The Beginning of Theory

In 2008, a WIRED magazine op-ed by Chris Anderson famously declared that big data would spell the “end of theory”. When everything is just data points, then we would no longer need to care why humans did things, only to map that they did; and Farsi, thus, would be no different from Klingon, suggested the op-ed. We are now living in the moment prophesied by WIRED, as transformer models and diffusion models reshape the landscape of knowledge production, teaching and learning. This talk builds on both speculation and critique to develop strategies for making knowledge and learning about the world in a blended human-machine reality.

This event is part of Ether’s Bloom: A Programme on Artificial Intelligence.