Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/will-the-humanities-survive-artificial-intelligence
D. Graham Burnett (He teaches history of science at Princeton):
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.
But factory-style scholarly productivity was never the essence of the humanities. The real project was always us: the work of understanding, and not the accumulation of facts. Not “knowledge,” in the sense of yet another sandwich of true statements about the world. That stuff is great—and where science and engineering are concerned it’s pretty much the whole point. But no amount of peer-reviewed scholarship, no data set, can resolve the central questions that confront every human being: How to live? What to do? How to face death?
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.
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/will-the-humanities-survive-artificial-intelligence
D. Graham Burnett (He teaches history of science at Princeton):
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.
But factory-style scholarly productivity was never the essence of the humanities. The real project was always us: the work of understanding, and not the accumulation of facts. Not “knowledge,” in the sense of yet another sandwich of true statements about the world. That stuff is great—and where science and engineering are concerned it’s pretty much the whole point. But no amount of peer-reviewed scholarship, no data set, can resolve the central questions that confront every human being: How to live? What to do? How to face death?
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.
What's next for AI at DeepMind, Google's artificial intelligence lab
https://youtu.be/1XF-NG_35NE
https://youtu.be/1XF-NG_35NE