Chicago, March, 2004--Can machines be more intelligent than people? If so, how are human beings different from machines? Professor Terence Brunk thinks that cinematic images of intelligent machines, like Hal in the film 2001 and the android David in Artificial Intelligence AI, may reveal as much about our ideas of ourselves as they do about technology. We create artificially intelligent beings in our own image. The motto of Tyrell, the android creator in Blade Runner, is "More human than human." Brunk will examine such representations in relation to cultural assumptions about gender, emotion and relationships.
His presentation, HAL Grows Up: Thinking Machines and the Popular Imagination, will engage his audience in an imaginative encounter with intelligent machines in film, music and literature. With luck, they will have the honor of interacting with an intelligent machine "in person." The program will take place at 6 p.m. Thursday, April 1 in the Fifth Floor East Meeting Room of the Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington. Admission is free. Call 312-744-6630 or visit www.intersections.colum.edu.
What is now called the Turing Test was proposed by A.M. Turing in 1950 as a measure of whether a machine could be as intelligent as a person. In the test, a guesser tries to determine from a lying man (or computer) and a truthful woman which of the two is actually the woman. Turing thought a computer capable of such deception would be developed before the year 2000.
Marvin Minsky, one of the founders of the AI Lab at MIT, defined artificial intelligence as "the science of making machines do things that would require intelligence if done by men." Today Deep Blue can play masterly chess. And according to Ray Kurzweil, "Levels of intelligence far greater than our own are going to evolve within this century." Yet the Loebner Prize of $100,000 for a computer capable of passing the Turing Test remains unclaimed. Human beings still lie better than machines do.
Brunk is Professor of English at Columbia College Chicago, where he directs the Literature program. He earned his PhD from Rutgers University, specializing in Gothic Studies, Literary and Cultural Studies and Composition Studies. He is co-author of a widely used composition textbook, Literacies: Reading, Writing and Interpretation (Norton, 2000) and numerous essays on feminist literary theory, 18th century British literature and culture, and pedagogical applications of technology. His current projects include an article on constructions of masculinity in Matthew Lewis's classic Gothic novel, The Monk. With his students he produces a multimedia hypertext version of Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology.
HAL Grows Up: Thinking Machines and the Popular Imagination is part of the adult education series, Intersections: A Meeting Place for Diverse Ideas on Contemporary Culture and the Arts. Intersections, a collaboration between the Cultural Studies Program of Columbia College Chicago and the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, presents monthly lectures and discussions that investigate and celebrate the complexity of contemporary culture and the arts in which scholars and educators from Columbia College Chicago explore a broad range of compelling topics in a format designed to be informative, invigorating and accessible. For a complete schedule visit www.intersections.colum.edu. Intersections lectures offer Continuing Education Credit for Illinois Public School Teachers. For information on CE credit, contact Paul Camic, Ph.D. at pcamic@colum.edu.
Contact: Micki Leventhal, 312-344-7383, mleventhal@.colum.edu