[ianbicking]

The knowledge machine question is fascinating ("Imagine you had access to a machine embodying all the collective knowledge of your ancestors. What would you ask it?") – it truly does not know about computers, has no concept of its own substrate. But a knowledge machine is still comprehensible to it.

It makes me think of the Book Of Ember, the possibility of chopping things out very deliberately. Maybe creating something that could wonder at its own existence, discovering well beyond what it could know. And then of course forgetting it immediately, which is also a well-worn trope in speculative fiction.

[jaggederest]

Jonathan Swift wrote about something we might consider a computer in the early 18th century, in Gulliver's Travels - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Engine

The idea of knowledge machines was not necessarily common, but it was by no means unheard of by the mid 18th century, there were adding machines and other mechanical computation, even leaving aside our field's direct antecedents in Babbage and Lovelace.