PRE-HISTORY OF ARTIFICIAL EMPATHY:

Reluctant to reveal their tricks, some magicians will endulge anecdotal evidence in efforts to make polite conversation.  Ironically such a natural human tendency may well aid in acquiring knowledge of a most audacious instance of relational antagonism circa 13th century Europe.

This example concerning one Albertus Magnus, alchemist par excellance, who constructed a living being entirely out of an improvised copper-zinc alloy— a bonafide brass  man.

Upon completion, however, Magnus was so riled by the brutish disposition of this brass man that he destroyed it with a hammer in a state of rage.  Police reports convey that the conversation had become so congested with pompous puffery from the metallic mister that the otherwise mild-mannered sorcerer was driven to physically finagling, shall we say, the “brass tacks” of the issue. Namely, that even sufficiently advanced technologies do not guarantee an abundance of people skills.

Fourscore and several Frankensteinian foibles forward, Artificial Life eventually was sorted out. Ever after the next hotbed of funding, the scientifically inclined populace fixated on “Intelligence” as the next apoetheosis of artificial feats. 

Mid-century mods on the Enigma family of electro-roto devices negotiated intelligence in the form of pretentious riddles, codes and cryptographically inscribed gossip.

  Needless to say this did little to advance cordial relations between man and machine.

Alan Turing, celebrated for cracking Enigmas in WW2, was met with impending incarceration in the 1950s on account of being homosexual.  Unceremoniously coerced into auto-installing ‘correctional’ hormones, homophobic authorities apparently deemed the known known of an artificially straight scientist was less enigmatic than the known unknown of a naturally gay computer whisperer.

Could it be that the repressive state apparatus of the British Gov’t contributed to Turing’s determination to seek out post-human sentience? It is evident that the intrepid cryptanalyst reverse-engineered Althusserian antics, finding his peers (i.e. people) to be obsolete in terms of empathetic capacity.

Turing soon developed the eponymous “Turing Test” to determine whether or not a computer could be said to “think,” if a human operator could not distinguish conversation with this computer as artificial.