CONCEPT
The Ancient Wish to Forge the Gods
Pamela McCorduck's organizing thesis—that artificial intelligence did not begin at Dartmouth in 1956 but with a three-thousand-year-old human longing to make a thinking artifact, to externalize and replicate the mind, a wish so culturally central that its anxieties and hopes arrive pre-installed in every generation of builders.
Artificial intelligence began with the ancient wish to forge the gods. The sentence, written by Pamela McCorduck as the animating intuition of Machines Who Think, is one of those rare formulations that contains an entire argument in a dozen words. The verb is deliberate: not discover, not worship, but forge—a word that carries the heat of the smithy and the shadow of forgery, both the act of making and the act of counterfeiting. This double meaning was not an accident. McCorduck understood that the dream of building a mind has always been entangled with the suspicion that we are usurping something not ours to make, trespassing on a creative power reserved for whatever made us. She traced the wish through the bronze giant Talos guarding Crete, through Hephaestus and his golden handmaidens who could think and speak, through Pygmalion's statue brought to
Keep reading with YOU ON AI
Unlock the full book, 10,000+ field-guide entries, and a 1000+ thinker library. If you have a book code, register now — it takes a minute.