AI4Research open seminar

Coevolved with the cold war, smart technology chills far more than speech as it heats up more than one environment. In this talk I will unpack my ongoing book project on the history of Soviet artificial intelligence, or an alternative genealogy of how media and information technologies became "smart" in the twentieth century. Framed around the organizing argument against the cold war instrumentalism of smart technology, this talk argues that smart tech--phones, cars, cities, etc.--we know today sprung from particular cold war cutting-edge embodiments, despite their being long-neglected alternative genealogies and alternative ways forward: in particular, this talk critically advances, among other hypotheses, the following insights from Soviet artificial intelligence research: although appearing more of an archipelago of schools than a tradition of research, Soviet AI broadly emphasized intelligent environments, and not anthropomorphic machines, even as the proverbial "radiohead" in early revolutionary Soviet Union constitutes a mind-machine metaphor as suggestive as any mid-century brain-computers; contemporary AI debates stand to learn from the curious absence of any Soviet romance with cyborgs or the uncanny valley, even as the tragic case study of Chernobyl 1986/2022, among the failure of other smart environments, may help routinize a post-apocalyptic subaltern critique of AI. In neither genealogy is smart tech set to deliver on its most popular, progressive, and better-world promises.