Public Lecture on AI by N. Katherine Hayles
Modes of Cognition: Implications for AI
Public lecture by Professor N. Katherine Hayles, 11:30 am, Wednesday October 23, 2024
In-person and Zoom hybrid event. Zoom link: https://mit.zoom.us/j/97309041943
Myers Room, George Washington University Museum and Textile Museum, 701 21st St NW, Washington, DC 20052
N. Katherine Hayles is Distinguished Research Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles; the James B. Duke Professor Emerita from Duke University; and member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her new book, Bacteria to AI: Human Futures with Our Nonhuman Symbionts, is forthcoming from Chicago University Press in 2025.
This event is co-sponsored by the George Washington University Department of English, Digital Humanities Institute, University Writing Program, Department of History, and the Trustworthy AI Initiative.
This event is hybrid: in person and on Zoom. Here is the event poster.
Featuring Professor N. Katherine Hayles, this public lecture will offer a set of criteria by which a system may be judged to be cognitive or not, testing it against minimally cognitive biological lifeforms such as unicellular organisms and plants.
The candidate criteria should admit implicit and nonconscious cognition and distinguish between adaptation and cognition. The criteria will then be applied to AIs, specifically Large Language Models (LLMs). The talk will conclude with examples of how well LLMs are able to understand and interpret a complex literary text, Henry James “The Figure in the Carpet.”
