Artificial Intelligence: George Eliot, Ernst Kapp, and the Projections of Character

This article focuses on one of Eliot’s last and strangest pieces of writing: ‘Shadows of the Coming Race’ (the penultimate chapter of Impressions of Theophrastus Such). It argues that ‘Shadows’ was strikingly prescient — less in its imagining of future machine intelligence than in its prediction of how the cultural debate has developed around AI and AI’s consequences for humanity. By reading ‘Shadows’ alongside a near contemporary work, Ernst Kapp’s Elements of a Philosophy of Technology (1877), the article seeks to cast light on the peculiarly demanding style of an essay that projects strong characters, given to hyperbolic arguments, and quite uninterested in ‘the wisdom of balancing claims’. In Kapp’s conception of language and culture as tools, whose technological function becomes clearer if we consider the etymological connection of ‘character’ with engraving and printing, we may find a model for what Eliot is doing: putting the technology of her art visibly to the fore, in order to gain critical purchase on the challenges of imagining the future.