The Dream of AI: what are the origins of 'artificial intelligence'?

By giving life to non-living things, people have explored their place in the world. Sometimes feeling powerful, and sometimes feeling fearful of a world they can’t control. This belief inspired attempts to create human-like figures with special abilities and to develop systems of intelligence that extend the mind. These two dimensions have driven the project of artificial intelligence to where it is today.

"What are the computers and robots of our time if not golems?"

Isaac Bashevis Singer

Searching for meaning with the golem

The golem is made from inanimate matter, which magically comes to life. Most famously created by Rabbi Loew in 16th century Prague, the golem was intended to protect the Jewish people against attacks.

Emily D. Bilski, a curator and scholar in nineteenth- and twentieth-century art and cultural history, writes:

"The Golem, the artificially created human of Jewish tradition has long been evoked as a metaphor for artificial intelligence by scientists, philosophers, writers, and artists.

The motivations and methods for creating a golem, as well as the golem’s actions once it has been brought to life, have provided powerful analogies for the potential risks and benefits of creating artificial intelligence.

The word ‘golem’ occurs once in the Bible, ‘Thine eyes did see my golem...’ (Psalm 139:16), where it denotes an unformed substance, something embryonic. According to Talmudic commentaries, these words were spoken by Adam to God, and ‘golem’ was understood as the physical form of man before acquiring a soul. This innate connection between the first human and a golem inspired writers and artists beginning in the nineteenth century to view the golem as our doppelgänger, a concept that can be seen mirrored in AI developments and in our desire to create ever-more human-looking robots and synthetic humans."

"Each of the many manifestations of the golem – in literature, theatre, film, visual art, or popular culture – has reflected the concerns of their creators and the anxieties of the times in which they lived, whether the increased brutality of technological warfare, political movements run amok, the threat of nuclear annihilation, or scientific advances in biotechnology, AI, and big data. Both the golem story and Frankenstein have been understood as expressing the ‘horrors’ that science and technology can wreak.

Yet it is the golem that underscores the ambivalent relationship we have with scientific and technological progress.

In this regard, the scientist seeks to benefit humanity, just as the goal of the rabbis was to rescue Jews threatened by violence; therefore, any resulting danger is an unintended consequence. It is this dialectical nature of the golem – at once saviour and destroyer – that offers fertile comparisons with AI, and has inspired writers, filmmakers, and artists to interpret this archetypical."

At its core, the golem motif explores the mystery and power of the creative act.

Emily D. Bilski

Kode9: audio essay

Artist and electronic musician Kode9 presents a newly commissioned sound installation on the golem. Kode9’s audio essay adapts and samples from many of these stories of unruly artificial entities to create an eerie starting point to the exhibition.

Sam Twidale and Marija Avramovic: Sunshowers

Sam Twidale and Marija Avramovic look at AI through the lens of Japanese Shinto beliefs to explore notions of animism and techno-animism in Sunshowers.

Sunshowers is inspired by the opening chapter of Akira Kurosawa’s film Dreams which follows a young boy as he explores a forest and stumbles accross a fox wedding (Kitsune no Yomeiri)

The piece unfolds in real time with the characters themselves deciding which paths they will follow.

Non-playable characters occupy a virtual world, each controlled by its own AI system. Each character’s system contains personality traits and emotions that evolve over time in response to their interactions with other characters and their shared environment.

"Our piece explores ideas of animism and techno-animism by assigning life in the form of artificial intelligence to all of the objects, both natural and man-made, within the virtual world."

Sam Twidale and Marija Avramovic