TIAS Collegium Fellow 2022–2025

Machine learning and neural networks have developed significantly during the twenty-first century. Despite the success of weak artificial intelligence, strong AI – the creation of an artificial consciousness comparable with humans – is still as much science fiction as it was when Mary Shelley published Frankenstein (1818). My TIAS project Artificial Intelligence Before Computers (AICOM, 2022–20225) explores the history of AI discourse before the invention of the electronic computer. The utopia of a thinking machine is based on computationalism, which argues that human mind operates like a computer. As a philosophical idea, computationalism is much older than computing hardware: already Thomas Hobbes and G. W. Leibniz maintained that all reasoning is reducible to addition and subtraction.

The overarching aim of AICOM is to problematise the concepts of ‘computation’ and ‘artificial intelligence’ by showing the way in which these concepts are historically constructed. The project traces the history of current AI discourse by pointing out its roots in the Romantic era. Automata and androids were common in the eighteenth and nineteenth-century fiction, providing a metaphor for the Industrial Revolution where machines such as the Jacquard loom threatened to replace human workers. However, the Romantic AI discourse took place in a very different historical situation than ours, for the digital computer existed only in the plans of Charles Babbage and other IT pioneers. AICOM will show that the Analytical Engine was deeply rooted in the Romantic culture of its time.

The primary sources perused in AICOM consist of eighteenth-century, nineteenth-century and twentieth-century texts including philosophical essays, newspaper articles and fiction. The geographic focus of my study will be on Germany, Britain and USA. The history of computers has been often seen as an evolution from Leibniz and Babbage to Alan Turing. Following Michel Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge, media archaeology has emphasised the ruptures in technological development, studying forgotten and outdated technologies. The failed and imagined attempts to create AI or the digital computer do not only represent their own time but they help us to understand the historical origin of our own utopian hopes and dystopian fears related to mechanised thought.