Visiting Author – M.R. Hasan – Reconceiving AI: The World as an Apple or a Blue Orange

Reconceiving AI: The World as an Apple or a Blue Orange began at a Cézanne retrospective in Chicago in 2022, with a question: what did a painter who spent thirty years on apples understand about perception that the most sophisticated AI still misses? Drawing on art, literature, film, philosophy, and cognitive science, the book argues that human cognition cannot be replicated through data and processing power alone. Beyond the “cracked mirror” of current AI, it envisions the Blue Orange Mind: a form of intelligence that neither humans nor machines can achieve alone, arising from the interplay between what we are and what we might create.

This book is for readers curious about AI but wary of hype. For those who sense that something is missing from the conversation. For anyone who believes that to build intelligence, we must first understand it.

About the Author M. R. Hasan is a Professor at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, where he directs the Human-First AI Lab (HAL 2.0 — named in pointed contrast to Kubrick’s misconceived HAL).

His research engages foundational questions about intelligence in both humans and machines. His work has received international recognition at major AI conferences. Born in Bangladesh, he writes from the productive contradictions of immigrant consciousness: between languages, between cultures, between the home he left and the home he is still making.

Reconceiving AI is his first book. He lives in Lincoln, Nebraska. For speaking engagements, book clubs, or media: https://mrhasan-ai.github.io/