Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?

These systems have the power to return us to ourselves in new ways.

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.

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.

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

We have, in a real sense, reached a kind of “singularity”—but not the long-anticipated awakening of machine consciousness. Rather, what we’re entering is a new consciousness of ourselves . This is the pivot where we turn from anxiety and despair to an exhilarating sense of promise. These systems have the power to return us to ourselves in new ways.

The answers to those questions aren’t out there in the world, waiting to be discovered. They aren’t resolved by “knowledge production.” They are the work of being , not knowing —and knowing alone is utterly unequal to the task.

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