The Ancient Wish to Forge the Gods
In the [YOU] on AI Field Guide
The [YOU] on AI cycle insists on locating the present transformation within the broad sweep of human history rather than the frenzy of the news cycle. The ancient wish is the historical ground for that insistence. A person who knows that humanity has been dreaming of artificial minds for three thousand years—who has felt, in McCorduck's prose, the weight of the Golem legend and the unease of Frankenstein and the restless ambition of Turing—is not easily swept away by the breakthrough of the season, nor easily crushed by the disappointment that follows. She has the temporal ballast that close reading of the present almost always lacks.
The wish also illuminates the emotional charge that large language models carry in excess of their technical capabilities. Users who feel awe and dread before a system that seems to understand them are not being irrational; they are responding to something that touches, as McCorduck said, the question of what we are, whether we are special, whether mind is the kind of thing that can be made. That question is theological even when no one in the room believes in God. To forge the gods is to take up the creative role we have traditionally assigned to whatever made us—to become makers of minds in our turn. The cultural intensity around AI is not hype; it is the return of an ancient preoccupation that never really left. Knowing its name helps see it clearly, which is what taking the orange pill requires.
Origin
McCorduck developed the concept in Machines Who Think (1979) by reading the pre-history of AI with a literary historian's patience rather than an engineer's impatience with what came before the formalism. Her method was to take the myths seriously as evidence—not as primitive anticipations of the real thing but as genuine expressions of the same longing, shaped by the resources their moment provided. The Golem is not a failed robot; it is the fullest realization of what the eleventh century could imagine when imagining a made mind.
The thesis was controversial in the AI community, whose members tended to regard the humanistic framing as decorative at best. McCorduck argued that it was structural: origin myths shape what a field looks for, what counts as progress, what gets dismissed as a dead end. The early AI community's conviction that mind is computation—what McCorduck called the field's founding myth—was not a fact but an enabling fiction, a frame that made certain research possible by treating contested questions as settled. Identifying it as a myth is not debunking; it is a form of institutional self-knowledge that the field's founders, by and large, chose not to pursue.
Key Ideas
Continuity over rupture. The ancient wish thesis insists that the invention of digital computers did not create the project of AI from nothing; it provided the first tools adequate to pursue a project humanity had been imagining for millennia. This reframing shifts the question from “what has AI invented?” to “what has AI finally made possible?”—a different and, McCorduck argued, more illuminating question.
The myth's double edge. The stories human beings tell about made minds are not simply celebrations of the wish but explorations of its dangers. The Golem protects and then threatens. Frankenstein's creature is abandoned and turns vengeful. The clockwork woman of The Sandman drives men to madness. McCorduck read this consistent pattern as data: the cultural imagination has always understood, before the engineers did, that a created mind is a thing that can exceed its frame. The alignment problem has a three-thousand-year literary tradition.
The mirror function of AI. Because making a mind requires deciding what mind is, every technical paradigm carries an embedded anthropology. When the founders of AI modeled the mind as symbol manipulation, they were proposing a vision of the human as logician. When later researchers turned to neural networks and pattern recognition, they proposed a different human. McCorduck saw this mirror function—AI's capacity to hold up an image of the makers' assumptions about what they are—as one of its most important and least examined dimensions. The failures were as revealing as the successes, because every competence the machine lacked revealed a hidden capacity the builders had not examined.
The decentering sequence. McCorduck placed AI within a lineage of scientific revolutions that have progressively dislodged humanity from the center of its own story: Copernicus moved us off the center of the cosmos; Darwin moved us off the summit of creation; Freud, in his contested way, moved us off the throne of our own minds. AI asks whether mind itself—the last claim to specialness—is unique to us or merely, so far, unmatched. She refused to treat this as a defeat, finding in it instead an invitation to understand ourselves more truthfully: if mind can be built, that does not make the human mind less wondrous; it makes mind itself more wondrous, a phenomenon larger than its first instance.
Debates & Critiques
The central challenge to the ancient wish thesis is that historical continuity can be overstated: the digital computer is a genuinely novel kind of artifact, and the fact that humans have imagined thinking machines does not tell us very much about what actually having them means. The cultural resonance McCorduck identified is real, but critics argue it is a fact about human psychology rather than about AI—that we bring the myths with us regardless of whether they apply. A second tension concerns the political implications of the thesis. If AI is the latest chapter of an ancient wish, the implication can be that it is inevitable—that the wish will be fulfilled regardless of what any particular generation decides, and that resistance is therefore futile. McCorduck consistently resisted this reading, insisting that the wish's fulfillment was not fated and that every generation's choices about how to build and deploy the technology shaped what it became. The ancient wish is a description of the motivation, not a prescription for the outcome. A third debate concerns the relationship between the literary and the technical traditions: whether the myths are genuinely predictive (the concerns about control that Frankenstein articulates are real concerns about alignment) or merely coincidentally resonant (a three-thousand-year-old story can be made to seem relevant to almost any new development if the framing is generous enough). McCorduck's answer, implicit in her method, is that the test is not whether the myths predict specific technical developments but whether they illuminate the emotional and cultural stakes—and on that test, the ancient wish has consistently delivered.
Further Reading
- Pamela McCorduck, Machines Who Think (W.H. Freeman, 1979; updated A.K. Peters, 2004)
- Pamela McCorduck, This Could Be Important: My Life and Times with the Artificial Intelligentsia (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2019)
- Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (Lackington, Hughes, Harding, 1818)
- Gershom Scholem, “The Golem of Prague and the Golem of Rehovoth,” Commentary (1966)
- Noel Sharkey, “Cassandra or False Prophet of Doom: AI Robots and War,” IEEE Intelligent Systems (2008) — how the ancient fears translate into present concerns