What is Life? What is Intelligence? These questions animated ancient philosophy. In our time, they remain fundamental quandaries but can be probed through new disciplines and technologies. Fields like astrobiology and artificial intelligence, in turn, raise new questions: Are we alone? Can machines think?
In advance of their forthcoming book, Noam Chomsky and Jeffrey Watumull present four fundamental conjectures. They contend that grand questions can be answered in a unified explanatory theory.
A founder of modern linguistics and a tenacious critic of injustice and inequality, Noam Chomsky is one of the most cited living scholars in the world. He is the author of more than 100 books and hundreds more articles, which together have shaped our understanding of language, evolution, anthropology, politics, and international relations. Chomsky served as Institute Professor of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT from 1955 to 2017, when he joined the University of Arizona as Laureate Professor of Linguistics and the Agnese Nelms Haury Chair in Environment and Social Justice.
Jeffrey Watumull is Chief Philosophy Officer and Director of AI at Oceanit. He is also an affiliated professor at the University of Cambridge and co-founder of the Cambridge Institute for Exo-Language.
Brought to you by the UH Better Tomorrow Speaker Series in partnership with the Hawai‘i Book and Music Festival.
The Better Tomorrow Speaker Series is a joint venture of the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, the Hawai‘i Community Foundation, and Kamehameha Schools.