The American Academy in Rome has played an important role in archaeology in Italy over the past century. Asking about the future of archaeology now means asking about what we can learn from things—artifacts and places—and, indeed, from bodies, in an age of language-driven machine learning. What defining human knowledge has come from our species’ material intelligence? And what of this can be—needs to be—preserved into the coming age of widespread artificial intelligence? Put another way, what kind of knowing cannot be derived from language? These are the questions to be explored in Material Intelligence in the Era of Artificial Intelligence, a multidisciplinary conversation between artists, humanists, and scientists hosted at the Academy on March 16-18, 2026. As the meeting is taking place in Rome, with its perhaps unsurpassed archive of the encounter of humans with matter, we could also frame this as an encounter between Rome and Silicon Valley. The working program, which consists of closed workshops, seminars, and site visits with invited participants, also includes a public conversation, Material Ways of Knowing, on March 16.
What is material intelligence? It is simultaneously how humans have learned to work with the givenness of matter, whether at the micro or macro scale and the affordances or resistances of matter that are independent of humans (or lying in wait for them). For Homo thought with his hands long before becoming Sapiens. Rome can stand as a stalking horse for the wider role of the material world as a teacher and as an archive of teaching. The tangible legacies of ancient and pre-modern material intelligence—including both artifacts and built environment—can outlast the transmission of making traditions that could never have been fully captured in writing. This conference-as- exploration will center ways of doing and knowing that have been essential to the progress of civilization, often developed by groups that have been marginalized in the annals of history. The main axes of investigation are the following:
- How do we talk about material experience, and does material experience change the way we think?
- Can we only discuss material experience in a deep way with others who share the same kinds of experiences with the same kinds of materials?
- Are there material/material intelligence "wormholes"; that intuitively connect distant sectors of idea space?
- What are the consequences of material ignorance? Can language-based artificial general intelligence understand things?
- How much does our embodiment affect our language?
- How can it deal with embodied knowledge at all?
- Can there be "Artificial Material Intelligence"?
- Are there ways we can incorporate material intelligence into the artificial general intelligence of the future?
From this perspective we could imagine replacing the (discursive) Turing Test with something more like a “Gilligan's Island” Test -- can we make a robot that could land on a lush alien planet and manage to make everything humans would need to survive from whatever natural materials it finds there?
Material Intelligence in the Era of Artificial Intelligence extends the Academy’s century-past commitment to examining the material world through the lens of Rome to the next century.
Major support for this program is provided by an Anonymous Donor.
Participants
Project Leads
Jaś Elsner (Classics, University of Oxford)
Caroline Goodson (AAR/History, University of Cambridge)
Hideo Mabuchi (Applied Physics, Stanford University)
Pamela Smith (History, Columbia University)
Participant List
Makers
Simon Levin (Mill Creek Pottery)
Camille Utterback (Art, Computer Science, Stanford University)
Nick Benson (The Johns Stevens Shop)
Dario Robleto (Artist, Filmmaker, Writer)
Humanists
Chirs Gosden (Archaeology, University of Oxford, em.)
Janet DeLaine (Classics, University of Oxford, em.)
Emily Pegues (Curator, NGA, WDC)
Verity Platt (Classics and Art History, Cornell University)
Scientists
Naomi Leonard (Engineering, Princeton University)
Hidenori Tanaka (Physics, Harvard University)
Tiziana Vanorio (Earth and Planetary Sciences, Stanford University)
Anthony Leonardo (Neurotechnology/Howard Hughes Medical Institute)