Aytes, Ayhan (Author)
University of California, San Diego
Serlin, David
Tanaka, Stefan
Edition Details: Advisors: Serlin, David; Stefan Tanaka
Physical Details: 221 pp.
Language: English
This dissertation project is a media archaeological inquiry into a long-term cultural dialectic between the rise of intelligent automata and the rise of Western discourses of Orientalism. I organize my analysis around the archetypal theme of the chess-playing machine, the Mechanical Turk, which has played many significant roles as a metaphor, as an abstract machine, as a behavioral prototype and as a thought experiment throughout the history of the mechanization of the mind. In almost every implementation of the chess-playing automaton as a conceptual device--from the essays of Edgar Alan Poe to Claude Shannon's computer models--there is a direct reference to its archetype, the 18th century chess-playing automaton invented by Austrian engineer Wolfgang von Kempelen. The Enlightenment chess automaton depicted a puppet dressed as an Ottoman subject who performed the role of the chess-player on behalf of the machine while secretly it was controlled by a chess-master hidden inside the cabinet. This intricate artifice designed into the chess-playing automaton is probably one of the reasons why it stayed relevant in explaining the human-machine symbiosis throughout the modern and industrial eras. This might also explain why the chess automaton became so readily applicable as a conceptual apparatus throughout the history of the mechanization of the mind. My initial approach, borne out in the following chapters, is to show how that this particular human-machine configuration can be seen as the physical embodiment of the irreconcilable contradictions of the Enlightenment's ideological presumptions. Through the historical analysis of this configuration, I particularly aim to investigate the interaction between the cultural "Other" as a systematic epistemological design and the technological "Other" of the European mind. These converge in the archetypal apparatus of the mechanized mind concept, which, as I will argue, become crucially active in later industrial and postindustrial configurations such as the cybernetic apparatus of the 20th Century and the contemporary distributed cognitive labor platforms of the early 21st Century.
...MoreDescription Centers on the archetype of the 18th-century Ottoman-dressed puppet, which seemed to mechanically play chess. Explores the importance of this notion to the history of the mechanized mind concept. Cited in ProQuest Diss. & Thes. (2012). ProQuest Doc. ID 916751886.
Similar Citations
Article
Daniel C.S. Wilson;
Mariona Coll Ardanuy;
Kaspar Beelen;
Barbara McGillivray;
Ruth Ahnert;
(2023)
The Living Machine: A Computational Approach to the Nineteenth-Century Language of Technology
(/isis/citation/CBB645588940/)
Article
Lukas Geiszler;
(2023)
Imitation in automata and robots: A philosophical case study on Kempelen
(/isis/citation/CBB024398139/)
Chapter
Kang, Minsoo;
(2012)
From the Man-Machine to the Automaton-Man: The Enlightenment Origins of the Mechanistic Imagery of Humanity
(/isis/citation/CBB001200744/)
Chapter
Sam Thomas;
Genevieve Liveley;
(2020)
Homer’s Intelligent Machines: AI in Antiquity
(/isis/citation/CBB959937679/)
Article
Awa Hanane Diagne;
Emily Grenon;
Syeda Hasan;
Holly K. M. Johnstone;
Edward Jones-Imhotep;
Alexander Offord;
Neve Ostry Young;
Sarai Rudder;
(2024)
The Black Androids: A Chrestomathy
(/isis/citation/CBB089679321/)
Book
Standage, Tom;
(2002)
The Turk: The Life and Times of the Famous Eighteenth-Century Chess-Playing Machine
(/isis/citation/CBB000430274/)
Book
Stephen Cave;
Kanta Dihal;
Sarah Dillon;
(2020)
AI Narratives: A History of Imaginative Thinking about Intelligent Machines
(/isis/citation/CBB815179895/)
Book
Voskuhl, Adelheid;
(2013)
Androids in the Enlightenment: Mechanics, Artisans, and Cultures of the Self
(/isis/citation/CBB001452021/)
Book
Chrisley, Ronald;
(2000)
Artificial Intelligence: Critical Concepts
(/isis/citation/CBB000102338/)
Article
Marco Tamborini;
(2023)
The elephant in the room: The biomimetic principle in bio-robotics and embodied AI
(/isis/citation/CBB283870317/)
Chapter
Slocombe, Will;
(2021)
Machine Visions: Artificial Intelligence, Society, and Control
(/isis/citation/CBB379792288/)
Book
E. R. Truitt;
(2016)
Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic, Nature, and Art
(/isis/citation/CBB258385375/)
Book
Kang, Minsoo;
(2011)
Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The Automaton in the European Imagination
(/isis/citation/CBB001023105/)
Chapter
Crosthwaite, Paul;
(2011)
Clockwork Automata, Artificial Intelligence and Why the Body of the Author Matters
(/isis/citation/CBB001201379/)
Article
Daniel White;
(2019)
The Mechanics of Fear. Re-envisioning Anxiety through Emerging Technologies of Affect (Funktionsweisen der Furcht. Neue Konzepte von Angst im Kontext der emotionalen Robotik)
(/isis/citation/CBB473929187/)
Article
Jose Luiz Goldfarb;
Odecio Souza;
(2018)
From the Golem's Jewish Myth to IBM's Responsive Watson: Where Are We Going?
(/isis/citation/CBB191239455/)
Book
Jeremy Packer;
Joshua Reeves;
(2020)
Killer Apps: War, Media, Machine
(/isis/citation/CBB034416699/)
Article
Yulia Frumer;
(2018)
Cognition and Emotions in Japanese Humanoid Robotics
(/isis/citation/CBB191691606/)
Book
Neda Atanasoski;
Kalindi Vora;
(2019)
Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures
(/isis/citation/CBB025120161/)
Article
Geraci, Robert M.;
(2008)
Apocalyptic AI: Religion and the Promise of Artificial Intelligence
(/isis/citation/CBB001030738/)
Be the first to comment!