The history of AI is often told as the story of machines getting smarter over time. What's lost is the human element in the narrative, how intelligent machines are designed, trained, and powered by human minds and bodies. In this six-part series, we explore that human history of AI--how innovators, thinkers, workers, and sometimes hucksters have created algorithms that can replicate human thought and behavior (or at least appear to). While it can be exciting to be swept up by the idea of super-intelligent computers that have no need for human input, the true history of smart machines shows that our AI is only as good as we are. In the year 1770, at the court of the Austrian Empress Maria Theresa, an inventor named Wolfgang von Kempelen presented a chess-playing machine.

Traditional art has an element of illusionism to it. This has long been commented on, and is responsible for the prevalent thought (at least among the general public) that the more realistic the artwork, the more a man-made creation looks like a nature-made one, the better it must be. The ancient praised the lifelike naturalism of painters, with Pliny relating the famous story of a duel between two artists, one of whom was able to fool a bird into swooping in to peck at his painted grapes, whereas the other was able to fool the first artist, tricking him into trying to pull aside a curtain that was, in fact, his painting of a curtain. Fooling a human trumps fooling an animal, and the ability to inspire awe, wonder, the "how-did-they-do-that" expression, has long been the goal of most traditional art. Think of a tale of Pygmalion, in which an ivory sculpture of a naked woman was so realistic, and its sculptor's love for it so strong, that it actually came to life.

This article has been reproduced in a new format and may be missing content or contain faulty links. Contact wiredlabs@wired.com to report an issue. The inside story of an ingenious chess-playing machine that thrilled crowds, terrified opponents, and won like clockwork. One autumn day in 1769, a 35-year-old civil servant was summoned to the imperial court in Vienna to witness a magic show. Wolfgang von Kempelen – well versed in physics, mechanics, and hydraulics – was a trusted servant of Maria Theresa, the empress of Austria-Hungary. She had invited him in order to see what a scientific man would make of the magician's tricks. The event was to change the course of Kempelen's life.

The peak of all this may be the moment at which the inventor Ray Kurzweil asks, "As Machines become more like People, will People become more like God?" The infectiously enthusiastic Kurzweil is the leading proponent of "Strong A.I.," a brave new world in which a "Non-invasive Surgery-Free Reversible Programmable Distributed Brain Implant" will soon become available. In the keynote essay in "Are We Spiritual Machines?" Kurzweil imagines nanobots--hyper-intelligent miniaturized robots--zipping around our brains and downloading our mental software onto new hard drives which will somehow become re-embodied as us. Immortality looms, if "we are sufficiently careful to make frequent back-ups."

Defecating ducks, talking busts, and mechanised Christs -- Jessica Riskin on the wonderful history of automata, machines built to mimic the processes of intelligent life. How old are the fields of robotics and artificial intelligence? Many might trace their origins to the mid-twentieth century, and the work of people such as Alan Turing, who wrote about the possibility of machine intelligence in the '40s and '50s, or the MIT engineer Norbert Wiener, a founder of cybernetics. But these fields have prehistories -- traditions of machines that imitate living and intelligent processes -- stretching back centuries and, depending how you count, even millennia. The word "robot" made its first appearance in a 1920 play by the Czech writer Karel?apek entitled R.U.R., for Rossum's Universal Robots.

Usually the discussion settles down to the would.)