AI before AI
A project organized with Peter Stacey (UCLA) starting December 2024
Scholars and analysts of contemporary AI rarely ask what the ancient, medieval or early modern periods might have already said about AI—before it was called AI. This project resurfaces questions whose depth and recurring demands have occupied thinkers across thousands of years; thinkers for whom the advent of AI might not represent anything so starkly new as the extravagant claims made for it by Silicon Valley pundits or hand-wringing politicians and CEOs.
Was human intelligence ever natural? And if not, in what ways does “artificial” accurately designate the aspects of rational thought or the ability humans might have to govern themselves? Is human rationality fundamentally social—and is that sociality natural or artificial? This is one kind of questions newly invigorated by the forms and uses being proposed for AI today, from automated decision-making in wars or economies, to forms of robotic care for patients or the elderly, to the role that the creation and access to knowledge plays in the ability we have to govern ourselves or others now, or in the past. “AI before AI” insists on putting these intellectual and philosophical questions back in the center of attention that is too easily displaced by spurious claims about what AI is or is not.
AI b4 AI Activities
Natural Sociability & Political Association
We organized a two-day workshop with Peter Stacey (UCLA) on December 2024, on the history of human sociality. Entitled ‘Natural Sociability and Political Association: Grounding Contemporary Responses to AI in an Intellectual History of Human Sociality’. The aim of the workshop is to subject various parts of the conceptual framework which often underpins contemporary responses to this challenge to serious and sustained intellectual scrutiny. It will do so by digging deep into the intellectual history of a succession of theories about society and the state whose terms demonstrably continue to structure the terms in which we currently construe the problem.