Our tech titans keep telling us that AI is humankind’s most cutting-edge technology ever, with Google CEO Sundar Pichai going so far as to describe its arrival as “more profound” than either the discovery of fire or the invention of electricity. Not to be outdone, entrepreneur Marc Andreessen said AI is “possibly the most revolutionary technology in the history of the species.”

Perhaps, but many people are still using the technology to generate porn and cat videos — not exactly needle-moving stuff. And some of the uses of AI can seem downright atavistic. Spiritualism, once associated with “primitive” cultures and the supernatural, has taken on a new life via “deathbots” that enable the living to communicate with convincing facsimiles of the deceased.

This isn’t the first mash-up of the modern and the occult. The arrival of transformational technologies nearly two centuries ago triggered a similar response. Consider, for example, what happened when human beings first encountered a bewildering new invention: the telegraph.

The basic idea of the machine emerged in the early 1800s, when scientists began to understand the peculiarities of electromagnetic phenomena. In the 1830s, two men — Samuel F. B. Morse and Alfred Vail — built a working version. It consisted of a transmitter, made up of a battery that sent electrical pulses along a wire. On the other end, the receiver housed a magnetic needle that moved in response to the presence or absence of a current.

When the individual operating the transmitter alternated the length of time the circuit remained open, the person on the receiving side could differentiate between long and short signals. This binary system became the basis of the famous “dots” and “dashes” of Morse code, with each letter of the alphabet assigned a different sequence of dots and dashes. Morse and Vail had devised a way to communicate instantaneously over vast distances.

The duo held their public demonstration of the telegraph in 1844, sending a message taken from the Bible’s Book of Numbers — “What hath God wrought?” — between Baltimore and Washington, DC.

In a couple of years’ time, telegraph wires began to knit the nation together. Senator John C. Calhoun, hardly a sensitive soul, marveled at how “magic wires are stretching themselves in all directions over the earth,” creating what he described as “mystic meshes.” The telegraph, like AI today, defied description. Only the language of the supernatural seemed right.

This may help explain what happened next. In 1848, two young sisters — Kate and Maggie Fox — in upstate New York reported hearing strange rapping noises that they claimed were made by the spirit of a murdered man who had been buried in their basement by a previous owner of the house. The girls, ages 11 and 14, were convinced that the mysterious raps weren’t random — the man was trying to tell them something. Conversations ensued.

Soon, the Foxes claimed to be channeling the messages of other departed souls, as did a growing number of other individuals, mostly women, who suddenly possessed the same knack for “spirit rapping.” What was exposed decades later as a prank quickly grew into a mass movement that swept the nation, and eventually, the English-speaking world.

Millions of Americans became convinced that they could speak to the dead, and seances entered mainstream culture. Andrew Jackson Davis, arguably the most important promoter of spiritualism in the U.S., put the matter bluntly in 1850. Talking to the dead, he explained, is “no more complicated or wonderful” than how telegraphs send messages through wires.

Another prominent spiritualist named Apollos Munn echoed this point, explicitly drawing an “analogy between the mode of communicating between the spiritual and the natural worlds by electrical rappings, and the mode of communicating between distant places by magnetic telegraph.” Understood this way, spirit rappings were the same as the telegraph’s Morse Code, “corresponding to letters of the alphabet.”

An entire train of metaphysical explication shored up this analogy, likening the magnetic telegraph that dissolved time and space to the “celestial telegraph” that united the living and the dead. The first newspaper of the movement, The Spiritual Telegraph, paid homage to the connection.

And when Davis sought to explain who among the deceased was responsible for uniting the two realms, he claimed that the spirit of Benjamin Franklin, whom many credited for discovering electricity in the first place, had been the key player. Franklin soon made many appearances in seances, chatting with Americans eager to hear his wisdom. Another Founding Father, George Washington, was likewise summoned from beyond the grave(1).

All of this may sound like a fringe movement, but it attracted millions of adherents in the middle and upper classes. Significantly, many electrical engineers who spent their professional lives in telegraphy had a deep personal interest in spiritualism — people like Cromwell Varley, who helped build the transatlantic telegraph cable and attended seances run by one of the Fox sisters.

Other technologies that seemed magical at first glance evoked comparable responses. The invention of photography spurred a movement that sought to capture “ghosts” on film; the arrival of the telephone sparked another spiritualist craze. The latest AI-driven version of this phenomenon is the direct descendant of this tradition.

That advanced technologies keep sparking shamanistic practices more in line with pre-modern societies should not surprise us. For all of our machine-making prowess, I’d bet that many of us secretly prefer the pleasures of enchantment and magic to the cold comfort of modern technology. It is what makes us human — and altogether different from AI.

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(1) We're not going to leave you hanging. The translation of the Morse code in the lead image is: Man: George, is that you?Telegraph: It is I

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This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Stephen Mihm, associate dean and professor of history at the University of Georgia, is coauthor of “Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance.”

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