Webinar ‘Artificial intelligence and the real thing’ by Iain McGilchrist – Embassy of the Free Mind

Thursday 25 April 2024

19:30pm to 21:00pm CEST

18:30pm to 20:00pm (UK time)

(online event)

Machines cannot understand. They can work out what look like the consequences of data according to extrapolations they have had fed into them by human beings – some of them (perhaps especially those close to AI projects) quirky and unrepresentative. But that aside, this is nowhere near anything close to understanding; and it cannot serve intellectual life.

Above all it cannot serve spiritual life. If imagination, the realm of the spirit and true intelligence – rather than mere speedy information-processing – matter to what we take a human life to be, we must be careful not to be deceived by the artful, essentially parasitic, claims made on behalf of machines. Machines are, and must remain, our servants. It should not need to be said that we are far more than calculation machines or senseless processors.

Iain McGilchrist will discuss briefly differences between the right and left hemispheres of the brain, and demonstrate that the kind of calculation done by machines represents a dangerous enlargement of the less perceptive, less veridical, less intelligent, indeed frankly deluded, modus operandi of the left hemisphere of the brain. O Mensch, gib acht!

Please find the event page here.