What looked like mind

Every age has had something that made people wonder where the machine ended and the mind began. In What Looked Like Mind, Risto follows four such moments across two and a half thousand years. A Greek philosopher who imagined a world in which tools worked by themselves — and saw, in passing, the problem his entire economic argument would have to solve. A European ambassador who stood before mechanical birds that sang and bronze lions that roared at his arrival. A wooden Turk who played chess against Napoleon, Benjamin Franklin, and Edgar Allan Poe, and won most of the time. And a movement of English weavers who broke the machines that were replacing them, knowing exactly what they were doing.