Second Orders

Shane

Second Orders is a series of conversations with thinkers, tinkerers and theorists about pivotal changes in science, technology, law and culture, their unintended consequences and what they reveal about how we live and cooperate at every scale.

Puntate

  1. 27 APR

    AI learned language backwards and we need a new humanities to understand it - Leif Weatherby

    ABOUT THE EPISODE Leif Weatherby is an associate professor of German at New York University, founding director of the Digital Theory Lab and Director of Digital Humanities. His research spans dialectics, semiotics, the nature of data and computing, and problems of political economy after the Industrial Revolution. He's also written several books, the latest of which is Language Machines: Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism, and is currently working on two other book projects: Artificial Concepts: How Cybernetics Encountered German Idealism and The Mismeasure of Mind: Against the Prediction of Everything. ABOUT SECOND ORDERS Second Orders is a series of conversations with thinkers, tinkerers and theorists about pivotal changes in science, technology, law and culture, their unintended consequences and what they reveal about how we live and cooperate at every scale. Website: secondorders.co Become a guest or suggest a topic: secondorders.co/hello Chapters: 00:00 Why LLMs got language before they got reasoning 07:40 Saussure and the poetic function inside attention 13:13 The four-horned unicorn: meaning from the top down 15:42 What if grammar is easier than meaning? 23:05 Steelmanning the AI skeptic 32:58 Chess, Go and the boards we play language on 36:47 Why language feels like the special human thing 44:48 Do we need a new humanities to study AI language? 58:16 How will AI change the way we use language? 01:01:15 Language-as-a-service 01:02:23 Can AI free us to interact more authentically again? 01:10:06 LLMs as ideology machines 01:23:14 Schismogenesis and the refusal of AI vocabulary 01:29:10 Remainder humanism & taste 01:37:51 What about the future excites you?

    1h 40m

Descrizione

Second Orders is a series of conversations with thinkers, tinkerers and theorists about pivotal changes in science, technology, law and culture, their unintended consequences and what they reveal about how we live and cooperate at every scale.