An Appraisal of Nikola Tesla’s Idea of Artificial Intelligence
UDOSEN, Uforo Akpan
Department of Philosophy, Akwa Ibom State University, Obio Akpa Campus
Abstract
This paper offers an appraisal of Nikola Tesla’s vision of artificial intelligence, exploring his prescient ideas on automation, consciousness, and the mechanization of thought. While Tesla lived long before the term “AI” entered the scientific lexicon, his writings and inventions reflect a foundational intuition about the possibility of intelligent machines. Tesla viewed the human brain as a biochemical engine governed by determinism and susceptible to replication in mechanical form. From this standpoint, intelligence was not a mystical property but an emergent function of material complexity—an idea that prefigures modern computationalism. Tesla’s dream of a “thinking machine” was not rooted in contemporary digital paradigms, but in an electromechanical ontology, wherein cognition could be synthesized through systems that emulate neurological feedback. This philosophical reconstruction examines Tesla’s interpretation of mind as reducible to energy flows, memory as patterned storage, and ‘will’ as a programmable directive—thus dissolving the traditional dualism between human and machine. His vision suggests a proto-materialist AI, where agency is not sacred but synthetic. By situating Tesla’s ideas in the broader context of Enlightenment rationalism, mechanistic philosophy, and early cybernetic theory, the paper using Analytic and Expository methods, argue that his conception of artificial intelligence anticipates key debates in AI ethics, machine autonomy, and the nature of consciousness, thereby highlighting the limitations and critiques of his vision, as well as offer epistemological insights on Telautomaton. Tesla emerges not merely as an inventor, but as an intuitive philosopher of mind—offering a radically empirical, yet uncannily modern, account of artificial cognition.
Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, Automaton, Telautomaton, Mechanization, Consciousness, Mind.