Stephen Cave: Intelligence as Ideology: From IQ to AI

A Thursday Talk on a Friday!

Dr Stephen Cave is Executive Director of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence
and Senior Research Associate in Philosophy at the University of Cambridge

He earned his PhD in philosophy from Cambridge, then spent a decade in the British Foreign Office, where he served as a policy advisor and diplomat.
He is author of the book Immortality (Penguin Random House), a New Scientist book of the year, and co-editor of the forthcoming AI
Narratives: A History of Imaginative Thinking About Intelligent Machines (OUP). His cross-disciplinary research interests currently focus on the nature, portrayal and governance of AI.

Abstract:

The notion of intelligence has always been political, in that is has been used consistently to establish and enforce systems of social dominance.
This talk will begin with a historical overview of this, from Aristotle to IQ, showing the role that assessment of intelligence has played in establishing hierarchies

including patriarchy and colonialism. It will then ask what this legacy means in the age of intelligent machines, arguing that this history is distorting the
current debate about the ethics and impact of AI. In particular, it will examine the focus on automation and middle-class jobs, the cult of brilliance in the

technology sector, and the fear of artificial super-intelligence.

http://lcfi.ac.uk/team/stephen-cave/