2023, Bruder, Johannes

2017, Bruder, Johannes

In this chapter, I reflect on contemporary entanglements between artificial intelligence and the neurosciences by tracing the development of Google's recent DeepMind algorithms back to their roots in neuroscientific studies of episodic memory and imagination. Google promotes a new form of “infrastructural intelligence,” which excels by constantly reassessing its cognitive architecture in exchange with a cloud of data that surrounds it, and exhibits putatively human capacities such as intuition. I argue that such (re)alignments of biological and artificial intelligence have been enabled by a paradigmatic infrastructuralization of the brain in contemporary neuroscience. This infrastructuralization is based in methodologies that epistemically liken the brain to complex systems of an entirely different scale (i.e., global logistics) and has given rise to diverse research efforts that target the neuronal infrastructures of higher cognitive functions such as empathy and creativity. What is at stake in this process is no less than the shape of brains to come and a revised understanding of the intelligent and creative social subject.

2020, Bruder, Johannes

It’s time to stop celebrating experiments, tests, and demos designed to show that there is one “real” form of intelligence. These have primarily been used to devalue “unskilled” human labour and to dehumanize those who are supposedly not intelligent. Maybe it’s time to stop defending human intelligence altogether. Maybe it’s time to queer the concept of intelligence until it stops defining so much of what seems to matter.

2016-12, Caviezel, Flavia, Allen, Jamie, Bruder, Johannes, Greiner-Petter, Moritz, Miyazaki, Shintaro, Volkart Schmidt, Yvonne

2018-10-25, Bruder, Johannes

In this paper, I elaborate on deliberations of “post-enlightened cognition” between cognitive neuroscience, psychology and artificial intelligence research. I show how the design of machine learning algorithms is entangled with research on creativity and pathology in cognitive neuroscience and psychology through an interest in “episodic memory” and various forms of “spontaneous thought”. The most prominent forms of spontaneous thought - mind wandering and day dreaming - appear when the demands of the environment abate and have for a long time been stigmatized as signs of distraction or regarded as potentially pathological. Recent research in cognitive neuroscience, however, conceptualizes spontaneous thought as serving the purpose of, e. g., creative problem solving and hence invokes older discussions around the links between creativity and pathology. I discuss how attendant attempts at differentiating creative cognition from its pathological forms in contemporary psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and AI puts traditional understandings of rationality into question.