"What Is AI?" Part 1: A Survey of Imaginaries, Mythologies, and Rhetorical Structures of Thinking Machines
*Online lesson module and WIP chapter draft. Table of Contents Introduction Yan Shi's Automata Talos Golem Faust’s Homunculus The Long Arc of Artificial Imaginaries Footnotes 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. ...