Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?

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

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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

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

“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?”