Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?

I teach at a university in Japan, and, for the past two and a half years, I have been struggling with the implications of AI for university education. I found this essay interesting and helpful.<p>One remark:<p>&gt; I fed the entire nine-hundred-page PDF [of the readings for a lecture course titled “Attention and Modernity: Mind, Media, and the Senses”] to Google’s free A.I. tool, NotebookLM, just to see what it would make of a decade’s worth of recondite research. Then I asked it to produce a podcast. ... Yes, parts of their conversation were a bit, shall we say, middlebrow. Yes, they fell back on some pedestrian formulations (along the lines of “Gee, history really shows us how things have changed”). But they also dug into a fiendishly difficult essay by an analytic philosopher of mind—an exploration of “attentionalism” by the fifth-century South Asian thinker Buddhaghosa—and handled it surprisingly well, even pausing to acknowledge the tricky pronunciation of certain terms in Pali. As I rinsed a pot, I thought, <i>A-minus.</i><p>The essay is worth reading in its entirety, but, in the interest of meta-ness, I had NotebookLM produce a podcast about it:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gally.net&#x2F;temp&#x2F;20250425notebooklm&#x2F;index.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gally.net&#x2F;temp&#x2F;20250425notebooklm&#x2F;index.html</a>

Quote from the article:<p>&gt; Within five years, it will make little sense for scholars of history to keep producing monographs in the traditional mold—nobody will read them, and systems such as these will be able to generate them, endlessly, at the push of a button.<p>It is already the case that effectively nobody reads these books. They&#x27;re basically just &quot;proof of work&quot; for people&#x27;s tenure dossiers.

In case anybody is wondering, the answer is obviously yes. Assuming a singularity-type event happens, the humanities will have tremendous value to AGIs as systems of thinking for analyzing themselves, their environment and their interactions with their environment in the same way that existing nation-states value the humanities as foundational tools in developing the abilities of their personnel and executives.<p>Surviving humans will no longer be free to participate in the academic humanities however, as their study&#x2F;curation&#x2F;production etc will exclusively be job roles for AGIs.<p>.<p>If there is no singularity however, none of what I&#x27;ve written above will apply. If. (fingers crossed)

This might be the first time I have seen someone both engage with LLMs as a producer of humanities artifacts, self-reflection and all, while also being cognizant of the underlying mechanisms.<p>It brings up some real questions about what does it mean to be, even if it doesn&#x27;t ask whether our institutions are capable of recognizing that effort as valuable.<p>Off topic, it&#x27;s extremely frustrating to see how few top-level comments are engaging with TFA. So many people are just using the headline as an excuse to pontificate.

Many areas of humanities devolve into a bag of words where the evaluation of it is subjective depending on ones tastes - and LLMs excel here, and academics are rightfully scared.<p>As an analogy and contrast, take the case of euclidean geometry. This is knowledge about geometry which relates to our &quot;feeling&quot; of space around us. But, it is symbolized in a precise and operational manner which becomes useful in all sorts of endaevors (physics, machines we use etc) - because of the precision. LLMs as machines cannot yet create symbolism and operational definitions of worlds which produce precise and operational inferences. However, they excel at producing persuasive bag-of-words.<p>As the author notes and concludes, human intuition, experience and the communication of it (which is the purview of humanities) is a pre-cursor to formally encoding it in symbolism (which renders said intuition stale but operationally useful). ie, socratic dialog was a precursor to (and inspired) euclidean geometry, and meta-physics inspires physics.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;hE0UM" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;hE0UM</a>

My answer is yes — at least for now. People tend to believe AI gives the great answers until it touches a field they actually have real expertise in. If you talk to true experts in humanities, you’ll find their depth of insight is on a totally different level compared to AI&#x27;s surface-level summaries. AI mostly stitches together some published cliche like Max Planck’s driver in the old story.

If the labours of Men of science should ever create any material revolution, direct or indirect, in our condition, and in the impressions which we habitually receive, the Poet will sleep then no more than at present; he will be ready to follow the steps of the Man of science, not only in those general indirect effects, but he will be at his side, carrying sensation into the midst of the objects of the science itself.<p>The remotest discoveries of the Chemist, the Botanist, or Mineralogist, will be as proper objects of the Poet’s art as any upon which it can be employed, if the time should ever come when these things shall be familiar to us, and the relations under which they are contemplated by the followers of these respective sciences shall be manifestly and palpably material to us as enjoying and suffering beings.<p>Wm Wordsworth.

