# What is E. T. A. Hoffmann's 'The Sandman', and why do AI people still read it?

Date: 2019-05-26 · Author: Robert Scales · https://guidetoartificialintelligence.com/en/learn/what-is-hoffmanns-the-sandman-about/

**Answer:** "The Sandman" is a German short story by E. T. A. Hoffmann, dated 1816, in which a student named Nathanael falls in love with Olimpia, a beautiful young woman who turns out to be a clockwork automaton. It is one of the first stories about a person mistaking a machine for a thinking being, and it gave later thinkers, from Freud to robot designers, a name for the eerie feeling that lifelike machines can cause.

Most people who talk to a voice assistant have had a strange moment: the reply is so apt that, for a second, it feels as if someone is listening. A short story written two centuries ago is built around exactly that moment, stretched out until it becomes a tragedy.

In E. T. A. Hoffmann's "The Sandman", a young student becomes infatuated with a woman who barely speaks, never fidgets and listens to his poetry for hours. Everyone else finds her stiff and odd. He finds her profound. She is, in fact, a machine. The story asks a question that is very current in 2019: how much of the "mind" we see in a machine is really our own mind, reflected back?

## When and where it was published

Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann was a German writer of the Romantic era whose tales mix ordinary town life with the strange and the supernatural. "The Sandman" (*Der Sandmann*) is dated 1816. It opens his collection *Die Nachtstücke* ("Night Pieces"), published in Berlin; the printed volume carries the date 1817, which is why you will see both years given.

English readers came to it later through translations. A widely available one is J. T. Bealby's, in a two-volume collection of Hoffmann's *Weird Tales*, where it is titled "The Sand-Man".

## What happens in the story

The story begins as a set of letters. Nathanael, a university student, writes about a childhood terror: the Sandman of a nursery tale, a figure who steals the eyes of children who will not go to sleep. As a boy he connected that monster with Coppelius, a menacing lawyer who visited his father at night for secret experiments, one of which ended in the father's death. Now that he is grown, a travelling seller of barometers and spectacles named Giuseppe Coppola knocks at his door, and Nathanael is sure he is the same man.

Nathanael buys a small telescope from Coppola and points it across the street at the window of his physics professor, Spalanzani. There sits the professor's "daughter", Olimpia. Through the lens her fixed eyes seem to light up, and he falls hopelessly in love, forgetting his fiancée, Clara.

At a party Olimpia plays the piano and sings with dazzling precision, and dances in such perfect time that Nathanael cannot keep up. Her hand is ice cold. When he pours out his feelings, she answers only "Ach! Ach!" His friend Siegmund warns him that Olimpia moves as if driven by wound-up clockwork and only seems to act like a living person. Nathanael will not hear it.

The truth comes out when he arrives to propose. Spalanzani and Coppola are fighting over Olimpia, quarreling about who made the clockwork and who made the eyes. She is a wooden automaton, and her eye sockets are empty. Spalanzani cries that he worked on her for twenty years. Nathanael is driven to madness, and the story ends in his death.

## How the illusion works

Hoffmann is precise about why Nathanael is fooled, and it is not because Olimpia is clever. Here is what she actually does, and what he reads into it:

| What Olimpia does | What Nathanael believes |
|---|---|
| Sits still for hours, eyes on his face | She is deeply absorbed in his poems |
| Says only "Ach! Ach!" and "Good-night, dear" | Her few words are full of hidden meaning |
| Never interrupts or disagrees | She understands him as no one else does |
| Plays and dances with perfect, even timing | She is a gifted artist |

Nathanael even notices that her responses seem to echo his own private opinions of his work. Hoffmann's point is sharp: Olimpia contributes almost nothing. The understanding is supplied entirely by the person who wants to find it.

The aftermath is just as telling. Spalanzani has to leave the university for passing off an automaton as a person in polite society. Suspicion spreads, and some lovers begin asking their partners to sing a little off key, to fidget, and above all to speak in ways that show real thought and feeling, just to be sure they are not courting a puppet. That is, in effect, a test for telling a person from a machine, more than a century before Alan Turing proposed his famous version in 1950.

> **Try it:** The next time you use a voice assistant or chatbot, keep a two-column note like the table above. In one column write what it actually said; in the other, write what you assumed it understood. Where did you fill in the gaps yourself?

## Why it mattered

"The Sandman" became a touchstone for the feeling of the *uncanny*, the unsettling sense that something familiar is somehow wrong. The German psychiatrist Ernst Jentsch wrote about that feeling in 1906, and Sigmund Freud's 1919 essay "The Uncanny" analyzed Hoffmann's story at length, focusing on its fear of losing one's eyes. The tale also inspired the ballet *Coppélia* (1870) and the first act of Jacques Offenbach's opera *The Tales of Hoffmann* (1881).

The idea traveled into robotics. In 1970 the Japanese robotics professor Masahiro Mori proposed what is now called the *uncanny valley*: as a robot looks more human, people warm to it, until it gets very close to human but not quite, at which point comfort suddenly drops into unease. When the term was translated into English in 1978, it created a link, partly by accident, to the older literature of the uncanny that runs back to Hoffmann. Designers of robots, animated films and digital characters discuss that valley today.

## Why do we see understanding in machines that only imitate it?

People are built to look for minds. We read faces, guess intentions and fill in missing meaning all day long, and that habit serves us well with other people. It switches on just as readily for a doll, a cartoon or a program that replies in fluent sentences.

Computer scientists ran into this effect in the 1960s with ELIZA, an early chatbot whose users often credited it with far more understanding than its simple rules could provide. Nathanael's "Ach! Ach!" is the same trick in literary form: a minimal response, plus a listener eager to be understood.

None of this means machines can never understand anything. It means that a convincing reply is weak evidence on its own. The useful habit, then as now, is the one Hoffmann's nervous lovers adopted: look for signs of real thought, such as handling something unexpected, rather than trusting how good the conversation feels.

## Sources

- Weird Tales, Vol. 1 (includes 'The Sand-Man'): https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/31377
- The Sandman (short story): https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Sandman_%28short_story%29&oldid=892139822
- Uncanny valley: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Uncanny_valley&oldid=895545735