“The psychological effect, if you do not know what to expect,” he wrote, “is devastating. Clarke, who encountered Shannon’s prototype of the machine during a visit to Bell Labs in the ’50s, claimed to be disturbed by this spectacle. To watch it switch itself off is to experience something strangely human. Despite being a product of Minsky’s strange and fertile imagination, the Useless Machine seemed to me to run counter to this narrative of absolute automation it seemed to react to the idea by switching itself off. I was haunted by Minsky’s own infamous claim that the human brain “is just a computer that happens to be made out of meat” - an idea as hard to refute as it was unpleasant to think about - and by his insistence that our creations would one day be smarter than we are. Part of the experience of writing the book, of spending time with transhumanists and engaging with their mechanistic ideas about human nature, was an uneasy grappling with the notion that we humans were already biological machines, and that we were destined to be superseded by technologies more sophisticated than ourselves. I developed an affection for this machine - for the idea of it, and then, having bought one on eBay, the reality - while writing a book about transhumanism, a movement that, among other things, advocates the merger of our bodies with our technologies. This context, the fact that the creators of this aggressively pointless gadget are emblematic figures in the ascendancy of machines over our contemporary world, lends a frisson of historical oddity to what is essentially an executive toy. The first working model was constructed by his mentor, Claude Shannon, who later became known as the father of information theory. This device - which is known as the Useless Machine, and more rarely as the Leave Me Alone Box - was conceived at Bell Laboratories in the early 1950s by the computer scientist Marvin Minsky, a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence, who was at that point a grad student working a summer job. Having been switched on, this machine has now fulfilled its sole function of switching itself off again. From time to time over the course of my workday, I reach out to flick this switch, and a hatch opens at the top of the box, and a small fingerlike projection, driven by a whirring motor within, emerges and pushes the switch back into its original position. On the lower left-hand corner of my desk sits a wooden box, roughly the size and shape of a smallish jewelry case and featureless save for a small metal switch on its uppermost surface.
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