Language, Artificial Intelligence, and Relationality

Catalog description

Is Artificial Intelligence (AI) something that we can build relationships with? If so, how? Indigenous peoples, globally, have created and maintained relationships with non-humans from time immemorial. Rivers, celestial bodies, plants, and animals all have distinct modes of being that we understand through the process of personification; we also observe and reason about the phenomena of their existence to better understand ourselves. These questions can be confronted by a combination of Indigenous knowledges and philosophies - both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, as well as theories of meaning, metaphor, computation, and ethicality - all of which have something to say about AI and the nature of its existence. During this class, we will find that artificial intelligence sets the stage for discourses about what intelligence and consciousness is; what does artificiality mean with respect to intelligence? These are questions which, traditionally, Indigenous and non-Indigenous Weltanschauung (worldviews) generate very different answers to.