Edgar Poe as Cultural Warrior Part 2

Poe, Beethoven and Houdini VS the Cult of Artificial Intelligence

This is part two of a new series that will develop in tandem with The Occult Tesla series. Click here to read part 1 of the series The Society of the Cincinnatus: Solving a 170 Year Murder Mystery

Originally published on Matt Ehret’s Substack

Poe Debunks the Cult of Artificial Intelligence

Throughout his literary works, Edgar Poe not only devoted every effort to expose the plague of irrational spiritualism taking over the American psyche in the mid-19th century, but also demonstrated the tricks of fraudsters that pretended to control “thinking machines” such as seen in Mäelzels's Chess Player, an essay published in April 1836 in the Southern Literary Messenger.

As Allan Salisbury demonstrated in his 1981 pioneering study ‘The Lost Soul of America’, Edgar Allan Poe did much more than simply debunk a travelling hoaxster, but intervened on a much larger psychological warfare operation directed by British intelligence which sought to promote the concept that machines could not only think, but…