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Travelling is a fascinating thing to do. But what today is seen for the most part as an interruption of the daily life at home, as something done only during vacations, used to be a much more challenging endeavor, full of risks. People travelled to explore virtually unknown and uncharted land; they went to conquer, to investigate, and to bring Christianity. Letters and reports written during the journey or after one's return were a means to share whatever one had learned, as well as to let those who stayed behind participate in one's experiences. For us today these documents are a treasure of ideas and worldviews. One such treasure has been preserved in the Jesuit Collection of the University Library in Maastricht. Among the 265,000 volumes covering an immense variety of fields, the international orientation of the Jesuit order has given us a series of travel writings. They span a time period from as early as the sixteenth century to as late as the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and are proof of the explorative nature of past travellers: both the Old World and the New World were explored widely, and since not all of the books in the Jesuit Collection were written by actual Jesuits, the different backgrounds – scientific and religious, military and commercial – add to the writings' diversity.

This article shows how fundamental debates on both human obsolescence in the form of vanishing human exceptionalism and of technological unem- ployment were anchored to the emerging technology of artificial intelligence (AI). Through this anchoring, these debates became tangible and they were discussed beyond scientific circles by the wider public too. Thus the technol­ ogy on the one hand and the scientific and social debates on human obsoles­ cence on the other hand entered into a phase of co­evolution. We will first discuss the computer metaphor since it not only prepared the idea of AI but also was the culture medium for the connection between the technology and the obsolescence debates. In the second half of the article, we then discuss this connection in the context of human exceptionalism, followed by the context of technological unemployment. Next to prominent examples from Anglo-American AI research as well as cybernetics and psychology we look at German-language examples. That the spread of the anchoring of debate to technology goes beyond scientific circles is made clear by looking at science fiction and broadsheet newspapers and magazines.