Philosophies of Technologies

9Artificial Intelligence’s New Clothes

In 1770, Hungarian inventor Johann Wolfgang von Kempelen exhibited his automaton chess player, the “Mechanical Turk”, for the first time at the Viennese court of Empress Maria Theresa. Seated at a wooden console, the automaton was dressed “in a Turkish style”. The cabinet’s side doors opened onto a set of cogs and gears that supposedly operated the automaton chess player’s body. The Mechanical Turk would go on to win numerous victories – its most illustrious would be against Napoleon Bonaparte and Benjamin Franklin. Not only could it solve the tricky mathematical-logical problem of the knight, but it would also have been able to recognize cheating or an illegal move by its opponent. For over 80 years, the automaton toured Europe and the United States, meeting dignitaries, inventors and great chess players, before being destroyed in a fire in 1854.

The Mechanical Turk brings about two deeper issues that we would like to highlight and explore here, in the context of AI’s contemporary resurgence: (1) mechanism or automatism, as a blind sequence of causes and effects, is always the automation of the other; (2) intelligence refuses to let such an order out of its sight and control, as it experiences its power and enjoyment by exercising this control. These two issues come together in what science historian Simon Schaffer (1994) describes as the “geography of intelligence”, which assumes the spatial distribution and communication of human and ...