Shakespeare And Nonhuman Intelligence

The Infinite Monkey Theorem is an idea frequently encountered in mass market science books, discourse on Intelligent Design, and debates on the merits of writing produced by chatbots. According to the Theorem, an infinite number of typing monkeys will eventually generate the works of Shakespeare. Shakespeare and Nonhuman Intelligence is a metaphysical analysis of the Bard's function in the Theorem in various contexts over the past century. Beginning with early-twentieth century astrophysics and ending with twenty-first century AI, it traces the emergence of Shakespeare as the embattled figure of writing in the age of machine learning, bioinformatics, and other alleged crimes against the human organism. In an argument that pays close attention to computer programs that instantiate the Theorem, including one by biologist Richard Dawkins, and to references in publications on Intelligent Design, it contends that Shakespeare performs as an interface between the human and our Others: animal, god, machine.

"Having a conscience distinguishes humans from the most advanced A.I. systems. Acting in good conscience, consulting one's conscience, and being conscience-wracked are all aspects of human intelligence that involve reckoning (deriving general laws from particular inputs and vice versa), and judgement (contemplating the relationship of the reckoning system to the world). While A.I. developers have mastered reckoning, they are still working towards the creation of judgement. This book sheds light on the reckoning and judgement of conscience by demonstrating how these concepts are explored in Everyman, Doctor Faustus, The Merchant of Venice, and Hamlet. Academic, student, or general-interest readers discover the complexity and multiplicity of the early modern concept of conscience, which is informed by the scholastic intellectual tradition, juridical procedures of the court of Chancery, the practical advice of Protestant casuistry, and Reformation theology. The aims are to examine the rubrics for thinking through, regulating, and judging actions that define the various consciences of Shakespeare's day, to use these rubrics to interpret questions of truth and action in early modern plays, and to offer insights into what it is about conscience that developers want to grasp to eliminate the difference between human and non-human intelligences, and achieve true A.I."--

This book argues that Shakespeare and various cultures of celebrity have enjoyed a ceaselessly adaptive, symbiotic relationship since the final decade of the sixteenth century, through which each entity has contributed to the vitality and adaptability of the other. In five chapters, Jennifer Holl explores the early modern culture of theatrical celebrity and its resonances in print and performance, especially in Shakespeare’s interrogations of this emerging phenomenon in sonnets and histories, before moving on to examine the ways that shifting cultures of stage, film, and digital celebrity have perpetually recreated the Shakespeare, or even the #shakespeare, with whom audiences continue to interact. Situated at an intersection of multiple critical conversations, this book will be of great interest to scholars and graduate students of Shakespeare and Shakespearean appropriations, early modern theater, and celebrity studies.

Provocative and engaging, this text invites you into a unique thought experiment, using portraits from some of Shakespeare's most stirring works to illustrate how our psychological understanding of human nature and personality can be significantly enriched through literature.

Having a conscience distinguishes humans from the most advanced A.I. systems. Acting in good conscience, consulting one’s conscience, and being conscience-wracked are all aspects of human intelligence that involve reckoning (deriving general laws from particular inputs and vice versa), and judgement (contemplating the relationship of the reckoning system to the world). While A.I. developers have mastered reckoning, they are still working towards the creation of judgement. This book sheds light on the reckoning and judgement of conscience by demonstrating how these concepts are explored in Everyman, Doctor Faustus, The Merchant of Venice, and Hamlet. Academic, student, or general-interest readers discover the complexity and multiplicity of the early modern concept of conscience, which is informed by the scholastic intellectual tradition, juridical procedures of the court of Chancery, the practical advice of Protestant casuistry, and Reformation theology. The aims are to examine the rubrics for thinking through, regulating, and judging actions that define the various consciences of Shakespeare’s day, to use these rubrics to interpret questions of truth and action in early modern plays, and to offer insights into what it is about conscience that developers want to grasp to eliminate the difference between human and non-human intelligences, and achieve true A.I.

What if you found yourself working for an intelligence agency and suddenly your understanding of other human beings had become a matter of life or death? Yair Neuman draws us into a unique thought experiment, using portraits from some of Shakespeare’s most stirring works to illustrate how our psychological understanding of human nature can be significantly enriched through literature. Provocative and engaging, Shakespeare for the Intelligence Agent: Toward Understanding Real Personalities invites you to a challenging, enjoyable, and in many cases humorous reading of human personality through Shakespeare’s plays.

This book examines performance projects of Shakespeare's plays for young people in terms of their value for their young audiences. Using interviews with theatre workers and workshops with young people, the book argues that it is by trusting young people's experience of performances, rather than promoting a range of pre-determined textual understandings of the plays, that they might gain most benefit. It argues that by privileging the meanings young people make of Shakespeare, new and exciting interpretations of his work might be found.

A series of intellectual provocations that investigate the creative process across the human-nonhuman spectrum. Is it possible that creative artists have more in common with machines than we might think? Employing an improvisational call-and-response writing performance coauthored with an AI text generator, remix artist and scholar Mark Amerika, interrogates how his own "psychic automatism" is itself a nonhuman function strategically designed to reveal the poetic attributes of programmable worlds still unimagined. Through a series of intellectual provocations that investigate the creative process across the human-nonhuman spectrum, Amerika critically reflects on whether creativity itself is, at root, a nonhuman information behavior that emerges from an onto-operational presence experiencing an otherworldly aesthetic sensibility. Amerika engages with his cyberpunk imagination to simultaneously embrace and problematize human-machine collaborations. He draws from jazz performance, beatnik poetry, Buddhist thought, and surrealism to suggest that his own artificial creative intelligence operates as a finely tuned remix engine continuously training itself to build on the history of avant-garde art and writing. Playful and provocative, My Life as an Artificial Creative Intelligence flips the script on contemporary AI research that attempts to build systems that perform more like humans, instead self-reflexively making a very nontraditional argument about AI's impact on society and its relationship to the cosmos.