IWM Fellowship in Vienna

I'm spending November 2024 in Vienna, as a guest of the IWM (Institute for Human Sciences). Specifically, I was invited to be the Senior Digital Humanism fellow, part of an initiative run jointly between the institute and the Technical University of Vienna. I'd enjoyed participating in the Digital Humanism conference Can Machines Save the World? the previous year, so was pleased and surprised to be invited back for a full month. Being at the IWM is a great experience, with an active program of talks, a lively community of fellows to chat with, and daily lunches cooked in house.

A lot of my time here, though, has been spent teaching a compressed course on the history of AI at the Technical University of Vienna for a group of doctoral students in computer science (or informatik as it is known in German). The course is based around a draft of my upcoming short history of AI, supplementing each chapter with a selection from the primary and secondary sources on which it is based. Getting reactions from the students has been great, particularly as they all know more than I do about the modern machine learning techniques that dominate the last two chapters of the book.

My other main activity comes at the end of the month, as one of the primary speakers at the digital humanism workshop, A Paradigm Shift in Computer Science? That's a real honor, as the other speakers include prominent figures such as philosopher Tim Crane, computer scientist Moshe Vardi and communication scholar Noshir Contractor. I'll be starting the conference out with a talk on the history of AI, but my real question is: if computer science is getting a new paradigm then what was the old one? That brings us to the alliance between computer science and AI, which emerged around the same time and grew up together, and also to the narrowing of the AI brand to include only symbolic approaches as the field matured within computer science during the late-1960s and 1970s.