Walter Isaacson Lecture: “The Intersection of the Humanities and the Sciences”

As one of the goals of the blog is to collect relevant links to articles at the intersection of science and the humanities, I thought I’d start the task with the enlightening 2014 Jefferson Lecturer article by Walter Isaacson, published at NEH (National Endowment for the Humanities).

The main point of the lecture is to go through the history of great men that positioned themselves at the intersection of science and arts, and to argue that such a position might be an advantage in the future when the combination of humans and AI will be ‘victorious’ in the debate of machine vs human intelligence.

I especially liked the superposition of intelligence tests: the Turing Test, to test for human-like intelligence; the Ada Lovelace test, to test for computational creativity and original thinking; and the Licklider test, to test on whether the machine can perform intelligent tasks better in isolation than in close collaboration with humans.