Webinar on “Artificial Intelligence and Human Orientation” to Begin in April 2023

A new virtual seminar will begin in April, taught by Dr. Lucy Osler and Dr. Christoph Durt on the topic of “Artificial Intelligence and Human Orientation.”

This seminar meets on a monthly basis, the second Tuesday of each month, beginning on April 11, 2023. Meeting time: 10:00 a.m. – 11:45 a.m. (US Central Time). There will be at least 8 seminar sessions.

About the content: Artificial Intelligence (AI) increasingly generates output that changes not only how we find our way on the internet and in the world. AI also changes how we relate to each other and how we conceive of ourselves. In all these respects, AI is increasingly intertwined with human orientation. To study how AI changes orientation, the seminar builds on the philosophy of orientation, and in return develops it further. We discuss questions such as: What does AI-produced text reveal about the patterns of human thought, language, and interaction? How does it change them? How do we communicate with and treat AI, and how does this impact our emotions towards and understanding of each other?

The seminar focusses on the novel text production capabilities of Large Language Models such as Chat GPT. We trace back their fundamental impact to a revolutionary technology possibly even more transformative than the internet and the printing press: writing. The now often overlooked changes writing brought to memory, thinking, communicating, and philosophical understanding have been problematized by Plato in his – writing. Besides Plato, we discuss topical contributions by renown contemporary philosophers, most of whom will participate in the discussion of their texts.

There will be multiple guest speakers, whose texts we will read and who will join our seminar discussions. These are (among others):

 Sibylle Krämer

 Thomas Fuchs

 Alexis Elders

The seminar is free. Please apply by April 04, 2023.

Learn more here.