2026 AKML & Symposium (02 Oct 2026)

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Registration is for

In-Person Attendance ONLY

For Members of the

Institute of General Semantics

All IGS Members in Good Standing Will Receive Instructions on How to Livestream the Event Online Prior to the AKML

The 74th Annual

Alfred Korzybski

Memorial Lecture

and the Symposium on

Language,

Listening,

Literacy,

and Algorithms

October 2nd-4th, 2026

Call for Papers and Proposals

Co-Sponsored by the

New York Society for General Semantics

the International Bateson Institute

the Media Ecology Association

the Tomkins Institute

and the 404 Festival of Art and Technology

featuring

Ted Chiang

speaking on

"No Machine

Has Passed the

Turing Test"

It is now commonly asserted that the Turing Test is no longer a useful metric because current LLMs easily pass it. In this talk, Ted Chiang will offer a different interpretation of Turing's paper and what Turing actually meant by a thinking machine. Linguistic fluency of the type that Turing described is a very high bar, one so high that not only have we not achieved it, but we should arguably not even be aiming for it.

Ted Chiang is an American science fiction writer. His work has won four Nebula awards, four Hugo awards, six Locus awards, the PEN Malamud Award, and the Media Ecology Association's Mary Shelly Award. His novella “Story of Your Life” was the basis of the film Arrival (2016). His most recent short story collection, Exhalation (Knopf, 2019), was listed as one of the Top Ten Books of 2019 by The New York Times, and included in President Barack Obama’s 2019 reading list. In 2023, he was named one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in AI.

The lecture, dinner, and symposium are being held at the historic Players Club in Gramercy Park, Manhattan.

Registration is free for IGS members and their guests, but all attendees must be registered in advance in order to gain admittance to the club. More information regarding the dinner and symposium schedule will be made available at a later date.

Please note that as an historic 19th century landmark, the site is not handicap accessible. Dress code is business casual and is strictly enforced, including no sneakers, shorts, ripped jeans, t-shirts).

Bateson Book Launch and Signing (07 Oct 2026)

Wed, 07 Oct 2026 22:00:00 GMT

Join us on Wednesday, October 7th

for a Double Book Launch

Reading and Discussion

and Book Signing

for

Belly

by Nora Bateson

and

Gregory Bateson's Ecology of Mind: The Course

edited by Phillip Guddemi

cosponsored by the

Institute of General Semantics

International Bateson Institute

New York Society for General Semantics upcoming events

2026 AKML & Symposium (02 Oct 2026)

Bateson Book Launch and Signing (07 Oct 2026)