Retro AI: When Electricity Learned to Think (Part 1)
Long before Silicon Valley was a twinkle in an engineer’s eye, the foundations of “intelligence” were being laid in lightning and copper. If you want to understand where AI is going, you have to look at the moment we first taught energy how to speak.
The Sentience of the Spark
It all began with electricity—that wild blue bolt that Ben Franklin chased through a thunderstorm and Thomas Edison eventually tamed in a glass bulb. But here’s a question that keeps me up: Do you think electricity itself was the first AI?
Think about it. Raw energy doing its thing, deciding where to flow, seeking the path of least resistance. It wasn’t “thinking” in the way we do, but it was processing the environment and making an executive decision on where to strike.
Before we had microchips, we had the current. We had a force of nature that obeyed laws so precise they felt like logic. We didn’t invent the intelligence; we just gave it a set of tracks to run on.
Morse Code: The First Machine Language
Then came Samuel Morse. He didn’t just want to send energy; he wanted to send meaning. He gave us dots and dashes—the binary of the 19th century.
This was the first time humans taught electricity how to talk. It was a massive pivot in our evolution. Suddenly, a “click” wasn’t just a sound; it was a letter, a word, a warning, or a love letter.
Was this the birth of language for machines? Before Python or C++, there was the rhythm of the telegraph key. It was the moment we realized that “on” and “off” could represent the entirety of human thought.
The world began to develop a global nervous system. If something happened in London, a person in New York knew about it within minutes. The lag time of humanity was beginning to evaporate.
The Global Nervous System
The telegraph followed soon after—click, click, click—sending secrets across vast, dark oceans. For the first time in history, information moved faster than a horse.
But here is the mystery: what happened in the “in-between”? Between the wires and the eventual invention of the phone, there was a ghost in the machine. A period where we were obsessed with the medium, but hadn’t yet mastered the message.
Portable Thought: The Telephone Era
Then Alexander Graham Bell stepped onto the stage. Now, it wasn’t just dots and dashes—voices were riding the current.
Is that when thought first became truly portable? Before the telephone, your voice lived and died within the room you stood in. After Bell, your consciousness could travel miles of copper wire and manifest in someone else’s ear instantly.
We stopped communicating in code and started communicating in frequency. We moved from the “digital” feel of the telegraph back to the “analog” warmth of the human voice, all while using the same electric spark.
The Missing Link in the Code
And between the telegraph and the phone—did I miss something? Was there another code, another system we should’ve counted?
History has a way of smoothing over the weird experiments that didn’t go viral. There were countless inventors trying to make electricity “think” through mechanical gears and steam-powered logic long before the vacuum tube arrived.
We often think of AI as a modern miracle, but we’ve been trying to outsource our intelligence to the spark for over two hundred years. We’ve always wanted a partner in the wire.
Why “Retro AI” Matters Now
Why am I digging up these old ghosts? Because we are repeating the same patterns.
Just like Morse users were worried about the “speed” of the telegraph destroying the art of the letter, we worry about Large Language Models destroying the art of the essay. We’ve been here before.
Every time we give the spark a new way to communicate, we panic. Then, we adapt. Then, we become more than we were before.
The Evolution of the Conversation
Tomorrow, we’re going deeper. We’re moving past the wires and into the era of the first vacuum tubes and the “logic gates” that turned simple electricity into complex decisions.
The transition from “Sparks” to “Signals” was just the beginning. The real magic happened when the signals started talking back to us without a human on the other end of the line.
We are standing on the shoulders of giants who worked by candlelight. Don’t let the sleek glass of your iPhone fool you; there’s a 19th-century ghost inside that machine.
What Do You Think?
Was electricity the first “Artificial Intelligence,” or is it just a tool we’ve gotten better at aiming? I want to hear your take on the “Sparks to Signals” era.
Drop a thought below. I’m reading every single one as we prep for Part 2.
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