During this Rising Tide Foundation lecture, the history of Artificial Intelligence is examined from the 19th century to the present as the following questions are posed:

1) Is it truly possible to replicate the full spectrum of human mentation with “machine learning” as is popularly presumed today?

2) What are the positive roles for computer learning, and also what are the profound failures of A.I. to deal with certain fundamental qualities of language and mental activity more generally with a focus on paradox formation, metaphor and irony?

3) Why is Artificial Intelligence only plausible to the degree that people are trained to artificially think like machines via purely symbolic deductive/inductive forms of logic?

4) What is it about the human mind that absolutely distinguishes our species from all possible forms of machines on the one side and monkeys on the other?

These questions and more will be addressed by Dr. Jonathan Tennenbaum in the following lecture.

Speaker Bio: Jonathan has Ph.D in mathematics and works as a researcher and consultant on economics, science and technology. He has written extensively on fundamental problems in the natural sciences, and most recently authored a provocative series of articles on artificial intelligence for Asia Times. He is also a classical pianist and lecturer.