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Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?

newyorker.com

21–30 of 74 posts

Re: Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?

#22
post #4

Quote 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.

At one point, I estimated that the subfield of mathematics that I work in has at most 250 living contributors.

It’s an applied field, there’s actually-existing technology that depends on it, but it’s technically challenging and a lot of people left for AI/ML because it’s easier and there’s more low-hanging fruit.

Anyway, my colleagues and I, we write monographs for each other more or less, using arXiv to announce results as a glorified mailing list—do you consider that mere “proof of work”? By my count, 250 folks is practically no one.

Re: Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?

#23
post #2

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…

Happy to see Buddhaghosa on HN!

On a semi related tangent, I recently listened to the audio book of Ajahn Brahm's Mindfulness, Bliss and Beyond. It was pleasantly surprising to hear nimitta spoken about so frequently outside of the Visuddhimagga!

Ingesting Buddhist commentaries and practice manuals to provide advice and help with meditation is one of the few LLM applications that excite me. I was impressed when I received LLM instructions on how an upāsaka can achieve upacāra-samādhi !

Re: Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?

#24
post #2

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…

Happy to see Buddhaghosa on HN! On a semi related tangent, I recently listened to the audio book of Ajahn Brahm's Mindfulness, Bliss and Beyond. It was pleasantly surprising to hear nimitta spoken about so frequently outside of the Visuddhimagga! Ingesting Buddhist commentaries and practice manuals to provide advice and help with meditation is one of the few LLM applications that excite me. I was impressed when I rec…

Hey I'm reading that book too! Glad to meet you! I love that book.

Re: Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?

#27
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There is absolutely no evidence that language models are "persons". When one is not executing a generation algorithm, it is not running. It's so easy to anthropomorphize these things, but that's not evidence; people anthropomorphize all kinds of things.

I absolutely agree that it's reasonable to assume that zero of them are persons today, so far.

What about more advanced ones that have yet to be invented? Will they be persons once they're built?

(For clarity I want to make sure you know I'm talking about de facto personhood as independent agents with careers and histories and not legal recognition as persons. Human history is full of illustrative examples of humans who didn't have legal personhood.)

Re: Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?

#28
post #2

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…

Happy to see Buddhaghosa on HN! On a semi related tangent, I recently listened to the audio book of Ajahn Brahm's Mindfulness, Bliss and Beyond. It was pleasantly surprising to hear nimitta spoken about so frequently outside of the Visuddhimagga! Ingesting Buddhist commentaries and practice manuals to provide advice and help with meditation is one of the few LLM applications that excite me. I was impressed when I rec…

> It was pleasantly surprising to hear nimitta spoken about so frequently outside of the Visuddhimagga!

MN 128 is also worth reading through on that topic.

Re: Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?

#29
post #7

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.

Now imagine if advertising or other narratives could be invisibly, undisclosedly multiplexed into content. That's the future of AI, if not the present.

Re: Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?

#30
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There is absolutely no evidence that language models are "persons". When one is not executing a generation algorithm, it is not running. It's so easy to anthropomorphize these things, but that's not evidence; people anthropomorphize all kinds of things.

For these purposes it doesn't matter if they are persons and they don't need to be anthropomorphized: it only matters that the LLMs can incorporate the data from person-generated works into their output, either to weight things or to be read by an actual human.
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