Ghosts of the Machine Age: A Scientific Family, a Haunted Empire, and the Prehistory of AI

Benjamin Breen
History
UC Santa Cruz

In the late Victorian era, science escaped the laboratory and took over the world. Through a vast network of telegraphs, universities, and statistical bureaus, it became a globalized force for both understanding nature and asserting control over human societies. The technoscientific revolution of the 1880s crystallized around two distinct but entangled approaches. William James and an eclectic coalition of psychologists and psychical researchers sought to expand the boundaries of science by investigating altered states of consciousness and supernatural phenomena. Meanwhile, in London, Francis Galton pursued a more mechanical dream, seeking to reduce human life to a collection of measurements and correlations. While the Galtonian model laid the groundwork for machine learning, James’s humanistic approach offered a different path—one that valued individual experience over aggregated metrics. Building on recent work in science and technology studies on the imperial origins of data science, while drawing new connections to histories of consciousness, gender, and the supernatural, this book traces the links between imperial power, paranormal research, and the emerging logic of the machine in the decades preceding World War I. It is a “prehistory of AI” that provides a novel historical perspective on some of the most pressing debates of the 2020s.