Much news about UK government and #AI today. The Guardian had this summary.
What this reminds me of is how 18th century governments were hypnotised by the idea of humans as machines in a mechanistic universe.
The Mechanical Turk
The Mechanical Turk con is well known and still relevant but what is often missed is how it affected European thinking about the state, citizens & governance.
Seeing it demonstrated in Vienna at the court of Maria Theresa confirmed the idea of the Clockwork State.
The Hapsburg
I am using The Hapsburgs by Martyn Rady for references here.
The machine symbolized humanity’s capture of nature and yet, by the regularity of its movements, its conformity to the laws of a repetitious universe as disclosed by Isaac Newton.
Humanity creates machines that are mechanistic and regular. The Mechanical Turk demonstrates that in human form.
One by one, philosophers (Kant, Herder, Rousseau, Bentham) succumbed to the illusion that human beings might themselves be organized as if they were clockwork and, moreover, that there was no sphere in which mechanical solutions might not be applied—the drilling of soldiers, the organization of hospitals, prison and workshop management, and so on.
The con trick of the Mechanical Turk was like a modern technology demonstration. A stage trick that was enough of a con to get more money and time to do more.
Everyone is a cog, everything is a clock
If machines could do what humans could do then humans were a form of machine too. A state therefore could be run efficiently and effectively in mechanistic way. Every citizen and every civil servant as a cog, all working together like clockwork.
The AI revolution is just this failed idea redux.