Cultural historian and Harvard professor Martin Puchner takes the audience on a fascinating journey through the prehistory of artificial intelligence. Instead of focusing on the future of AI, Puchner suggest using generative AI as a lens to understand humanity’s long-standing relationship with technology.
“What I find most exciting about a new technology like AI is that it allows you to look into the past in a new way”, he says. “It obliges us to think about the prehistory of that technology.”
This unique perspective shifts the conversation from speculative futurism to a deeper understanding of how we arrived at this technological moment.
Puchner begins his exploration in ancient Egypt, where the Book of the Dead introduces us to Thoth, the god of writing and scribes. “In Egypt, you have, thanks to writing, the first white-collar jobs in the world”, Puchner observes.
“I started to think of the Nile Valley as the papyrus valley of the ancient world,” he remarks, highlighting how this early technology laid the groundwork for the information age.
Puchner illustrates his central thesis – that AI is not a sudden, alien force but an extension of the technologies humans have been developing for millennia – with further examples from India and the Middle East.
“We humans have been artificially intelligent for thousands of years”, he argues, “thanks to this bundle of technologies that allowed us to store and retrieve information – both based on numbers and writing. Not just store and retrieve, but also manipulate, combine, and that creates new knowledge.”
Watch the video to follow along as Puchner reveals the origin of the term “algorithm” and discusses his work on historical chatbots, which offer a revolutionary way to engage with accumulated human knowledge.
