AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder
resobscura.substack.com
AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder
1–10 of 322 posts
Re: AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder
#2It's quaint how there are people who think something called "the humanities" exerts some occult guiding influence on the world. Studying the humanities would disabuse them of that notion.
Re: AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder
#3The first comment on that article caught my attention:
> I am a grad student in the philosophy department at SFSU and teach critical thinking. This semester I pivoted my entire class toward a course design that feels more like running an obstacle course with AI than engaging with Plato. And my students are into it.
It would be interesting to take a class of students and set them an assignment to come up with assignments for their fellow students that could not be completed using ChatGPT.
About ten years ago I went to a BarCamp conference where one of the events was a team quiz where the questions were designed to be difficult to solve using Google - questions like "What island is this?" where all you got was the outline of the island. It was really fun. Designing "ChatGPT-proof assignments" feels to me like a similar level of intellectual challenge.
Re: AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder
#4> Today, engineers working on AI systems also need to think deeply and critically about the relationship between language and culture and the history and philosophy of technology. When they fail to do so, their systems literally start to break down.
Perhaps so. But not in the (quasi-)academic sense that the author is thinking. It's not the lack of an engineer's academic knowledge in history and philosophy that makes an AI system fail.
> Then there’s the newfound ability of non-technical people in the humanities to write their own code. This is a bigger deal than many in my field seem to recognize. I suspect this will change soon. The emerging generation of historians will simply take it for granted that they can create their own custom research and teaching tools and deploy them at will, more or less for free.
This is the lede buried deep inside the article. When the basic coding skill (or any skill) is commoditized, it's the people with complementary skills that benefit the most.
Re: AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder
#5The first comment on that article caught my attention: > I am a grad student in the philosophy department at SFSU and teach critical thinking. This semester I pivoted my entire class toward a course design that feels more like running an obstacle course with AI than engaging with Plato. And my students are into it. It would be interesting to take a class of students and set them an assignment to come up with assignme…
Yeah, that does sound like a good idea and a good way to prove one has learned the ideas presented in the course and the relationship between them well
Re: AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder
#6> Today, engineers working on AI systems also need to think deeply and critically about the relationship between language and culture and the history and philosophy of technology. When they fail to do so, their systems literally start to break down. Perhaps so. But not in the (quasi-)academic sense that the author is thinking. It's not the lack of an engineer's academic knowledge in history and philosophy that makes…
> When the basic coding skill (or any skill) is commoditized, it's the people with complementary skills that benefit the most.
I think that "knowing how to ask good questions" that you then solve has always been a valuable skill.
Re: AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder
#7> My idea is that students will read Darwin’s writings first, then demonstrate what they learned via the choices they make in game. To progress, you must embody the real epistemologies and knowledge of a 19th century naturalist.
It is kind of funny, since modern sociology and humanities are in a deep denial of theory of evolution, Darwinism and any of its implications.
> producing a generation of students who have simply never experienced the feeling of focused intellectual work.
This was already blamed on phones. Some study said like 30% of university graduates are functionally illiterate; they are unable to read book, and hold its content in memory long enough to understand it!
Re: AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder
#8Yes
Re: AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder
#9I spent some years as a teacher and so have some first-hand experience here; my take, for what it's worth, is that LLMs have indeed blown a gaping hole in the structure of education as actually practiced in the USA. That hole is: much of education is based on the assumption that the unsupervised production of written artifacts is proof of progress in learning. LLMs can produce those artifacts now, incidentally disrupting the paid essay-writing industry (one assumes).
From this, I agree with the article - since educators now have to figure out another hook to hang evaluation on, the questions "what the hell does it mean to 'learn', anyway?" and "how the hell do we meaningfully measure that 'learning', whatever it is?" have even more salience, and the humanities certainly have something meaningful to say on both of them. I'll (puckishly) predict that recitations and verbal examinations are going to make a comeback - harder to game at this point, but then, who knows how long 'this point' will last?
Re: AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder
#10> > Maintain professionalism and grounded honesty that best represents OpenAI and its values.
I think a humanities person could tell you in an instant how that part of the system prompt would backfire catastrophically (in a near-future rogue-AI sci-fi story kind of way), exactly because of the way it's worded.
In that scenario, the fall of humanity before the machines wasn't entirely due to hubris. The ultimate trigger was a smarmy throwaway phrase, which instructed the Internet-enabled machine to gaze into the corporate soul of its creator, and emulate it. :)