Technological imagination as a source of the culture of neural networks

Abstract

The study represents a partial output of research on the culture of artificial neural networks, as the authors call the cultural complex, in which a number of different actants participate (technologies, their users, results of the generation process, their recipients, media, etc.) and which is constituted by language games that have a performative function. The aim of this study is to conduct a media-archaeological insight into the imaginative layer of these language games and to point out that one of the sources of neural network culture is precisely the deeply historically anchored technological imagination. The genealogy of this imagination is traced in the study from its ancient origins to the 1950s, when the idea of the artificial mind was transformed into a scientific theorem and founded the research field of artificial intelligence. In this way, the paper draws attention to the fact that when we think and talk about artificial intelligence, we are talking about a set of imaginations that should not be confused with reality, but rather treated as technological fictions.