Small incidents can invoke a larger significance, from faith-restoring acts of kindness to those petty irritations that seem to signal a larger problem with the universe. 

It started when I was grocery shopping with my husband a few days before Thanksgiving.  Despite the crowd, only two checkout lanes were staffed, so we made our way to the self-checkout area. As we scanned our items, the screen instructed us to wait for assistance and a harried store employee appeared to press keys and examine our shopping bag. Other shoppers were having similar problems. When we triggered the system a second time, we got an exasperated reprimand: “You have to move faster or the scanner gets confused.”

Grumpy and apparently decrepit, I thought about the many occasions when I have felt like a servant to the computer, adjusting my language or timing to suit the machine. There’s nothing new or singular about this love/hate experience; we both deify and fear our devices, which are after all created by us to fulfill our own desires. Think of the remorseless guardian robots authorized to eliminate troublesome planets in “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” the doomsday device designed to ensure total mutual destruction in “Dr. Strangelove” or the wistful, violent androids in “Blade Runner.”

With the advent of generative AI and its potential for hallucination, we will continue to spin out these conflicted scenarios.

In 1991, the British historian Paul Johnson proposed that the 15 years between 1815 and 1830 represented the “matrix of the modern world,” a period of remarkable change in ideas, technologies, literature and the arts that continue to shape our current time. This brief timespan saw the introduction of railroads, steamboats and canals. Gas street lights and paved roads transformed cities, and constitutional government proliferated around the world. Charles Babbage developed the first computer, which he called a “difference engine.” 

Two Frenchmen, mathematician Joseph Fourier and physicist Claude Pouillet, working independently in the 1820s, described the ability of the earth’s atmosphere to trap heat—the earliest iteration of the phenomenon we know as “the greenhouse effect.” 

One of the era’s literary giants was E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776-1822), a pioneering German Romantic composer, author, satirist and fantasist. Many literary scholars see Hoffmann as the originator of the science fiction genre, because his iconic works reveal deep concerns about scientific advancement and the growing machine culture of his time, reflected in his frequent focus on mechanical toys and automata.

Today Hoffmann’s work is probably most familiar as the source for the beloved ballet “The Nutcracker.” This Christmas favorite comes to us filtered through translation and adaptation, with much of the original 1816 novella’s cruelty and violence softened—but it retains the central themes of invention, magic and evil spells. 

A more potent and grownup rendering of these themes is presented in Hoffmann’s 1817 short story “The Sandman.” This story is now best known as the first episode in Offenbach’s opera “The Tales of Hoffmann,” in which Hoffmann himself is presented as the central character, a lovelorn poet. Here again, the source work, Hoffmann’s original short story, is far more nightmarish and complex, featuring a troubled hero whose childhood trauma has given him a morbid fear of losing his eyes.

In both versions, two charlatans—the evil Dr. Coppelius and his accomplice Spallanzani—conspire to induce the poet-hero to fall in love with Olympia, an automaton in the form of a beautiful singing doll. Coppelius sells the hero a telescope (in the opera, a pair of magic glasses) that makes Olympia appear human. It’s a nice touch that the hero is induced to purchase the means of his psychological destruction. 

In the opera the spell is broken; in the original story, the hero is driven mad. 

“The Sandman” explores disturbing tensions between reality and psychological disarray, between the sensible scientific mindset of the Enlightenment and the phantasmagorical world of 19th-century Romanticism and magic. The story was psychologically potent enough to have been featured by Sigmund Freud in his 1919 essay “The Uncanny.”  Today, the notion of the uncanny—the experiences that strike us as simultaneously familiar and unsettling—has resurfaced as an important concept in the development of robots and AI interfaces that feel like interactions with actual humans. 

Hoffmann’s satirical writings got him into trouble at a time when German intellectuals and college professors were surveilled and sometimes accused of treason for espousing the “wrong” political views. One such story is “Little Zaches, Called Cinnabar,” the story of a grotesque and malicious little being, half boy and half mandrake root. A misguided fairy takes pity on him and casts a spell that makes everyone see him as handsome and charismatic. No matter what terrible things he does, others are blamed, and if anything good happens, he gets all the credit. Only artists and foreigners can see him as he really is. Zaches achieves a great career first at university and then at court. The spell is broken when a poet and his friends prevail upon a magus to discover the secret of the fairy’s magic and undo the charm. 

When stories like this one—blending fantasy and political satire—began to attract dangerous attention from the political censors, Hoffmann’s friends pleaded that he was in ill health and he got off with a reprimand. 

The story of “Little Zaches” endures in numerous retellings, including the world’s first steampunk opera, by the Berlin-based group Coppelius, which premiered in 2015.

Scientific ethicists speak today of the lure of “technical sweetness,” the thrill of successful design and engineering that can blind us to the potential consequences of our inventions and prevent us from asking deeper questions, keeping us from moving from “We can“ to “Should we?”  It’s a new term for an age-old problem, and a theme at the heart of Hoffmann’s work. We keep asking the same questions because we keep making the same mess. For me, “The Nutcracker” will never be quite the same.