“When I say goodbye to Cynthia Breazeal [scientist at MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory], she tells me I should go to Japan, where robots are made to look more life-like, and people are less worried about them usurping human faculties. At Waseda University in Tokyo, she says, there is a robot that is truly amazing: it plays the flute. She doesn’t seem to realize that a French inventor built just such a machine, over 250 years ago.” –Introduction to Edison’s Eve

It’s funny to be confronted with a concept that completely redefines your perception of the world you live in. To think that history isn’t really what you thought it was can be an exceedingly intimidating idea. I think most of us suffer from the delusion that somewhere in the not too distant past, human beings got smart. They weren’t smart before that, they picked their teeth with Bowie knives, or came up with stupid ideas about fanciful creatures guarding the ends of the earth. Now we’re much more scientific. We don’t guess, we test and we know.

So why is there such evidence that contradicts us? Why are there pyramids and great stone walls and mysteries we’ve given up trying to understand, all accomplished back when we assume people were gathering berries for a living? The truth is we’re not any smarter, in fact, there’s evidence to the contrary. We build upon the discoveries of those who came before us, but do we innovate and invent and create like they did? Is the computer programmer smarter than the one who created the first computer? Is there a point to asking these questions?