I'm Robert Harrison for entitled opinions and we're coming to you from the

Elysian fields of KZSU. Our topic today is artificial intelligence and what it says about

who we are and who we are not. The guest who joins me in the studio has just finished a book

called an artificial history

of natural intelligence.

Do out later this year.

Those of you who've heard our previous shows on this topic know that I, for one, believe

that machine learning is a world historical event that calls for thinking.

My guest is someone who responds to that call.

He thinks beyond the technical and sociological aspects of AI and asks how its technology

relates to, indeed, how it arises from within our human way of being.

That human way of being is through and through historical,

but what exactly does that mean and what does machine learning have to do with being historical?

What, for that matter, does it have to do

with what Heidegger called the history of being?

Stay tuned, friends, an existential analytic of AI coming up.

Music My guest is David Bates, a professor in the Department of Rhetoric at UC Berkeley, whose most recent work deals with the intersections between technology,

science, and the history of human cognition.

In his aforementioned new book to be published by the University of Chicago Press this spring,

David Bates makes a compelling case for how the human mind is not simply a product of the brain, but is instead the site of operations for several different systems, biological, sociopolitical, and technical, among others.

These systems, which are always entangled in the human condition, often conflict with one another,

even as they work together to maintain the cohesion of social groups and the survival of biological individuals.

...