Speaker:

Markus Krajewski | Professor of Media Studies | University of Basel

Title: How to Communicate with Wood: Insights from the Deep History of Large Language Models

This talk presents some aspects of what can be described as a deep history of AI, developing a trajectory of how scholars have interacted with their “intellectual furniture” since the Baroque period (and vice versa: how the different structures of these thinking devices have determined and shaped the production of scholarly knowledge throughout the ages). Leibniz, Goethe, and Luhmann are three different scholars who entrusted their collected knowledge to specific apparatus made of wood (and paper) in order to arrive at new and surprising insights in interaction with such “mechanical” intelligence.

Our new Lecture series Forms of Intelligence: Literary Knowledge in the Age of AI aims to bring in leading literature scholars to address questions about how our discipline might speak to the current moment—drawing on centuries of thinking about questions that computer scientists have recently taken up, regarding context, culture, affect, translation, and so on.

Upcoming Speakers in the Series:

April 1, Patrick Jagoda (University of Chicago)

April 15, Rita Raley (UCSB)