Less than a hundred years ago the idea that an artifact, a product of human labor, could exhibit intelligence was the stuff of myth. The statues fabricated by ancient Egyptian craftsmen—some of which may have even appeared to move or speak—were thought to possess something like a soul, but only insofar as they were inhabited by the divine. In the Hebrew Bible, the creation of life is the preserve of God alone. Apparently intelligent or sentient artifacts—like the chess-playing “Turk” Walter Benjamin alludes to in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” or Jacques de Vaucanson’s famous “Digesting Duck”—were simply ingenious hoaxes fit for a regent’s court.
