One thing usually leads to another in life, a chance meeting to a reunion, a podcast to a new book. Joining choirs had a similar effect - meeting new girlfriends, travelling and working overseas, recording music with a band. Robert Frost surely had it nailed in The Road Less Travelled, for way really does indeed lead onto way and often as not, there is no going back. It best not to have regrets.

So it was that a podcast on automata, an unusual subject, lead me to a short story called The Sandman, by E.T.A Hoffman, a German writer of the early 19th Century. In Scandanavian folklore, The Sandman was said to be character who sprinkled sand or dust into children's eyes to help them sleep and dream. But in this short story, the central character Nathaniel, conflates the mythical Sandman with an acquaintance of his father's from his own childhood, Coppelius. It is hard to be sure, because these are childhood recollections, but Coppelius is a lawyer who is also a practising alchemist and who comes nightly to the family home to work with Nathaniel's father on alchemy. The somewhat traumatic memories of these events and the subsequent accidental death of his father centrally inform Nathaniel's febrile imagination. We cannot be certain of the truth of what Nathaniel narrates as he appears to view the world through the prism of post-traumatic shock.

What has this got to do with automata, I hear you ask? Well, later, as a young man, Nathaniel leaves home to study at university and there falls madly in love with the daughter of one of his professors. But unbeknown to him, she(Olimpia) is an automaton. That is as much of the plot as I am going to reveal, but the story careers to a dramatic climax.

Such a story seems remarkably modern. Automata have been around for centuries and have been used to amuse and dazzle or even shock people. Their creators are clever in hiding the mechanisms that allow the object to appear as lifelike, as alive, something which can be achieved through machinery (as in clocks) or hydraulics or even direct human manipulation. If we accept that robots are just a more sophisticated kind of automata and that AI is merely adding a layer of 'thinking' to functionality and programming, then our present age is well and truly engaged with automata. Smart phones, companion robots and augmented reality are but a few of the modern takes on old practices, though their collective effect is likely to be far more profound.