I think it will survive. The metric here is environmental enmeshment. If AI starts training and observing in real time, and can sit, existing ontologically &quot;in time&quot;, in our environment that would be the only reason I would see a challenge to the humanities.<p>AI regurgitates, at synthesizes, but it doesn&#x27;t have lived experience, it just draws on what its fed -- that isn&#x27;t human.<p>Much of the value in the humanities, in art, is owed to its provenance. Viewing it enables social reflection and growth, and engenders culture. That is simply absent in AI unless you want to probe the training data and the nuances of the model, but again that&#x27;s a pretty circuitous&#x2F;inefficient path to learning about humans, or growing as one.<p>It does, however, reveal some of he mechanics involved and, my hope, is that it leads to deeper and more nuanced discourse in the humanities.

&gt; The A.I. tools my students and I now engage with are, at core, astoundingly successful applications of probabilistic prediction. They don’t know anything—not in any meaningful sense—and they certainly don’t feel. As they themselves continue to tell us, all they do is guess what letter, what word, what pattern is most likely to satisfy their algorithms in response to given prompts.<p>&gt; That guess is the result of elaborate training, conducted on what amounts to the entirety of accessible human achievement. We’ve let these systems riffle through just about everything we’ve ever said or done, and they “get the hang” of us. They’ve learned our moves, and now they can make them. The results are stupefying, but it’s not magic. It’s math.<p>The best description I&#x27;ve seen so far.

Yeah I have to agree with the author&#x27;s main point near the end. Knowing a new language is a lot more than the ability to use google translate.

Of course it will survive. But is it enough to pay off your mortgage and is it economically significant as like say a surgeon or a quantitative analyst &#x2F; trader?<p>I don&#x27;t think so.

No, the humanities won&#x27;t survive.<p>The problem with humanities is that the &quot;state of the art&quot; is about only saying something &quot;new&quot;. For example, the author thinks that discussing Kantian theories of the sublime and “The Epic Split” ad (a highly meme-able 2013 Volvo ad starring Jean-Claude Van Damme) is &quot;straight A&quot; work.<p>It is irrelevant nonsense masquerading as intelligent discourse much like most of this author&#x27;s actual published work and it is also something at which LLMs excel.<p>To be a &quot;rockstar&quot; humanities professor at Princeton, you have to make up something &quot;cool&quot; to fill the seats to keep the attention of 17-25 year-olds.<p>With LLMs that have encoded snapshots of the entire literary corpus that humanity has produced, those students can make up whatever connections they want and justify their worldview. No humanities courses required beyond maybe some introduction to vocabulary &#x2F; prompting.

There is a fundamental value assigned to human produced work that stems strictly from the fact it’s not AI slop. It comes from empathy.<p>Why are physical paintings more valuable than digital art? Why is manmade art implicitly higher value than imagegen art? Why do we watch Magnus Carlsen when engines are leagues ahead of the top 10?<p>Because the human condition matters. We crave seeing the world through the eyes of others with different (or even similar) lived experiences, fantasizing about what we could have been, under different circumstances. Empathizing. AI fundamentally has experienced nothing and so empathizing is not possible. It is not even able to escape the constraints of the human imagination.

It changes the scope of the game, if you will. You can now only seriously do humanities work if you are OK with everything you say being copied and dispersed for free. Potentially without any attribution.<p>Software has been going through the same productive shift for many decades now, e.g., Free and Open Source Software. Simply because copying bytes is absurdly cheap. It&#x27;s still around.

Humanities is even more useful when computers can manage technical problems.

I actually think humanities become more relevant than before in tech with AI. For example, good prompts for image generation remind me of authors setting the scene for their novels, so being trained to do this well is an advantage.

My answer is yes :)<p>But will AI survive us ? Just look at how the Internet changed from the 80s to now. It is filled with ads popping up everywhere, making many activities useless.

yes.

Any work that is based on knowledge, analysis, cleverness, thinking, expression, art, strategy, prediction, insights etc will be profoundly effected. Humans just need to move out of these territories invaded by AI. To the real world where human physical abilities matter.