Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?

She’s an exceptionally bright student. I’d taught her before, and I knew her to be quick and diligent. So what, exactly, did she mean? She wasn’t sure, really. It had to do with the fact that the machine . . . wasn’t a person. And that meant she didn’t feel responsible for it in any way. And that, she said, felt . . . profoundly liberating. We sat in silence. She had said what she meant, and I was slowly seeing into her insight. Like more young women than young men, she paid close attention to those around her—their moods, needs, unspoken cues. I have a daughter who’s configured similarly, and that has helped me to see beyond my own reflexive tendency to privilege analytic abstraction over human situations. What this student had come to say was that she had descended more deeply into her own mind, into her own conceptual powers, while in dialogue with an intelligence toward which she felt no social obligation. No need to accommodate, and no pressure to please. It was a discovery—f ... Read full article.