On the technical evolution of intelligence: an artificial history

Chair: Patrick Boucheron

Abstract

This article traces an artificial history of natural intelligence, arguing that, since the emergence of modern thought during the scientific revolution in Europe, the mind and its capacities have been apprehended as embedded in bodies, machines and prosthetic technologies of thought, such as writing. Human intelligence was thus apprehended in terms of automatism. Given the contemporary hypertechnologization of human life, marked by increasing automation thanks to digital infrastructures, automation poses a threat to human independence, while at the same time demanding crucial political and social decisions. This artificial history attempts to revive a tradition of thinking about intelligence as resistance to automatism. In other words, despite the mind's intimate, even constitutive, relationship with technology, it can nonetheless harbor the means for what Bernard Stiegler calls de-automatization, and thus rehabilitate the human capacity for decision-making. Starting with Descartes and the concept of the automaton in the modern era, this article is part of a reflection that integrates conceptions of the mind, the brain and machines in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, early computing devices, cybernetics and post-war theories of human-machine interaction, in order to track a certain interaction between the human mind and openness within technical and machinic forms of determination. We conclude with a critique of artificial intelligence, arguing that intelligence arises from the mind's confrontation with automatism, not from automatic processes per se.

David Bates

David W. Bates is Professor in the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley, an affiliate with the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine and Society, and past Director of the Berkeley Center for New Media. He received his PhD in European History from the University of Chicago. His research and teaching is focused on the relations between technology and cognition, and the history of political and legal thought. His book An Artificial History of Natural Intelligence: Thinking with Machines from Descartes to the Digital Age will be published by the University of Chicago Press in Spring 2024. He has previously published two books on early modern thought - Enlightenment Aberrations: Error and Revolution in France (Cornell, 2002) and States of War: Enlightenment Origins of the Political (Columbia, 2011) - and edited (with Nima Bassiri) a volume Plasticity and Pathology: On the Formation of the Neural Subject (Fordham, 2015). Other publications include articles on topics such as Cybernetics, Artificial Intelligence, and 20th-century political and legal theory.