The Material Nature of Human Intelligence
Event Details
- Type
- Friday Lecture Series
- Speaker(s)
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David Krakauer, Ph.D., president, William H. Miller Professor of Complex Systems, Santa Fe Institute
- Speaker bio(s)
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Human intelligence is the coevolutionary product of the brain and material culture. Dr. Krakauer will show how outsourcing inference to tools enables us to harness collective problem solving. Material culture encodes a repository of algorithms that take two forms: mental gadgets (collectively internalized policies and routines) and cognitive gadgets (collective external workspaces and inferential mechanisms). Dr. Krakauer will present a general mathematical theory of tools and explore expert performance in memory competition and puzzle solving as means of understanding several distinctive properties of human intelligence. In the background lies AI—part gadget and part oracle—proving to be both enabler and threat to human intelligence.
David Krakauer is the President and William H. Miller Professor of Complex Systems at the Santa Fe Institute. His research explores the evolution of intelligence and stupidity on Earth, which includes studying the evolution of genetic, neural, linguistic, social, and cultural mechanisms supporting memory and information processing, and exploring their shared properties. Previously he served as Founding Director of the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery, Co-Director of the Center for Complexity and Collective Computation, and Professor of Mathematical Genetics all at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He was included in Entrepreneur Magazine’s 2016 list of visionary leaders advancing global research and business.
- Open to
- Tri-Institutional