Events
MaD Seminar: From Language Machines to Decision Machines – and Back. Double Book talk for Leif Weatherby, Language Machines, and Ben Recht, The Irrational Decision
Speaker: Leif Weatherby & Ben Recht
Location: 60 Fifth Avenue, Room 7th floor open space
Date: Thursday, October 30, 2025
Starting with Shannon’s pre-computer experiments and ending with a refactoring of our computational paradigm through a chat interface, computing begins and ends with language models. In this conversation, Ben Recht and Leif Weatherby discuss computing, bureaucracy, and language through the perspectives of their new books. Recht’s book, The Irrational Decision, examines how post-war efforts to create rational decision-making machines led to the foundational technologies of computer science. He describes how these excel in constrained contexts but struggle to capture the full complexity of human decision-making in the face of uncertainty. Weatherby’s book, Language Machines, presents a new theory of meaning in language and computation. Seeing LLMs as a convergence of computation and language, Weatherby contends that AI does not stimulate cognition, as widely believed, but rather creates culture. Recht and Weatherby will explore what happens when computational optimization algorithms are applied to language, situating the current boom in the intoxicating power of making sense of culture through numbers.
Bios:
Leif Weatherby is associate professor of German and founding director of the Digital Theory Lab at NYU, which fuses humanities and data science. His writing has appeared in Critical Inquiry, New German Critique, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, as well as public venues like the New York Times, The Point, and Jacobin, and been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. He is the author of Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ: German Romanticism between Leibniz and Marx (Fordham, 2016) and Language Machines: Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism (Minnesota, 2025). He is a fellow at the Society for Humanities at Cornell University in 2025-2026.
Benjamin Recht is a Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. Ben studies the foundations of machine learning, be they mathematical, statistical, and computational, or philosophical, sociological, and historical.