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Is There a Ghost in the Machine?
Thomas Edison, technology, spirituality, and AI
Thomas Edison invented a lot of really nifty stuff. He’s a big part of the reason that the people of the twentieth century could turn the lights on at night, listen to recorded music, and make and watch movies. His inventions were integral to the development of modern life.
But even Edison didn’t bat 1.000.
Scattered amongst his big hits were many duds, including an electric pen that didn’t really work well, talking dolls that broke when actual children handled them, and concrete houses that nobody wanted.
But Edison’s strangest failed project was — well, I’ll let you read what A.D. Rothman of the New York Times had to say about it in 1921:
WITHOUT a peer in the field of scientific invention, Thomas Edison has announced his entrance into a new sphere, that of psychic research… When so-called “death” appears to drive life from our bodies Mr. Edison thinks that our personality “units” do not die, but continue to exist as substantial material things…. [Edison said that] “There are held a dozen ways of making a machine or of approaching the problem… A man with very puny strength sets into motion a machine with power infinitely greater than his own.”
Edison wasn’t sure he would succeed: “He is not prepared to say if he succeeds in constructing an apparatus that can register the stimuli of personality units… will mean the opening of free communication with the dead.” He rejected occult ideas like Ouija boards, but he believed that technology could crack the barrier between life and death. With a typically optimistic tinkerer’s attitude, he said, “The ball has got to start a-rolling. I am taking a try at it.”
The ball didn’t roll very far. It’s unclear if Edison ever actually tried to build this thing; his preliminary designs included a phonograph-like horn that would somehow catch the “vibrations” of the “life units” that were floating around. Edison’s “valve” to the world of the dead never opened.
Though Edison’s desire to create a device that could speak to the dead might seem laughable, when you look at it in context, it seems a little more reasonable. The truth is that Edison had created a link between the living…
