AI, Alive and Well?: On the Soviet Origins of Biology, Technology, and Artificial Intelligence Research

• In Event: Soviet Visions of Intelligence in the Light of Contemporary Socio-Technical Discourses

Abstract

Artificial intelligence has only recently become acknowledged for having clear coal-powered consequences in an age of runaway climate change. What if AI has long had living stakes, Soviet stakes in particular? Building on a supporting history of Soviet AI, this paper offers a cut across a Soviet continent and century of iskusstvennyi intellekt research and its predecessors with the aim of rethinking the materialist, substantivist, and living biological origins of machine learning and generative AI. A few case studies include Andrei Kolmogorov formalizing modern probability theory under the living duress of the Luzhin trails in the 1930s, Theodosius Dobzhansky developing a laboratory as a statistical model for an environment in which micro-level specimen genetics and macro-level species evolution reconcile, comments on substantivist mathematics, surgeon cyberneticists such as Mykola Amosov, bionic prostheses, and the curious absence of cyborg imagery since Belyaev's 1925 novel, and other (often war-sharpened) material media historical and theoretical foundations for better understanding how AI today has long had living, material, and Slavic stakes.

Author

• Benjamin Peters, U of Tulsa