AI in 1588?

The Folger Library alerts us to a mention of Artificial Intelligence in a book in their collection printed in 1588, John Harvey’s A discoursiue probleme concerning prophesies. You can see the mention eight lines from the bottom of this photo, just above Democritus’ name. “This predates what the Oxford English Dictionary identifies as its first use in a proposal that John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude Shannon authored in 1955 to investigate the feasibility of machine intelligence, which would then turn into the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence in 1956.” OK, but John Harvey’s not of course foreseeing ChatGPT and Claude. He is warning us against the artificiality of the apparently magical prognostications which were available in the many “books of prognostication and prediction from self-ascribed prophets” which were popular at the time. (Such magical prognostications still seem to be quite salable as part of the annual crop of…