An Artificial History of Natural Intelligence:
Thinking with Machines from Descartes to the Digital Age
David W. Bates

This lecture tracks an artificial history of natural intelligence, arguing that from the birth of modern thought during the Scientific Revolution in Europe, the mind and its capacities have been understood as entangled in bodies, machines, and prosthetic technologies of thought, such as writing. Human intelligence has been figured, then, in terms of automaticity. Given the contemporary hyper-technologization of human life, a condition that is marked by increasing automation through digital infrastructures, automation constitutes a threat to human independence while demanding critically important political and social decisions. This artificial history tries to recuperate a tradition of thinking about intelligence as resistance to automaticity.

That is, despite the mind’s intimate, indeed constitutive, relationship with technology, nonetheless it can harbor the means for what Bernard Stiegler calls dis-automatization, and thus rehabilitate the human capacity for decision. Beginning with Descartes and the early modern concept of the automaton, the paper will follow a line of thought that includes nineteenth- and twentieth- century understandings of minds, brains, and machines, early computational devices, cybernetics, and postwar theories of human-machine interaction, in order to track a certain interplay between human minds and openness in the midst of technical and machinic forms of determination. We will end with a critique of artificial intelligence, arguing that intelligence arises in the mind’s confrontation with automaticity, and not within automatic processes per see.

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David W. Bates is Professor in the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley, affiliated with the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine and Society, and past Director of the Berkeley Center for New Media (2010-2013). He received his PhD in European History from the University of Chicago. His research and teaching is focused on the relations between technology and cognition, and the history of political and legal thought. His book An Artificial History of Natural Intelligence: Thinking with Machines from Descartes to the Digital Age will be published by the University of Chicago Press in Spring 2024. He has previously published two books on early modern thought — Enlightenment Aberrations: Error and Revolution in France (Cornell, 2002) and States of War: Enlightenment Origins of the Political (Columbia, 2011) — and edited (with Nima Bassiri) a volume Plasticity and Pathology: On the Formation of the Neural Subject (Fordham, 2015). Other publications include articles on topics such as cybernetics, Artificial Intelligence, and 20th-century political and legal theory.