The Mechanical Turk: Enduring Misapprehensions Concerning Artificial Intelligence

In pioneering work by cyberneticians Claude Shannon and Herbert Wiener, Von Kempelen's Mechanical Turk was represented as precursor to the computer, and thus as harbinger to the processing power that is to bring about the 'absolute catastrophe' and 'the End of Man'. This essay demonstrates that the computational technologies prefigured by the Mechanical Turk have in fact generated serious, enduring misapprehensions concerning Artificial Intelligence; it then establishes that the threat computers are often represented as posing to human agency and even identity, in material ranging from popular science-fiction to post-humanist philosophy, is in truth nothing less than an uncanny effect.