31–40 of 74 posts
Of course it will survive. But is it enough to pay off your mortgage and is it economically significant as like say a surgeon or a quantitative analyst / trader? I don't think so.
I don't know any today that make what even a mediocre new surgeon or quant takes home.
Yeah 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.
Machine translation has poor reputation for the mistakes it makes; but if it ever gets good, then I wonder why learning foreign languages will be a more popular activity than learning Latin or Classical Greek is today. Of course reading Homer or Virgil in the original must be much more satisfying than reading them in translation; but the number of people who truly care about that is vanishingly small.
I 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…
My 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.
I 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.
In 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. Survi…
Only if the AGIs want those roles. We already have super-smart people who don't want to be history professors or classical musicians.
AI regurgitates, at synthesizes, but it doesn't have lived experience, it just draws on what its fed -- that isn't human.
Much of the value in the humanities, in art, is owed to its provenance. Viewing it enables social reflection and growth, and engenders culture. That is simply absent in AI unless you want to probe the training data and the nuances of the model, but again that's a pretty circuitous/inefficient path to learning about humans, or growing as one.
It does, however, reveal some of he mechanics involved and, my hope, is that it leads to deeper and more nuanced discourse in the humanities.
Yeah 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.
> Knowing a new language is a lot more than the ability to use google translate. Machine translation has poor reputation for the mistakes it makes; but if it ever gets good, then I wonder why learning foreign languages will be a more popular activity than learning Latin or Classical Greek is today. Of course reading Homer or Virgil in the original must be much more satisfying than reading them in translation; but the…
Why are physical paintings more valuable than digital art? Why is manmade art implicitly higher value than imagegen art? Why do we watch Magnus Carlsen when engines are leagues ahead of the top 10?
Because the human condition matters. We crave seeing the world through the eyes of others with different (or even similar) lived experiences, fantasizing about what we could have been, under different circumstances. Empathizing. AI fundamentally has experienced nothing and so empathizing is not possible. It is not even able to escape the constraints of the human imagination.