🚀 go-pugleaf

In the early eighteenth century a man of intense religious fervour named
Johann Ernst Elias Bessler claimed that God had revealed to him the secret
of the perpetual motion machine.  He would tour villages in the costume of
a magician and offer demonstrations of his devices.  Ultimately, he
attracted the attention of Count Karl von Hessen-Cassel, who undertook
to serve as a sponsor.  At Hessen-Cassel's expense, Bessler built one
of these machines based on a wheel which was twelve feet in diameter.
Hessen-Cassel then invited many of the leading scientific minds of his
time to evaluate the project.  In the course of this evaluation, the
machine apparently ran without stopping for 54 days.  Ultimately, Bessler
was exposed as a fraud;  and several scientific reputations were destroyed
as a consequence.

While the historical record of this affair is fragmented, there are several
rather interesting points which I would claim are at least remotely related
to the current discussion about similar sponsorship of artificial intelligence.

	1.  The evaluating scientists were not allowed to inspect the
	inner workings of Bessler's machine.  Bessler claimed they would
	be blinded by the divine revelation (or words to that effect).
	Hessen-Cassel apparently did see the inner workings and was
	not blinded.  Nevertheless, the evaluating committee agreed
	to accept this constraint.

	2.  For all the time that Hessen-Cassel possessed this machine,
	he never tried to do anything practical with it.  Bessler's
	previous demonstrations with smaller-scale machines always
	climaxed with the machine being used to lift some impressive
	weight.  While Hessen-Cassel was in possession of a potentially
	significant labor-saving device, he seemed content to keep it
	locked in a room of his castle.

	3.  Bessler was never exposed on the grounds of any scientific
	argument.  Willem Jakob Gravesande published a "proof" of why
	the machine worked, and the flaw in this proof was
	subsequently published by Jacque de Crousaz.  However,
	Bessler was undone when a servant girl confessed that
	she was powering the machine from an adjoining room.
	This was later discovered to be a false testimony, but
	Bessler was distraught by the affair.  Before anyone had
	a chance to inspect its interior, he destroyed the machine.

I do not intend to imply that artificial intelligence is like perpetual
motion, at least to the extent that it is a theoretical impossibility.
However, I am struck by certain behavioral parallels between past and
present.  My personal opinion is that Bessler was probably an extremely
skilled "hacker" (in mechanics) for his time, with his personal confidence
reinforced by his religious convictions.  He probably pulled off a pretty
good piece of work even if his mind was entirely "in the bits" (so to
speak) and largely ignorant of prevailing theory.  What is pathetic,
however, is that those who were asked to evaluate him were willing to
play the game by his own rules.  Indeed, there is some indication that
their opinions may have been slanted by the promise of sharing in the
monetary gain which Bessler's invention might yield.  Also, there is
this depressing observation that the evaluation never involved putting
the machine to work;  they were content to just let it run on in a
locked chamber.

Current "success stories" about artificial intelligence are not quite
as contrived as that of Bessler's machine running in a locked room for
54 days;  but they come closer than I would feel is comfortable.  To a
great extent, the "field testing" of "applied" expert systems often takes
place in rather constrained circumstances.  A less polite way of putting
this might be to say that the definition of "success" is in danger of
being modified POST HOC to accommodate the capabilities of the system
being evaluated.  Thus, I feel that all reports of such stories should
be viewed with appropriate scientific scepticism.

On the other hand, there is a positive side of this historical retrospective.
Had Hessen-Cassel actually put Bessler's machine to work, it might have
been of considerable benefit to him . . . even if it did not run forever.
In other words, a machine capable of dissipating its energy slowly enough
to run for a very long time, while not being a true perpetual motion
machine, would still be a useful tool.  By concentrating on a theoretical
goal, rather than a practical one, Hessen-Cassel lost an opportunity to
exploit a potentially valuable resource.  Similarly, sponsorship of
artificial intelligence should probably pay more heed to advancement
along specific pragmatic fronts and less to whether or not machines
which exhibit that behavior deserve to be called "intelligent."  If
we recognize what we have for what it is, we may get more out of it
than we might think.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT:  I would like to thank Jim Engelhardt for the extensive
research he has performed regarding the story of Bessler.  He is in the
process of incorporating his research into a play which he is calling
THE PERPETUAL MOTION MAN.  His research has been quite thorough, and
his insights are noteworthy.