A Theory of Technology

The course locates the process of technology development in the deep time of the evolution of life and intelligence and shows that human intelligence is not something special or exceptional that rises above the rest of 'creation', but one outcome of a wider process that also includes the development of animal and machine intelligences. The aim of the course is to demystify human intelligence and to present it as one of many intelligences with which it shares a history and some generic characteristics. The course thus presents human intelligence as one of the animal intelligences, whose distinctive feature is not so much the subjective sense of the presence of a soul, but rather the fact that it is constitutively technical from its very beginning. There is no such thing as a purely spiritual or purely mental human intelligence, and this realisation also poses the question of today's attitude to artificial intelligence in a new light.
The structure of the course: first, we consider the Leroi-Gourhan paleoanthropological theory of technology, according to which the beginning of the development of technology is not triggered by the guiding light of reason, but rather the other way around - the development of technology is the consequence of a specifically human biological evolution, and reason is the result, not the mystical trigger, of the development of technical intelligence. In what follows, human intelligence is placed among the animal intelligences and considered in its biological-evolutionary dimension, where we then also place technology up to modern artificial intelligence, destabilizing the apparently clear and solid distinction between life and technology. At the end of the semester, we look at current artificial or machine intelligences and their potential future development.

Leroi-Gourhan, Andre. Gib in beseda I. Ljubljana: Studia humanitatis, 1988. COBISS.SI-ID – 6802688
Leroi-Gourhan, Andre. Gib in beseda II. Ljubljana: Studia humanitatis, 1990. COBISS.SI-ID – 6802688
Pollack, Jordan. Mindless intelligence. V: Patricia Vargas idr. (ur.) The horizons in evolutionary robotics. Cambridge, MA: The MIT press, 2014, str. 279-293.
Tani, Jun. Exploring robotic minds. Oxford: Oxford university press, 2016.
Levin, Michael. AI: The space of possible minds. Noema, 2024. https://www.noemamag.com/ai-could-be-a-bridge-toward-diverse-intelligen….
Walker, Sara. AI is life. Noema, 2023. https://www.noemamag.com/ai-is-life/.
Kauffman, Stuart. A world beyond physics. Oxford: Oxford university press, 2019.
Bratton, Benjamin. The five stages of AI grief. Noema, 2024. https://www.noemamag.com/the-five-stages-of-ai-grief/.
Rogers, Thomas in McClelland, James. Parallel Distributed Processing at 25. Cognitive Science 38 (2014), št. 6, 1024-1077. https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12148.
Pfeifer, Rolf in Scheier, Christian. Understanding intelligence. Cambridge, MA: The MIT press, 2001.
Lovelock, James. Novacen. Ljubljana: UMco, 2021.

The reading list is updated every academic year and includes current research, articles, and opinions on human and machine intelligence, encouraging students to critically evaluate and keep up with the latest trends in technology development, specifically artificial intelligence. All readings will be uploaded in VIS system in a digital format.