But why was it necessary for Descartes to create a simulacrum of his dead daughter? Why wasn’t the memory of his daughter enough? The movie Hugo revolves around Hugo’s adamant attempt in fixing the broken automaton that he had been working on with his father, strongly believing that a message is left by his dead father within the machine. For Hugo, the time spent working on the automaton is equivalent to spending time with his dead father. Similarly, the process of creating a representation of a dead loved one is a constant reminder of the person and of all the memories associated.

Having a tangible reminder of the lost loved one is a stronger tool than mere intangible memories of them. Human memory, unlike the files saved in the hard drive of a computer, is a fragile form of data storage, as there is no certainty that it will continue to be available to be retrieved and to its original state. An object, on the other hand, can exist continuously to continue to remind us of the wanted memory. An automaton made to resemble a human figure not only is generally unaffected by time, but it has the ability the more closely represent the person through performing humanlike activities. The possibility of being able to revive the dead, most with a personal reason behind, has been one of the strongest motivations behind creations of automatons. For automatons created to serve this particular purpose, it is necessary for the machine to behave as humanlike as possible. This would be the one of the reasons why creators tend to facilitate automatons with somewhat unnecessary actions other than accomplishing its desired duty. For example, as the name of the machine states, the primary purpose of Jaquet-Droz’s the Writer is to write the pre-entered sentences on a piece of paper without mistake. However, the Writer does more than this. It is more as if the Writer’s task is not to simple write, but to perform the art of writing of humans. The graceful movement of the Writer, such as the tilting of the goose feather to prevent ink stains on the yet-to-be-written paper, is what amplifies the humanness of the machine.