Invited Talk by Prof. Orit Halpern from Institute for Urban Humanities, University of Seoulon May 24th: "Financializing Intelligence: On the Integrations on Machines and Markets.".

Financializing Intelligence: On the Integration of Machines and Markets 

by Prof. Orit Halpern on 2024 May 24th: 3:10-5:00PM KST 

Zoom-ID: 915 2536 3115

This talk traces the relationship between neo-liberal thought and neural networks through the work of economist Friedrich Hayek, psychologist Donald O. Hebb,  neural network pioneer Frank Rosenblatt, and later the architecture collective Asymptote's design of the virtual trading floor for the NYSE.  For all these figures, networked systems could accomplish acts of evolution, change, and learning impossible for individual neurons or subjects—minds, machines, and economies should therefore be integrated to change and deal with the unexpected.  

 Coming within the context of post-civil rights politics in the USA, and decolonization and political economic volatility globally, this emerging constellation of technology and attention birthed new practices and techniques of risk-management and speculation. These practices are embodied, for example, in derivative trading instruments,  the rise of networked computer architectures, and models of the neural network.   

Most importantly,  in the combination of aesthetics, economic thought, and cognitive sciences we can trace a broader reconceptualization of reason, decision making, and “freedom” in relation to the state and technology that occurred throughout the 1950’s-1970’s.  This reconceptualization, I argue, is the infrastructure supporting contemporary relations between generative AI, reactionary politics, and neo-liberal economics. 

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