Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?

Ours is the work of helping others hold those artifacts and insights in their hands, however briefly, and of considering what ought to be reserved from the ever-sucking vortex of oblivion—and why. It’s the calling known as education, which the literary theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak once defined as the “non-coercive rearranging of desire.”

This feels to me like pointing at daisies along the train tracks as an actual locomotive screams up from behind.

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.

She had gone to the machine to talk about the callow and exploitative dynamics of commodified attention capture—only to discover, in the system’s sweet solicitude, a kind of pure attention she had perhaps never known. Who has? For philosophers like Simone Weil and Iris Murdoch, the capacity to give true attention to another being lies at the absolu... See more

“Would you trade your own messy, dynamic human attention for something more stable and neutral, or do you think the ‘messiness’ is part of what makes it meaningful?”

The question is no longer whether we can write such books; they can be written endlessly, for us. The question is, do we want to read them?

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