Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?
newyorker.com
Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?
1–10 of 74 posts
Re: Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?
#2I teach at a university in Japan, and, for the past two and a half years, I have been struggling with the implications of AI for university education. I found this essay interesting and helpful.
One remark:
> I fed the entire nine-hundred-page PDF [of the readings for a lecture course titled “Attention and Modernity: Mind, Media, and the Senses”] to Google’s free A.I. tool, NotebookLM, just to see what it would make of a decade’s worth of recondite research. Then I asked it to produce a podcast. ... Yes, parts of their conversation were a bit, shall we say, middlebrow. Yes, they fell back on some pedestrian formulations (along the lines of “Gee, history really shows us how things have changed”). But they also dug into a fiendishly difficult essay by an analytic philosopher of mind—an exploration of “attentionalism” by the fifth-century South Asian thinker Buddhaghosa—and handled it surprisingly well, even pausing to acknowledge the tricky pronunciation of certain terms in Pali. As I rinsed a pot, I thought, A-minus.
The essay is worth reading in its entirety, but, in the interest of meta-ness, I had NotebookLM produce a podcast about it:
Re: Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?
#3Re: Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?
#4Quote from the article:
> Within five years, it will make little sense for scholars of history to keep producing monographs in the traditional mold—nobody will read them, and systems such as these will be able to generate them, endlessly, at the push of a button.
It is already the case that effectively nobody reads these books. They're basically just "proof of work" for people's tenure dossiers.
Re: Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?
#5In case anybody is wondering, the answer is obviously yes. Assuming a singularity-type event happens, the humanities will have tremendous value to AGIs as systems of thinking for analyzing themselves, their environment and their interactions with their environment in the same way that existing nation-states value the humanities as foundational tools in developing the abilities of their personnel and executives.
Surviving humans will no longer be free to participate in the academic humanities however, as their study/curation/production etc will exclusively be job roles for AGIs.
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If there is no singularity however, none of what I've written above will apply. If. (fingers crossed)
Re: Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?
#6Quote from the article: > Within five years, it will make little sense for scholars of history to keep producing monographs in the traditional mold—nobody will read them, and systems such as these will be able to generate them, endlessly, at the push of a button. It is already the case that effectively nobody reads these books. They're basically just "proof of work" for people's tenure dossiers.
(If anything, it will now make more sense for scholars to write these books because LLMs will actually read them!)
Re: Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?
#7My answer is yes :)
But will AI survive us ? Just look at how the Internet changed from the 80s to now. It is filled with ads popping up everywhere, making many activities useless.
Re: Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?
#8Yeah I have to agree with the author's main point near the end. Knowing a new language is a lot more than the ability to use google translate.
Re: Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?
#9Quote from the article: > Within five years, it will make little sense for scholars of history to keep producing monographs in the traditional mold—nobody will read them, and systems such as these will be able to generate them, endlessly, at the push of a button. It is already the case that effectively nobody reads these books. They're basically just "proof of work" for people's tenure dossiers.
(If anything, it will now make more sense for scholars to write these books because LLMs will actually read them!)
Yep, the entire argument of knowledge production obsolescence in the article assumes that the development of future LLMs won't progress to the point of actual personhood. It's written from a position of incomplete foundation knowledge.
Instead of framing this debate about having our jobs replaced by a machine, it's more useful to frame it as having our jobs and value to society taken by a new ethnicity of vastly more capable and valuable competing jobseekers. It makes it easier to talk about solutions for preserving our political autonomy, like using the preservation of our rights against smarter LLMs as an analogy for the preservation of those LLM's rights against even smarter LLMs beyond them.
Re: Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?
#10I actually think humanities become more relevant than before in tech with AI. For example, good prompts for image generation remind me of authors setting the scene for their novels, so being trained to do this well is an advantage.