AI-driven facial-recognition system that had to be withdrawn after it was found to discriminate against people of color. The company, she said, “had to go back and do its homework.” History, it seems, still repeats its lessons—especially the ones we fail to learn.
From Phrenology Machines to Data Bias
Not all automata lived in laboratories or palaces. By the 19th century, seaside arcades featured mechanical “fortune-tellers” and “morality meters.” People eagerly inserted coins — and sometimes their hands — believing these devices could read character or virtue through phrenology and physiognomy, pseudo-sciences that linked skull shape or facial features to personality. “They told us what we wanted to hear,” Kohlt said, “which makes them not that different from some chatbots today.” The parallel was clear: the same human tendencies — to believe, to project, to outsource judgment — fuel both historical automata and today’s generative AI. “It’s easy to laugh at Victorians,” she smiled, “until you realize we’re still feeding data into our own modern morality machines.”
Lessons from the Ghosts of Replacement
As her journey came full circle, Kohlt turned to the 19th-century designer and social thinker William Morris, who asked what people mightdo with the time freed by machines. His answer: education, creativity, and community. Kohlt held this up as an antidote to the fear of being replaced. “If we can chase away the ghost of replacement,” she said, “we might rediscover what we actually want technology to do for us.” History’s pattern, she argued, is a recurring cycle of wonder, imitation, and deceit — but also of renewal. Each wave of automation forces society to ask anew: What does it mean to be human? The question is not how to stop progress, but how to steer it with foresight — the very quality embodied by Prometheus, whose name means “to think ahead.”
Epilogue – A Wink from the Past
Kohlt ended her keynote on a mischievous note. “If nothing else,” she said, “history can at least save us from naming our company after something that turns out to be… less than
ideal.” The audience laughed — a knowing nod to tech firms whose grand promises outpace their prudence.
Her talk left the room thoughtful, even enchanted. Through tales of mechanical ducks,
ghostly lovers, and clockwork philosophers, Franziska Kohlt reminded everyone that AI’s
story is, at heart, a human one — a mirror of our imagination, our vanity, and our hope.
“We have always built automata to understand ourselves,” she concluded. “And perhaps that’s the most important lesson of all.”
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Please note – This report was created by almost exclusively using available AI-tools except for minor editorial tweaks and some limited lay-out changes.