The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is by Justin E. H. Smith

Author:Justin E. H. Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2021-12-16T00:00:00+00:00

Dark Conjurations

It should not be surprising by now to learn that the quest to build an artificial general-intelligence machine goes back much further in history than is ordinarily supposed, nor that the line between general intelligence and strong intelligence, between computational ability and consciousness, has often been blurred.

One legendary example of a general-intelligence device is the thirteenth-century English natural philosopher Roger Bacon’s “Brazen Head,” a genie made of brass, purportedly capable of answering any yes-or-no question put to it: a medieval Siri, if you will. The possibility of such a device was discussed by many other authors of the period in Europe, going back to William of Malmesbury in the early twelfth century. This period in European history experienced a small renaissance in experimental science largely thanks to the gradual introduction of ideas from works of natural philosophy produced in the Arabic-speaking world. The instructions for building or concocting a Brazen Head or one of its variants, found in Robert Grosseteste, Thomas Aquinas, and many others, were often imagined in the period as having been passed down from some generally unspecified Arabic grimoire or manual of natural magic.

It may well be that Roger Bacon’s own experiments in the construction of such a head are entirely the stuff of legend. In a posthumous 1683 English translation of Bacon’s work by Richard Browne, published under the title The Cure of Old Age, we read of Bacon in Browne’s preface that “some Learned Men thought him a Conjurer. Some report he made a Brazen Head that spake, and think it did it by the help of the Devil.”18 Bacon’s own words are here invoked in his defense, noting that, by the ingenuity of human artifice, “Metals roar, Diomede in Brass sounds a hollow Charge, the Brazen Serpent hisseth, Birds are counterfeited: And things that have no Voice of their own, are made to sing melodiously.”19 Why then, Browne concludes, should a learned man such as Bacon be “taken for a Magician,”20 when in fact he is only applying his learning to nature in order to unlock its powers?

Even if Bacon did truly intend to build such a device, he did so not using gears and dials, or mechanical switching circuits, as we will see some centuries later with the reckoning engines developed by G. W. Leibniz and Blaise Pascal. Bacon is working in late medieval Oxford, where the reigning science of nature is alchemy, and the boundary between efforts to harness nature’s forces, on the one hand, and efforts to arrogate to oneself demonic powers through magic, on the other, is far from clear. Technology is born of transgression, one might dare to say, and even if we generally lack the vocabulary to speak of this origin story today, many of us continue to feel the same sort of uneasiness in Siri’s presence as the townsfolk of medieval Oxford felt when they heard of Roger Bacon’s experiments and of the powers he hoped to harness.

The cleansing of any overt trace of the demonic

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