Modern English in the Making

Kennedy, Arthur G.; McKnight, George H.

doi:10.2307/452071

Cited by 5 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…Devin Kennedy, for instance, explores how foundational theory for how to sort and manage complexity in computer science mirrored approaches for how to sort and manage capital. 61 Similarly, with regard to the history of software development after the 1970s, Laine Nooney argues, 'Throughout it all, we can clearly see the intractable role financial speculation and the construction of markets played in people's desire to even imagine what shape innovation might take.' 62 In relation to 'AI', Rosenblatt's perceptron, a foundational contribution to machine learning, explained the irreducibly complex phenomena of the mind using Hayek's notion of decentralized market structures.…”

Section: The Naturalization Of Ai's Conceptual Originsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Animo nullius: on AI's origin story and a data colonial doctrine of discovery

Penn

2023

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This paper traces elements of the theoretical origins of artificial intelligence to capitalism, not neurophysiology. It considers efforts in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to formalize a science of mental behaviour using the dynamics of social rather than neural phenomena. I first revisit early American theorists’ controversial ambivalence toward neurophysiology, showing how this group benefited from post-war corporate and military investments in commercial and imperial expansion, which sustained and expanded their influence over the emerging field. I then trace the lasting effect of the founders’ early rhetoric through AI's institutionalization after 1960, arguing that from the 2010s technology corporations set out to veil their enclosure of the data commons via appeal to a curious precedent: the scientific pedigree of AI. By relating the field to the history of capitalism, and specifically the rise of assetization in modern technoscience, I invite reflection on AI's origin story and on broader parallels between historical colonialism and data colonialism. I offer a heuristic – animo nullius, for ‘no persons’ mind’ – as an attempt to name rhetorical manoeuvres that leverage the authority of mind-as-computer metaphors in order to naturalize acts of seizure.

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Section: The Naturalization Of Ai's Conceptual Originsmentioning

confidence: 99%