What Is AI? Part 2 – Demystifying AI Through Four Acts

Mon, 01 Dec 2025 09:35:52 +0000

Scene from the 1983 sci-fi thriller WarGames, directed by John Badham. The film dramatizes a near-catastrophe triggered by a military decision to entrust U.S. nuclear deterrence to an autonomous AI system that treats thermonuclear war as a solvable optimization problem. Source: DVDXtras, “WarGames (1983) | Behind the Scenes,” Internet Archive, June 2, 2022. <LINK>

Continuing from: “What Is AI?” Part 1: A Survey of Imaginaries, Mythologies, and Rhetorical Structures of Thinking Machines*

In the previous segment of our genealogical survey, we have traced ancient imaginaries that seeded today’s visions of machine intelligence. From Yan Shi’s mechanical performers to Talos’ bronze vigilance and the ritual logic of golems and Homunculi, we explored how mythic prototypes shaped the rhetorical terrain on which “AI” would later emerge as a technological category.

Whereas earlier societies used myth and ritual to make sense of uncanny forms of artificial agency and “thinking machines,” in this second part we turn from historical mythologies to present-day technological possibilities. The term “artificial intelligence” circulates in our cultural lifeworld with astonishing fluidity. It appears in commercials, policy reports, sci-fi movies, legal disputes, and everyday conversations. It is used to describe everything from basic computer programs to sophisticated generative models capable of complex knowledge-performance.

"What Is AI?" Part 1: A Survey of Imaginaries, Mythologies, and Rhetorical Structures of Thinking Machines

Mon, 17 Nov 2025 14:18:43 +0000

*Online lesson module and WIP chapter draft.

When our own era proclaims artificial intelligence (AI) as the centerpiece of contemporary technological fetishism, it often points to its sweeping impact on medicine, autonomous mobility, creative production, and the evolving rituals of law and civic life. Yet even amid these transformations, we should resist the impulse to treat AI as a clean break with the past, for the imaginaries that animate it are far older than the machines themselves.¹

Long before the first integrated circuit pulsed with electricity, societies from the past contemplated thinking machines in forms that now read like allegories of our contemporary anxieties.

Homunculus on Keren Wang

What Is AI? Part 2 – Demystifying AI Through Four Acts

Continuing from: “What Is AI?” Part 1: A Survey of Imaginaries, Mythologies, and Rhetorical Structures of Thinking Machines*

"What Is AI?" Part 1: A Survey of Imaginaries, Mythologies, and Rhetorical Structures of Thinking Machines

Table of Contents

Homunculus on Keren Wang

What Is AI? Part 2 – Demystifying AI Through Four Acts

*Continuing from: “What Is AI?” Part 1: A Survey of Imaginaries, Mythologies, and Rhetorical Structures of Thinking Machines

"What Is AI?" Part 1: A Survey of Imaginaries, Mythologies, and Rhetorical Structures of Thinking Machines

Table of Contents

Continuing from: “What Is AI?” Part 1: A Survey of Imaginaries, Mythologies, and Rhetorical Structures of Thinking Machines*