“The power of thought is the magic of the mind,” claims Lord Byron and what takes place in the mind cannot be know. At the same time, such unknown powers in mind inspire us, drive us into action and provide the core of our actions. In this course we will examine the tradition that views creativity and art to be inspired by unknown sources. For example, Socrates says that his thinking is inspired by the muses, and Goethe’s Faust says that the powers of nature can never be understood. The romantics argued that nature cannot be known. Freud based his psychoanalysis on the idea that the unconscious determines one’s life (despite the fact that he thought he could explain such mechanism). Jung claims that unconscious archetypes (12 in kind) determine human psyche. And Lacan maintains that we cannot know what lies beyond a system of signifiers. Katherine Hayles investigates how science attempts to explain how animals understand the world, in a book entitled The Unthought (2017). Ecofeminists argue that we perceive nature (like women) operates without thinking or being aware of things. In an era of powerful AI systems, we must ask what remains unconscious and what is essential to our understanding.

We will consider a few approaches to what can be termed the unconscious. We will read a few literary stories, explore several works of art, and study a few theoretical texts, all in order to understand that we cannot understand. We will ask how can we begin to examine that which we cannot know.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become a common term, capitalized by numerous organizations and companies. Related concepts, such as machine learning and neural networks, are also becoming widespread. AI algorithms stand at the heart of far reaching technological breakthroughs and hold great promises, but at the same time raise concerns about the possible rise of a destructive force driven by superintelligence. 

But what does artificial intelligence mean? What are the sources of the idea that one could artificially produce or create an intelligence? And what are the implications of this idea on human society? 

The course will run in the historical axis from Turing’s test for machine thinking articulated in the 50’s to recent events . We will converse with chatbots ourselves, analyze anthropomorphism and empathy towards robots, relate the primordial desire to overcome nature to current debates on granting “human rights” to digital entities, ask about the economic and cultural implications of automation, and of the different ways biases migrate from the human to the digital realm. And most importantly we will ask - in what way does this change the way we conceive humanity.