Simpson Center for the Humanities, humanities@uw.edu, 206.543.3920

Co-sponsored by the eScience Institute.

Whether exuberant or doomsaying, AI polemics generally share an interest in seeing AI as breaking with the past rather than considering continuities. But AI’s rootedness in pre-existing technologies defines its impacts as much as its newness. These pre-existing technologies include not only recent advances in mass digitization and machine learning, but prior analog developments as well, going back centuries, even millennia. In this workshop, Geoffrey Turnovsky (French and Textual Studies) will highlight two technologies that emerged from within early modern print: characters in the sense of textual representations of the human as encountered in fiction and characters in the sense of the streamlining of letterforms through typefounding. Both continue to shape how we interact and communicate with AI today. Participants will discuss what it means to situate AI in such historical perspectives (in a context massively invested in AI’s unprecedentedness). How can this help us understand AI better and conversely, how can AI help us better understand earlier historical shifts?