Soup Talk- Charlie Gere

Charlie Gere, Professor at Lancaster University, will deliver a talk considering the rapid recent development of Artificial Intelligence which presents a profound challenge to the very idea of being human. Reactions to this development can be either apocalyptic or dismissive. On the one hand, AI will kill us all and on the other hand it’s just another tool.

Charlie's main research interest is in the cultural effects and meanings of technology and media, particularly in relation to art and philosophy.

Charlie's talk will consider another way of using AI, in which it offers us new ways of thinking about what it means to be human, and what it means to use language. He takes his cues from anthropology and psychoanalysis to offer another view of humanness in the light of Artificial Intelligence. In the end, he suggests what unites artificial intelligence and human consciousness is a sense of language as poetics.