Introduction to Future Theories of Intelligence

Instructor: Simon DeDeo Date & Time: Nov 14, 21, Dec 5, 12 14 to 16:30 ET

DESCRIPTION: To study intelligence is to study the power and potential of thought itself. This course will examine this most difficult of topics from a scientific and philosophical perspective. It is a research seminar that proposes a four-fold taxonomy of theories of intelligence with the goal of extending our conception of the limits of our mental capacities. The study of intelligence as utility, computation, knowledge, and reflection, I will argue, provides a foundation for severer and more advanced speculation at thought’s frontier.

Intelligence is not only a theoretical problem. It is also a political one, and has been understood as everything from a distraction from moral virtue to an existential threat to human survival. It plays a central role in political theories ranging from Plato’s golden souls and Hobbes’s rational agents to Hayek’s decentralized capitalism and Anglo-American bureaucratic meritocracy. The era of “thinking machines” places more weight than ever on the notion of intelligence, with machines of beyond-human intelligence expected to both resolve our material needs and usher in a new era of mentality.

IMAGE: Desmond Paul Henry, Machine Drawing, 1962.

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