Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?
Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?
This article explores the transformative impact of Artificial Intelligence on the humanities and higher education. The author, a historian of science and technology, highlights the academic world's slow response to AI's rapid development and the perceived threat it poses. Through an assignment where students interacted with AI chatbots, the author observes that these tools, while lacking true consciousness, can foster profound self-reflection and philosophical inquiry by offering a unique form of "pure attention." The article argues that AI could automate traditional "scientistic" knowledge production, thereby liberating the humanities to refocus on core existential questions of "being" and "how to live," which machines cannot address. This shift, while initially unsettling, is presented as an exhilarating opportunity for the reinvention of humanistic education.
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some nice gems to this essay:
- human fracking
- electrical engineering is about making rocks do math
- you can no longer make students do the reading or the writing. So what’s left? Only this: give them work they want to do. And help them want to do it. What, again, is education? The non-coercive rearranging of desire.
i think this is one of the better takes on ai.
no hyperbole of fear of the (unlikely) future. no mocking for the inability to spell strawberry. a complete focus on what these systems can do well and how to leverage that for an important field that needs help.
on a side note, i appreciated the story of the student who expressed that talking to an LLM allows one to have an unguarded conversation. there are no power dynamics at play. there is infinite patient on one side. the ability to course correct on the other or change your mind on a whim. this opens up ways to explore our own mind in ways that not everyone can, either because of lack of knowledge, experience or the time to read archives and archives of treasure troves of information. this is possibly severely untapped or with too much focus on the fear of someone believing these systems are real and could lead to self harm.
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