Join the Center for 21st Century Studies and the AI and the Humanities Collaboratory for lecture by Meghan O’Gieblyn, author of God Human Animal Machine and the essay collection Interior States, which won the 2018 Believer Book Award.

At a moment when we are outsourcing many intellectual and creative tasks to machines, it’s worth thinking about the point of thinking itself. Is it a means to an end, or an end in itself? Are humans just “stochastic parrots,” mindlessly producing language in a way that is not so different from AI, as some tech luminaries contend, or is there something more going on in our minds?

While these questions may seem new, they harken back to older debates about the relationship between thought and language, freedom and necessity, and the fine line that exists between attention and automaticity. Long before the advent of digital technologies, two twentieth century philosophers, Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil, wrote about some of these questions through the lens of the technologies of their times. Their writing anticipates many of the challenges of the age of AI and calls attention to the more ordinary and insidious ways that consciousness becomes ossified by social convention, as well as the moral and political risks that arise when we fail to “think what we are doing.”

Free street parking available in neighborhoods near venue. Paid parking available at the Union Garage (Lot #22).

Refreshments will be served at 3:30 p.m. Lecture begins at 4 p.m. This event is free and open to the public.

Prior registration is requested for the purposes of estimating attendance. Please complete the form at https://uwm.edu/c21/event/meghan-ogieblyn/. No personal information will be collected.