Soviet Visions of Intelligence in the Light of Contemporary Socio-Technical Discourses

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

The aim of this panel is to encourage new research into various aspects of the still largely unknown pages of the Soviet intellectual history of artificial life and artificial intelligence and to reconsider them in the light of present-day socio-technical discourses on the human and machine intelligence, and algorithmic governance of economy and society. Drawing inspiration from post-World War II Western cybernetics, the information society and artificial intelligence, Soviet scientists, philosophers and engineers developed original concepts of thinking, control, and social transformation. These approaches creatively combined elements of Marxism, local cultural and intellectual traditions, and cutting-edge science and technology, often at odds with both mainstream Western philosophy of science and Soviet ideological orthodoxy at the time. The Soviet algorithmic concepts and schools of thought are sometimes difficult to understand from a contemporary perspective, and many of them have not been able to perpetuate themselves after the Soviet Union, as their original context of relevance, ceased to exist. However, some of these ideas, which will be discussed in this panel, can be surprisingly fresh and productive, or even take on new meanings, in the light of more contemporary problematisations. Participants in this panel will address questions about the specificity of this legacy and its relevance to contemporary debates about human and artificial intelligence, algorithmic governance, and postcolonial science and technology.

Sub Unit

• History: 1945-1990

Chair

• Olessia Kirtchik, CNRS / EHESS (France)

Papers

• AI, Alive and Well?: On the Soviet Origins of Biology, Technology, and Artificial Intelligence Research - Benjamin Peters, U of Tulsa

• Reflexivity and the Inhuman: Soviet Systems Theory, Second-Order Cybernetics, and Posthumanism’s Historical Blindness - Maksym Miroshnychenko, Bauhaus U, Weimar (Germany)

• Organizational Poetics: The Game of Chess as a Modeling Technology in Soviet Computing - Samuel Pizelo, U of Toronto (Canada)

Discussant

• Olessia Kirtchik, CNRS / EHESS (France)