How to Communicate with Wood: Insights from the Deep History of Large Language Models

Lecture series Forms of Intelligence: Literary Knowledge in the Age of AI, Harvard University Department of Comparative Literature

Speaker: Markus Krajewski, University of Basel

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Abstract: This talk presents some aspects of what can be described as a deep history of AI, developing a trajectory of how scholars have interacted with their “intellectual furniture” since the Baroque period (and vice versa: how the different structures of these thinking devices have determined and shaped the production of scholarly knowledge throughout the ages). Leibniz, Goethe, and Luhmann are three different scholars who entrusted their collected knowledge to specific apparatus made of wood (and paper) in order to arrive at new and surprising insights in interaction with such “mechanical” intelligence.