Artificial Intelligence

Neil D. Lawrence

2023-12-15

Ludgate Symposium

The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

Photo of Detail of Creation of Man from the Sistine chapel ceiling.

Photo detail of God.

The Blue Marble, a photo of Earth taken from Apollo 17.

The blue marble image of the earth taken from Apollo 17 which became a symbol of the environmental movement. December 1972??

The Atomic Eye, by slicing away aspects of the human that we used to believe to be unique to us, but are now the preserve of the machine, we learn something about what it means to be human.

The Diving Bell and the Buttefly is the autobiography of Jean Dominique Bauby.

For sale: baby shoes, never worn

Consider the six-word novel, apocryphally credited to Ernest Hemingway, “For sale: baby shoes, never worn”. To understand what that means to a human, you need a great deal of additional context. Context that is not directly accessible to a machine that has not got both the evolved and contextual understanding of our own condition to realize both the implication of the advert and what that implication means emotionally to the previous owner.

Ernest Hemingway’s apocryphal six-word novel would mean nothing to a computer.

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn suggests scientific paradigms are recorded in books.

Lunette containing Rehoboam and Abijah.

William Blake’s Newton.

William Blake’s Elohim Creating Adam.

Photo of detail of the fall and expulsion from the Garden of Eden.

People communicate through artifacts and culture.

Bandwidth vs Complexity.

book: The Atomic Human
twitter: @lawrennd
podcast: The Talking Machines
newspaper: Guardian Profile Page
blog: http://inverseprobability.com