Registration is for
In-Person Attendance ONLY
For Members of the
Institute of General Semantics
Registration
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 .JPG)
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).