In this blog I want to introduce and review a recent essay from The New Yorker on the future of the humanities titled Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?
If I did physics or mathematics I might be able to say it is an ‘elegant’, even ‘beautiful’ piece of writing – not so much in doing sociology of education!!
My intent here is not to provide a close reading of Graham Burnett’s essay, but to circulate it into spaces where it may not have been encountered, to sketch its main points, and catalogue and archive it.
Burnett, a historian of science and technology, poses his question in the context of Trump’s America, and its attacks on the so-called ‘woke agenda’ of higher education systems and institutions.
More profoundly, Burnett is concerned with the ways in which machine intelligences are forcing ‘us’ to rethink the ‘value proposition’ that ‘humans’ bring to any relationship, setting or practice – including the settings and practices of all educational systems and institutions that have little to do with the Trump administration’s paranoias about freedoms of thought and speech.
Because I’m a historian of science and technology, part of my terrain is the evolving role of the university—from its medieval, clerical origins to the entrepreneurial R. & D. engines of today. I teach among the humanists, and my courses are anchored in the traditional program of the liberal arts, in the hope of giving shape to humans equal to the challenge of freedom. But my subject is the rise of a techno-scientific understanding of the world, and of ourselves in it. And, if that is what you care about, the White House’s chain-jerk mugging feels, frankly, like a sideshow. The juggernaut actually barrelling down the quad is A.I., coming at us with shocking speed.
At first glance I wasn’t entirely convinced that the emergences and impacts of machine intelligences in the humanities – all educational settings – were of a bigger consequence than the far-right’s attacks on freedoms of thought and speech in educational processes of knowledge production.
But the historical evidence does suggest that these sorts of periodic attacks on freedom of thought and speech by totalitarians and authoritarians on the left and the right have a limited life span.
The value proposition of the human in these contexts is defined by forms of dissent and resistance and refusal and creativity.
So, I now tend to agree with Barnett that machine intelligences – and what we are dealing with now is just the harbinger of something much more profound emerging over our early 21st century horizons – present profound existential challenges to the value proposition that might attach to being a human.
Machine Intelligences and Education Futures
Source: https://theconversation.com/ai-in-schools-heres-what-we-need-to-consider-109450
Burnett sets his scene in familiar territory – territory that I have experienced in my teaching and research supervisions, and research grant and publication writing since ChatGPT was ‘released into the wild’ in November 2022.
The ‘impact zone’ as Burnett identifies it at Princeton is characterised by two main themes:
- How to stop students using machine intelligences to ‘cheat’:
As one quiet young woman explained after class, nearly every syllabus now includes a warning: Use ChatGPT or similar tools, and you’ll be reported to the academic deans. Nobody wants to risk it. Another student mentioned that a major A.I. site may even be blocked on the university network, though she was too nervous to test the rumor.
- Just ignore it and suggest that it doesn’t really signal anything profoundly transformative in terms of what we have come to understand as ‘education’.
In one department on campus, a recently drafted anti-A.I. policy, read literally, would actually have barred faculty from giving assignments to students that centered on A.I. (It was ultimately revised.) Last year, when some distinguished alums and other worthies conducted an external review of the history department, a top recommendation was that we urgently address the looming A.I. disruptions to our teaching and research. This suggestion got a notably cool reception. But the idea that we can just keep going about our business won’t do, either.
In relation to both themes Burnett begs to differ:
On the contrary, staggering transformations are in full swing. And yet, on campus, we’re in a bizarre interlude: everyone seems intent on pretending that the most significant revolution in the world of thought in the past century isn’t happening. The approach appears to be: “We’ll just tell the kids they can’t use these tools and carry on as before.” This is, simply, madness. And it won’t hold for long. It’s time to talk about what all this means for university life, and for the humanities in particular.
I recognise myself – and much of what I have done for the last 25+ years, and much of what I have been questioning about the value proposition that this work and this questioning brings to others in more recent times – in Burnett’s ‘confession’ that:
I’m a book-reading, book-writing human—trained in a near-monastic devotion to canonical scholarship across the disciplines of history, philosophy, art, and literature. I’ve done this work for more than thirty years. And already the thousands of academic books lining my offices are beginning to feel like archeological artifacts. Why turn to them to answer a question? They are so oddly inefficient, so quirky in the paths they take through their material.
Not only that, but:
Now I can hold a sustained, tailored conversation on any of the topics I care about, from agnotology to zoosemiotics, with a system that has effectively achieved Ph.D.-level competence across all of them. I can construct the “book” I want in real time—responsive to my questions, customized to my focus, tuned to the spirit of my inquiry. And the astonishing part is this: the making of books such as those on my shelves, each the labor of years or decades, is quickly becoming a matter of well-designed prompts. 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?
The Joy of…
For much of the rest of his essay Burnett provides compelling, even enchanting, examples of what his undergraduate students produced when he asked them to:
engage one of the new A.I. tools in a conversation about the history of attention. The idea was to let them take a topic that they now understood in some depth and explore what these systems could do with it. It was also a chance to confront the attention economy’s “killer app”: totally algorithmic pseudo-persons who are sensitive, competent, and infinitely patient; know everything about everyone; and will, of course, be turned to the business of extracting money from us. These systems promise a new mode of attention capture—what some are calling the “intimacy economy” (“human fracking” comes closer to the truth).
