Global Histories of AI

Lecture by Unso (Eun Seo) Jo. Assistant Research Professor at Cornell University.

Abstract

It is all too easy to assume AI is a recent phenomenon, but humans have had a fascination with imitating "natural" intelligence for centuries. In this talk, we will explore the early modern, modern, and post-internet eras of AI starting from the Protestant Reformation. In each of these stages of development, AI research was influenced by political, cultural, and even religious motivations and in turn changed the course of human history as a defence weapon, calculation tool, and automaton phenomenon. For centuries people have imagined co-living with machines to various degrees driven by both hope (can we automate production?) and fear (will enemy drones outsmart us?). Charting the history of AI from multiple global sources, this talk argues that "artificial" replication of natural intelligence has been an enduring fascination for humanity.

Speaker Bio

Unso (Eun Seo) Jo is an Assistant Research Professor at Cornell University where she teaches the history of AI in the Department of Information Science. Previously, she worked as a research engineer at the open-source AI platform Hugging Face where she worked on multilingual search and embedding-based classification. Dr. Jo has worked on a variety of research topics spanning history and NLP, including Cold War oral history, State Department linguistic change, and the ethics of AI data. Her current book project is on the history of AI from a global perspective and she works with her AI team on furthering text2SQL code generation for industry-grade databases. She has a PhD in History from Stanford University.