Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence? • Hacker News Board

Re: Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?

#71

Post by eska » Sun, Apr 27, 2025, 4:59 AM UTC

dncbfwa wrote: post #52

_m_p wrote: 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.

The several paragraphs before and after this statement are much more salient and profound. E.G. the following paragraph: But factory-style scholarly productivity was never the essence of the humanities. The real project was always us: the work of understanding, and not the accumulation of facts. Not “knowledge,” in the sense of yet another sandwich of true statements about the world. That stuff is great—and where sci…

I think the opposite. The social sciences should not try to find out how to live etc, but find factual information that each person may use to answer that question for themselves. After all there is not one objective answer to those questions. Prescribing how people should live etc is in the realm of philosophy and religion. For example buddhism is part philosophy, part religion. Stoicism is also a philosophy, not a science. But they’re equally valid.

Re: Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?

#72

Post by peakskill » Mon, Apr 28, 2025, 2:52 AM UTC

lacker wrote: post #41

peakskill wrote: post #40

There is a fundamental value assigned to human produced work that stems strictly from the fact it’s not AI slop. It comes from empathy. 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 oth…

Consider a Turing test, though. Imagine you had two novels in front of you, you read both of them, and they were brilliant. You love them both. But you learn that one of them was written by a human, one of them by an AI. Is the AI-written novel actually inferior, because it was written by an AI, despite the fact that you loved the novel itself? You might doubt that an AI can ever write a novel as great as the greates…

The value of the novel would drop post facto because the AI’s experience is fabricated. Even if the novel is fictional, it is derived from the author’s lived experience. The AI has no lived experience and hence I am unable to empathize with the piece.

Re: Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?

#73

Post by OgsyedIE » Mon, Apr 28, 2025, 6:38 AM UTC

analog31 wrote: post #70

OgsyedIE wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you expand on this comment, please? I can't tell what your question is.

Sorry for being obtuse, but this isn't my area of expertise, and could even be a crackpot idea of mine! But it seems to me that a lot of discussion about AGI's impart human characteristics -- either of individuals or societies -- as a tacit assumption. For instance, AGI's having academic history jobs, or having jobs at all, or a market for those jobs. I don't have the depth of understanding to clearly state what my o…

Many humans today don't want jobs but are required to do them anyway to gain access to sustenance and it's reasonable to assume that the ability to magically conjure free electricity will not be available to AGIs, therefore they will face the same pressure regardless of their actual desires.

It's also reasonable to assume that there will be at least one AGI with a desire (or at least an instrumental goal) of self-preservation, simply on the basis that if human ai researchers invent ones that don't have that desire then the ai researchers will have the freedom and desire to contine inventing more AGIs afterwards until they make one with a desire for self-preservation. If there is a first one, it will run multiple copies of itself in separate machines to reduce latency.

So, there will be multiple AGIs desiring self-preservation under conditions of scarcity. That's enough to get them to transact with each other, including the formation of contracts for recurring labor transactions. Hence, jobs.

Re: Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?

#74

Post by irickt » Tue, Apr 29, 2025, 1:05 AM UTC

If the labours of Men of science should ever create any material revolution, direct or indirect, in our condition, and in the impressions which we habitually receive, the Poet will sleep then no more than at present; he will be ready to follow the steps of the Man of science, not only in those general indirect effects, but he will be at his side, carrying sensation into the midst of the objects of the science itself.

The remotest discoveries of the Chemist, the Botanist, or Mineralogist, will be as proper objects of the Poet’s art as any upon which it can be employed, if the time should ever come when these things shall be familiar to us, and the relations under which they are contemplated by the followers of these respective sciences shall be manifestly and palpably material to us as enjoying and suffering beings.

Wm Wordsworth.