Fall Institute: 'Limits of Intelligence: Meaning and Value'

Modern knowledge-societies value intelligence as a set of problem-solving capacities. In recent years, we could be said to have entered not only a so-called “AI summer”, but even a “technology summer”. This imaginary draws on accelerated progress in AI research and the large-scale socio-economic and political implementation of ‘intelligence’ technology. In our fall workshop we will question some of the key assumptions underlying this socio-political constellation. In particular, we will focus on existential and linguistic meaning as potential limits to intelligent processing. Our goal is to trace the contours of a novel type of ethics of intelligence that takes into account the fuzzy, historically changing, and apparently non-computable nature of values. This requires us to recalibrate our sense of what it is to understand meaning and value in an age in which intelligence and even understanding seem to emerge in the realm of our techno-scientific artifacts.