George Zarkadakis

I think the name was chosen aspirationally.

Most of the people who are

The Dartmouth Conference has become an origin myth commemorated with a plaque and everything.

On this site, artificial intelligence was born.

But in practice, the conference was a bit of a flop, actually.

There was a lot of conflict and tension and disagreement, and there wasn't actually a coherent field that emerged out of the conference.

Of course, the origin myth served to empower these men to tell their own story, and it's a story full of erasure.

We hear nothing in that origin myth about the relationship that AI has to industrialization or to capitalism or to these colonial legacies of reserving reason for only certain kinds of people and certain kinds of thinking.

That deeper story takes us back to the early days of industrialization.

In the late 1700s and early 1800s, factories started popping up across the world, reshaping the nature of work.

More and more tasks that had once been done only by human hands were now the work of machines.

Over in England, Charles Babbage, English mathematician, was touring factories in the context of industrialization and thinking, wow, these factories can tell us something about the human mind because they tell us about technology.

how processes can be broken down and what the elementary steps even of thought might be.

So we also see in this moment a kind of devaluation of the classes of people and or machines who do this sort of repetitive mechanical broken down labor in service of efficiency and profit maximization and industrialization and early capitalism.

He thought they were annoying and filthy and they were always making noise and singing songs and said famously, I wish to God these calculations had been produced by steam, by which he meant the steam engine, which was driving factory automation at the time.

People have been playing around with what is called automata, essentially machines that would automatically do something simple for centuries.

This is George Tsarkadakis again.

So there was always this idea of replicating nature, replicating movement, because movement was related to life.

I think the Industrial Revolution was in many ways a culmination of all those ideas that people have been experimenting on and off for at least 2,000 years.

Something happened to our collective psyche after the atom bomb.