This brings us to this semester's first speaker: Thordur Arnason. Thordur will argue that thinking machines have been twenty years away for three hundred years. The talk will follow this promise through its various homes: the automata of the Enlightenment, the calculating engines of Victorian Britain, the wartime cryptanalysts, the Dartmouth optimism of 1956, and the two winters that followed. Thordur argues that the current moment breaks this pattern, and that the earlier failures tell us more about why than the successes do.
Historical Quarter is starting the semester off with a lecture in English for our international students as well as our Norwegian ones.
The lecture will take place in Sophus Bugges hus this Thursday, 27 of August, in Auditorium 1, from 9–10.
There will be free coffee and waffles, as always 🙂
Please mark yourself as interested on the event page on our Facebook, or at least leave a comment to let us know, so we can prepare accordingly.
If you have any questions, feel free to contact us.
Hope to see you there!