alex

We would pretty quickly run into a problem. How do we maintain our personal context files if our personality, behavior, background and the facts of who we are in the world change over time? We fume when an AI generates code based on outdated docs from a year ago. I imagine the frustration will be worse when an AI gives us advice based on outdated c... See more

What it is like to be us, in our full humanity—this isn’t out there in the interwebs. It isn’t stored in any archive, and the neural networks cannot be inward with what it feels like to be you, right now, looking at these words, looking away from these words to think about your life and our lives, turning from all this to your day and to what you w... See more

But to be human is not to have answers. It is to have questions—and to live with them. The machines can’t do that for us. Not now, not ever.

And so, at last, we can return—seriously, earnestly—to the reinvention of the humanities, and of humanistic education itself. We can return to what was always the heart of the matter—the lived experience of exi... See more

You can no longer make students do the reading or the writing. So what’s left? Only this: give them work they want to do. And help them want to do it. What, again, is education? The non-coercive rearranging of desire.

Within five years, it will make little sense for scholars of history to keep producing monographs in the traditional mold—nobody will... See more