sequence of instructions—that is, an algorithm” (Misa, below), the invention of the software loop and the nested loop (now called recursion, a process fundamental to contemporary artificial intelligence), while Note A suggested that machine…In The Babbage Machine and the Origins of Programming, the authors reproduce Lovelace’s table for the Bernoulli numbers and translate the algorithm into a 65-FORTRAN program that compute them. The program has eight “if . . . [then] go-to” s…To counter the Lovelace’s objection, Turing creates a test for intelligence, or, more specifically, for the appearance of intelligence in machines, predicated on whether a machine can exhibit intelligent behavior indistinguishable from that…
Alan Turing
mathematician · 10 mentions across 6 readings
In this course
Alan Turing is foundational to the course's engagement with computability, the algorithmic basis of machine thinking, and the philosophical question of whether machines can instantiate intelligence—concerns that emerge across debates about functionalism and substrate-independence in AI. While Turing appears only in passing reference here (implicit in the computational genealogy traced through Babbage and Lovelace), his conceptual inheritance shapes the readings' treatment of algorithms, recursion, and the formal procedures that underpin contemporary artificial intelligence. The course positions him as a figure whose work enables the very framework through which AI's relationship to mind, sexuality, and the Enlightenment's questions about knowledge can be reconsidered.
Mentioned in 6 readings
Planetary computation: platform, stack, model, machine; Charles Stross’ “very slow AIs” to “imperceptible algorithmic value extraction devices”; social, inducement, walled gardens, and yield farms; Trapwire, Predpol, Palantir, and other “pe…Planetary computation: platform, stack, model, machine; Charles Stross’ “very slow AIs” to “imperceptible algorithmic value extraction devices”; social, inducement, walled gardens, and yield farms; Trapwire, Predpol, Palantir, and other “pe…Additional Reading/Primary Documents: Ian J. Goodfellow, et al., Generative Adversarial Nets
BJ Fogg, from Persuasive technology, using computers to change what we think and do
9. November 10 Hopeium, a hell of a drug: Cipherpunks to Finte…
Appears alongside
People mentioned in the same passages — sorted by co-occurrence weight.
Ada Lovelace 3Charles Babbage 2Benjamin Bratton 1Charles Stross 1Irving John Good 1Jean-François Lyotard 1Mark Fisher 1Matt Colquhoun 1Steven J. Dick 1Tiqqun 1B. J. Fogg 1David Chaum 1David Golumbia 1Diedrich Diederichsen 1Ian Goodfellow 1Lambros D. Callimahos 1Neal Stephenson 1Robert Mercer 1Satoshi Nakamoto 1Seth Siegelaub 1Tim May 1Donato Ricci 1Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz 1H. P. Lovecraft 1Valentin Goujon 1Immanuel Kant 1Jacques-Alain Miller 1Jacques Lacan 1Thomas J. Misa 1Douglas Hartree 1