I contributed a chapter to the new book Dis/Trusting the Digital World in Imaginative Literature, just published by Edinburgh University Press. My chapter examines Edgar Allan Poe’s attempt to discredit the famous chess-playing Turk hoax, along with “The Raven,” Poe’s essays, and contemporaneous works by Charles Babbage. Poe’s account of the hoax, I argue, exemplifies a persistent value judgment that I call “technological purism”: a belief that autonomous machines are stronger testaments to the skill of their designers than machines that work together with human intelligence. This assumption, I argue, has become problematic in the age of AI, disrupting systems of trust that have attended (supposed) machine intelligence since the nineteenth century.
