Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Artificial Intelligence Before Computers: The History of Romantic Computationalism

Artificial Intelligence Before Computers: The History of Romantic Computationalism

Nivala, Asko

Hardcover

Series: Routledge Studies in Cultural History

General European HistoryGeneral World History

PREORDER - Expected ship date September 25, 2026

ISBN10: 1041296703
ISBN13: 9781041296706
Publisher: Routledge
Published: Sep 25 2026
Pages: 244
Weight: 1.19
Height: 0.63 Width: 6.14 Depth: 9.21
Language: English

This cultural history of thinking machines examines conceptions of the human as an automaton and the possibility of mechanised thought in philosophical and literary works from the seventeenth century to the 1840s, with particular emphasis on the Romantic period.

In the 2020s, there has been no escaping the debate over AI. Yet strong AI remains as much science fiction today as it was in the nineteenth century. Media archaeology has highlighted the ruptures and dead ends of technological development, recovering forgotten and obsolete technologies. Failed and imagined attempts to create thinking machines from Thomas Hobbes to Charles Babbage and from E.T.A Hoffmann to Edgar Allan Poe not only illuminate their own historical contexts; they also reveal the origins of the utopian hopes and dystopian fears that continue to shape responses to mechanised thought. Artificial Intelligence before Computers argues that we can move beyond the Romantic myth of AI only by recognising its historical roots.

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