Infrastructural Intelligence

On March 1st, we will continue the Critical Media Lab Colloquium series with a new season. For the first session, IXDM researcher Johannes Bruder will present his forthcoming book project:

The text I’d like to discuss is the introduction to my book “The Shape of Brains to Come” (forthcoming, McGill-Queens University Press). The book is based on studies of ‘outsiders’ in neuroscience (researchers with non-neuroscientific backgrounds), which I conducted as a PhD candidate, and enriched with material I collected over the last two years. Essentially, the book exhibits contemporary entanglements of neuroscience and AI by showing how the recent ‘deep learning tsunami’ and related models for general artificial intelligence are subtended by contemporary developments in neuroscientific modeling that gave rise to an ‘infrastructuralization’ of the brain. To show how both developments are related, I am referring to two ‘milestones’: an open letter regarding the Human Brain Project (HBP), signed by leading neuroscientists and addressed to the European Commission, and the DeepMind challenge organized by Google to promote its general artificial intelligence algorithms via a clash of human and machine in the game of Go.

The preliminary program of the new season can be found here.