Seminar archive
This seminar series, hosted by Dr Audrey Borowski, set out to probe the more theoretical ramifications and implications of ‘AI and the Digital'. The series was co-organized by The Philosopher (official Journal of the Philosophical Society of England), the Center for Science and Thought, the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence and Gloknos at Cambridge University.
AI and the Digital
'The Smartness Mandate' with Orit Halpern (TU Dresden) and Rob Mitchell (Duke)
Smart Grids. Smart Cities. Smart phones. Smart Medicine. Today, growing concerns with climate change, energy scarcity, security, and economic volatility have turned the focus of urban planners, investors, scientists, and governments towards computational technologies as sites of potential salvation from a world consistently defined by catastrophes and ‘crisis’. The penetration of almost every part of life by digital technologies has transformed how we understand nature, culture, and time. But how? And for whom? What futures are we imagining, or foreclosing, through our ‘smart’ infrastructures? This conversation will historically and ethnographically situate this new mandate to be smart and discuss how the humanities and sciences can work together to develop technologies that engage planetary scale problems in more ethical, just, and diverse ways.
'Capture and Generate: The New Language of AI' with Leif Weatherby (NYU)
2023 was the year of GPT. As hype, and then panic, swept the public sphere after the release of ChatGPT, questions of policy, regulation, bias, and even apocalypse dominated the conversation. This talk focuses on the "T" in GPT: the Transformer architecture. In this event, Leif Weatherby will separate the hype from the genuine leap forward that has occurred, and argue that only a computational structural theory of language is suited to grasp what the “G” in GPT – generative – means as it goes from an algorithmic capacity to a general cultural condition.
'Bacteria to AI: Human Futures with Our Nonhuman Symbionts' with N. Katherine Hayles (UCLA/Duke)
Arguably, AI is the most important cultural adaptation since the invention of language, and it is moving ahead at light speed—way beyond our ability to regulate or even comprehend it. This discussion will explain the basics of the Transformer architecture that powers ChatGPT and similar AIs and explore their implications for our collective futures and political processes.
'The Eye of the Master: A Social History of AI' with Matteo Pasquinelli (Ca' Foscari)
A dominant view describes AI as the quest “to solve intelligence” – a solution supposedly to be found in the secret logic of the mind or in the deep physiology of the brain, such as in its complex neural networks. Matteo Pasquinelli’s 2023 book, The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence argues, to the contrary, that the inner code of AI is shaped not by the imitation of biological intelligence, but the intelligence of labour and social relations, as it is found in Charles Babbage’s “calculating engines” of the industrial age as well as in the recent deep neural networks for face recognition. In this event, Pasquinelli will discuss his reading of the “labour theory of automation” in the age of AI.
'Rules and Algorithms' with Lorraine Daston (Chicago/MPIWG)
Since ancient times, algorithms have been one of several definitions of rules, but by no means the only or even the most prominent one. Lorraine Daston’s 2022 book, Rules: A Short History of What We Live By, traces the rise of rules of algorithms in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This conversation between Daston and Audrey Borowski will discuss the book, prefaced by a brief introduction to its themes, with special emphasis on the rule-as-algorithm and its alternatives.
'Who Do We Become When We Talk to Machines?' with Sherry Turkle (MIT)
Technology is the architect of our intimacies. We are human because language makes us so. And yet, we now contemplate a world where from our earliest years we talk to smart machines. Machines have no friendship to offer, and yet we persist in the desire for conversation, companionship, and even communion with the inanimate. What does that do to who we are as humans? What do we forget when we talk to machines? How can we remember ourselves?
'How Data Happened: A History from the Age of Reason to the Age of Algorithms' with Chris Wiggins (Columbia) and Matthew L. Jones (Princeton)
How did data-empowered algorithms come to shape our personal, professional, and political realities? Why do we view data with primacy in establishing truth, and how did access to data – “the new oil” – come to drive such power? Join a historian and a practicing data scientist, to understand the future of data, and its interaction with truth and power.