The assignment was simple: have a conversation with a chatbot about the history of attention, edit the text down to four pages, and turn it in.
It was such a pleasure to read what young humans could imagine, could conjure, could converse about, when they were encouraged to not be concerned about ‘cheating’, and to explore what it might mean to be a human engaged in a conversation with particular forms of machine intelligence.
What forms of knowledge, even wisdom, might emerge from these encounters?
Data is not information
Information is not knowledge
Knowledge is not wisdom
Burnett tells us about the joy, the satisfaction, the elation even, that he experiences as a ‘teacher’, as an ’educator’, that came from reading what his students did when they were allowed to:
When Paolo asked if it could have an emotional relationship to a song, the system carefully distinguished between recognizing emotion in music and actually feeling it. It said it lacked a body, and that this absence barred it from certain ways of knowing music. Paolo asked it to write a song that would make him cry.
It tried. Paolo sent me a note: “The system failed the test.”
But I was crying, there on the couch, reading.
And:
Ceci is from Texas and studies Spanish. In an inspired move, she cast herself as a “spiritual director” and guided ChatGPT-4 through the opening week of Ignatius of Loyola’s “Spiritual Exercises,” sixteenth-century meditational practices that we had studied as an early and powerful “attentional protocol,” close to the roots of modern selfhood.
The result outstripped my wildest imaginings: here was a young woman from Austin acting as a contemplative Counter-Reformation confessor to the stirrings of conscience in a neural network humming across a billion dollars’ worth of Nvidia chips, somewhere in a windowless server room in Abilene or San Antonio.
I have joked over the last decade that when large corporations such as Pearson provide the curriculum and the tests for many subjects in many schooling contexts, and can predict what the normal distribution of outcomes, of grades, should be in any particular context, then they will not be far from seeking to ‘teacher-proof’ these outcomes and grades, by developing holographic teachers to deliver that content.
This is not far-fetched. Not only in terms of the technology needed to produce holographic ‘instructors’, or the AI-agents/tutors now in use. But also, in terms of the reduction of teachers – as educational professionals – to the level of technical content deliverers who, particularly in Australia, are increasingly leaving the profession for a myriad of reasons. Many of which have very little do with their initial teacher education, and much more to do with political and business interventions into the labour processes, systems and practices that characterise what it is to be a teacher/technician/instructor in a neoliberal education apparatus.*
Education, as the “non-coercive rearranging of desire…”
My recommendation is that you take the time to read the full article.
Take the time to imagine and think about the many questions that is provokes about what we understand as knowledge creation – who does it, what purposes does it serve, what forms of value does it create – in these and other spaces.
Take the time to have conversations about the value propositions that we are increasingly being compelled to make about what it is that we as humans bring to so many of the arenas and elements of life on the planet at this time, and as the machine intelligence future looms over our horizons.
For my part, I can only address what it means for those of us who are responsible for the humanistic tradition—those of us who serve as custodians of historical consciousness, as lifelong students of the best that has been thought, said, and made by people.
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…” (D. Graham Burnett)
But what about the AI Apocalypse?
Up to this point in my commentary on Burnett’s essay I have been concerned with the question ‘Will the humanities and education survive the Age of Machine Intelligences?’. But what about that more profoundly existential question that would make this first question moot? Will humans survive the Age of Machine Intelligences’?
In an upcoming blog – tentatively titled ‘Pull Up a Chair to the AI Apocalypse. And Relax’ – I want to build on the work done here and elsewhere to comment on a recent TED conversation between former Google CEO and chairman Eric Schmidt and technologist Bilawal Sidhu – ‘The AI Revolution Is Underhyped’
In that conversation Schmidt takes a very ‘techno-optimistic’ stance in relation to the possibilities and existential challenges that machine intelligences pose for humans.
By way of a teaser I want to close with some observations about the techno-optimiism of Schmidt and his fellow Silicon Valley ‘tech-bros’ made by Izzy Lapowsky in a recent Vanity Fair comment on the TED conversation – ‘Eric Schmidt Says We Shouldn’t Fear AI—Except for the Risk of Nuclear War’
As she observes, this optimism has deep roots in the billions of dollars that these tech-bros have made, and hope to make, in the machine intelligence futures that they are actively creating – with a cursory nod to the need for ‘guardrails’ to safeguard the futures of humans.
* What it means to be a teacher/technician/instructor in a neoliberal education apparatus.
I have supervised a number of PhD students in the last 10 years who have done great work thinking through many of these issues, including:
Dr James Goring, Young People, 21st Century Skills and Uncertain Futures: A Genealogy of Australia’s Neo-Liberal Education Apparatus
Dr Garry Argent, Neo-Liberal Capitalism and the Government of Labour Market Skills: A Genealogy of Australia’s Foundation Skills Policy and Program Framework.
Dr Matt Barker, On the ‘Impossibility’ of Being a ‘Good’ Teacher