Lecture Series 25/26

Abstract: The lecture presents various historical and contemporary concepts of digitality that highlight the three characteristics of digital systems: discreteness, arbitrariness, and systematicity. In short, digitality is often understood as a triad that applies not only to modern electronic computers but also to analog sign and writing systems. The lecture examines this form of digital …

Abstract: In my presentation, I examine the digital culture of public administration in Switzerland from 1960 to 1990. The perspective on Switzerland is significant for the history of computing because the country lacks its own computer industry, but has an internationally well-connected computer science department at ETH Zurich. As I will demonstrate, numerous formal and …

Abstract: Digital complexity eludes human understanding not only because it is based on the synchronization of incommensurable systems, but also because each of these systems operates stochastically. We owe this insight to the “synthetic intelligence” (Brian Cantwell Smith) of machine learning models. An initially random variation of model assumptions enables the discovery and description of …