University of Cambridge > Talks.cam > Departmental Seminars in History and Philosophy of Science > Creativity for the information age: making up minds and machines in the United States and the Soviet Union

Creativity for the information age: making up minds and machines in the United States and the Soviet Union

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If you have a question about this talk, please contact Dr. Rosanna Dent.

In the mid-20th century, the United States and the Soviet Union came to believe that the future of each country hinged on capable technoscientific workforce. To cultivate such workforce, researchers in both countries suggested using special pedagogical computers, which were seen as more effective instructors than human teachers. At the same time, in the 1960s and the 1970s, both American and Soviet societies saw the rising urgency of the concept of creativity, defined as the capacity for technoscientific ingenuity. This talk begins by examining how researchers in the US and the Soviet Union approached the task of turning the computer, a rule-bound machine, into the instrument of cultivating creative thinking. In doing so, scholars employed formal approaches to modelling human reasoning developed by artificial intelligence (AI) practitioners and cognitive scientists in the US and the USSR . Pedagogical computing, therefore, became the site where many approaches to AI were tested and perfected. Eventually, some researchers involved in pedagogical computing turned to artificial intelligence research, where they sought to replicate computationally what they had come to define as the core of human intelligence. This talk treats US and Soviet pedagogical computing as converging efforts in optimizing and managing human cognitive resources under late capitalism and late socialism. Tracing the lineage between pedagogical computing and artificial intelligence in the US and the USSR , I demonstrate how in both countries, artificial intelligence was a managerial science of cognitive resources predicated on state and industry efforts to mold societies with science and technology.

This talk is part of the Departmental Seminars in History and Philosophy of Science series.

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