Pins, Memorylessness, and Bags of Words: Visualizing “A.I.” and Its Histories [2021]

Documentary, informational, and interactive in its aims, this project reflects on the 2020-2021 Histories of Artificial Intelligence Mellon Seminar at the University of Cambridge to imagine possibilities for concretely depicting the complex set of technologies, philosophies, and ideologies constituting “artificial intelligence” and its histories.  Often perceived by the general public as an incomprehensible “black box” and frequently defined by AI researchers as a “moving target,” “AI,” as late-capitalist “non-object” or set of phenomena, poses some unique challenges to those asked to define and explain “it,” its applications, and its genealogies.  And yet, having spent the last year discussing “AI” and its histories, the participants from the HOAI seminar have developed some uniquely diachronic and synthetic insights into the phenomena currently referred to as “A.I.”.  

Pins, Memorylessness, and Bags of Words
(IBM/Bell Labs/Descartes/Babbage/Baudot/Helmholtz/Markov/Hartley/Turing/Google AI Edition)
(Digital Print, 2021)
© johannah rodgers

The title of the project refers to the importance of things both abstract and concrete to “A.I.” and its histories and calls attention to the discursive complexities that are themselves part of “A.I.”: “Pins” functions at once as metonym, artifact, and symbol for the political and economic philosophies informing “A.I.”; “Memorylessness,” a technical term from the history of statistics, may be in itself a useful one for describing the frequently paradoxical characteristics of “A.I.” as a discursive and cultural object; and “Bag(s) of Words,” a concept and technique borrowed from natural language processing and machine learning, is deployed metaphorically to describe “A.I.’s” dependence on verbal language for its operations, as well as literally to collect verbal language used at discrete points in time to describe the possibilities and realities of “A.I.”.

The project is made up of a series of fictional “x-ray” images purported to be from the recently declassified medical history file of Artificial Intelligence. Consisting of collections of digital and actual objects and texts presented as digital and print based collages, the images can be used to explore the many different phenomena related to the histories of Artificial Intelligence and as a way to begin discussing in more concrete and tangible terms a set of technologies that often portray themselves as “unimaginable.”

Works Cited 

Babbage, Charles. “Drawing of the Difference Engine.” Reprinted in Bowden, B. V., ed. (1953). Faster Than Thought: A Symposium on Digital Computing Machines.  Pitman. https://archive.org/details/fasterthanthough00bvbo/page/n7/mode/2up

Baudot, J. M. E. (1888).  “Printing Telegraph.” (U.S. Patent No. (388,244)) U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/41/db/de/f22f7d839399ff/US388244.pdf

Bayes, Thomas. (1763). “An Essay towards solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chance.”   Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 53, pp. 370-418.

Bundy, W. L. (1888). “Time-Recorder.” (U.S. Patent No. (393,205)) U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. 

Copeland, B.J., ed. (2004). “Artificial Life.” In The Essential Turing by Alan Mathison Turing. p. 513. Oxford UP. https://books.google.com/books?id=dSUTDAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false

Dean, Jeff. (2016). Google Tech Talk, Seoul, March 7, 2016. https://deepai.org/machine-learning-glossary-and-terms/neural-network

Descartes, Rene. (1677). Opera philosophica. Principia philosophiae. Apud Danielem Elsevirium. https://books.google.com/books?id=C4IPAAAAQAAJ&source=gbs_navlinks_s 

“Epingle.” Diderot, Denis. (1777). Encyclopédie ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des metiers par une societe des gens de lettres. Pellet.  https://books.google.com/books?id=V7JanrmNAVcC&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false 

Haugeland, John. (1985). Artificial Intelligence: The Very Idea. MIT. https://archive.org/details/artificialintell0000haug

Hartley, R. V. L. (1928). “Transmission of Information.” Bell Labs Technical Journal 7, 535–563. https://archive.org/details/bstj7-3-535  

Helmholtz, (1896). Die Lehre von den Tonempfindungen als physiologische Grundlage für die Theorie der Musik, Sth ed., (Brunswick:

Vieweg & Sohn, 1896), p. 633. Reprinted in Lenoir, Timothy.   “Helmholtz and the Materialities of Communication,” in Thomas P. Hankins and Albert van Helden, eds., Instruments and the Production of Scientific Knowledge, special volume of Osiris, Vol. 9 (1994): 184-207.

Knuth, Donald E. (1968). The Art of Computer Programming: Fundamental Algorithms. Addison-Wesley. https://archive.org/details/artofcomputerpro0001knut_l0h13rdedition/page/n9/mode/2up 

Markov, A. A. (1913). An Example of Statistical Investigation of the Text Eugene Onegin Concerning the Connection of Samples in Chains. Bulletin of the Imperial Academy of Sciences of St. Petersburg 7(3):153–162. Translated and reprinted in Science in Context 19(4), 591–600 (2006). Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/S0269889706001074. http://www.alpha60.de/research/markov/DavidLink_AnExampleOfStatistical_MarkovTrans_2007.pdf

“Neural Network.” https://deepai.org/machine-learning-glossary-and-terms/neural-network

Smith, Adam.  (1776). An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. W. Strahan and T. Cadell. https://books.google.com/books?id=C5dNAAAAcAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=%22adam+smith%22+strahan+wealth+of+nations&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjBpvvUrfD8AhVrk4kEHfxyCRwQ6AF6BAgPEAI#v=onepage&q=%22adam%20smith%22%20strahan%20wealth%20of%20nations&f=false

Advertisement