When primitive people were carving statues of their deities and placing them within the dark enclosures of their temples, they believed that they were creating intelligent objects since the resulting statue was thought to be inhabited by an intelligent being.
Archaic Attempts
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The artifacts of primitive religions were early attempts to build intelligent systems and processes. These archaic AI systems were very successful. Other beliefs mapped the boundary of what behaviors are conscious. They provide useful insights into what humans will accept as artificial intelligence. Since earliest antiquity, humans attempted, consciously or unconsciously, to create intelligent beings. In fact, this quest has as much importance, in primitive beliefs and practices as their attempts to understand the cosmos. Their primitive investigations appear childish to us to the point that we do not usually view them as experiments in Artificial Intelligence. Rather, we consider these early investigations in the nature of non human intelligence to be part of religious phenomena. These primitive investigations and beliefs have usually been discarded as superstitious musings by AI researchers. However, these attempts should be considered to be part of the most ancient research in Artificial Intelligence. These earliest quasi-religious investigations in the nature of intelligence and consciousness can be particularly useful to us since they reveal how humans perceive intelligence and what they will accept as intelligent and conscious behavior. Two particular elements of primitive religion can be interpreted as early experiments in the design and fabrication of intelligent systems: Idolatry and Divination. Another long standing belief, in reanimated cadavers or animated things such as the golem, zombies, robots or Frankenstein's creature provide us with useful insights on the behaviors traits that humans perceive as indicating a lack of consciousness. The draft of this subsection is completed. |
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