/tags/liezi/ Recent content in Liezi on Keren Wang Hugo en-us Mon, 17 Nov 2025 14:18:43 +0000 /blog/2025/11/a-survey-of-imaginaries-mythologies-and-rhetorical-structures-of-thinking-machines-part-1/ Mon, 17 Nov 2025 14:18:43 +0000 /blog/2025/11/a-survey-of-imaginaries-mythologies-and-rhetorical-structures-of-thinking-machines-part-1/ <p><strong><span style="color: #cc99ff;"><em>*Online lesson module and WIP chapter draft.</em></span></strong></p> <h2><span style="color: #00ffff;">Table of Contents</span></h2> <nav id="toc"> <ul> <li><span style="color: #ccffff;"><a href="#introduction" style="color: #ccffff;">Introduction</a></span></li> <li><span style="color: #ccffff;"><em><a href="#yan-shi" style="color: #ccffff;">Yan Shi's Automata</a></em></span></li> <li><span style="color: #ccffff;"><em><a href="#talos" style="color: #ccffff;">Talos</a></em></span></li> <li><span style="color: #ccffff;"><em><a href="#golem" style="color: #ccffff;">Golem</a></em></span></li> <li><span style="color: #ccffff;"><em><a href="#faust-homunculus" style="color: #ccffff;">Faust’s Homunculus</a></em></span></li> <li><span style="color: #ccffff;"><a href="#long-arc" style="color: #ccffff;">The Long Arc of Artificial Imaginaries</a></span></li> <li><span style="color: #ccffff;"><a href="#footnotes" style="color: #ccffff;">Footnotes</a></span></li> </ul> </nav> <hr/> <section id="introduction">When our own era proclaims artificial intelligence (AI) as the centerpiece of contemporary<strong> technological fetishism</strong>, 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.^{<a href="#1" id="fn-1">1</a>}</section> <p>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.</p>