Oxford’s Digital Venue

The Digital Hub is delighted to host the fourth AI Annual Lecture, which this year will be given by Professor Jessica Riskin, Frances and Charles Field Professor of History & Director of Graduate Teaching, Stanford University. Jessica will be discussing  The Onion Axiom: A History of the Outside-In Approach to Artificial (and Natural) Intelligence.

Ever since the founding moments of artificial intelligence in the mid-twentieth century, the principal researchers and writers on the subject – from Alan Turing, and Norbert Weiner to Rodney Brooks, Daniel Dennett, and many others – have adopted the behaviourist assumption that intelligence is nothing more than its appearance.  That if you could peel away all the layers of the onion, at the core you would find nothing but emptiness: there’s no one in there.  This lecture will explore the implications of the onion axiom for the history of AI and consider how this history might inform our efforts to grapple with the runaway technology today.

Full details are on the Institute’s website here.