What becomes of humanities majors after they finish the degree? How might colleges and universities assist them in the transition? Join the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Humanities Center for a conversation about these issues that features the perspectives of both academia and industry.
November 2021–May 2022
The National Humanities Center is pleased to present a series of engaging monthly virtual talks featuring recently published books by NHC Fellows on a variety of topics.
When we refer to “the international scientific community,” what do we mean? In this Scholar-to-Scholar talk, Lorraine Daston (NHC Fellow 2021–22) discusses how scientists began developing international collaborations and organizations in the latter half of the nineteenth century—the era of globe-spanning empire, telegraph networks, steamship lines, and world expositions. This international scientific governance has endured—and has created binding agreements that survived wars, revolutions, decolonization, and radical shifts in research agendas over more than a century.
Artificial intelligence allows us to experience and compare many different methods of making sense of the world. How can universities support this kind of multiplication and polyvalence in relation to the humanities and AI? Is the “human” we in the humanities defend against the machine actually defensible? And is the image of the machine we uphold as the non-human actually reflecting the kinds of machines AI engineers are building today?
Shakespeare’s enduring influence, his facility with language, and his empathic depiction of the human experience contribute not only to our sense of his genius, but make him an irresistible subject for artificial intelligence researchers.
Artificial intelligence has transformed what we can learn and decipher from the brain. Are we mistaken to refer to our personal information as “ours” or to claim individual privacy rights to those multifarious details being scooped up by data miners and aggregators? Might there be better, more apt ways to think about individual privacy and personal information—perhaps as collective or public goods?
If human beings are creating artificial intelligence that influences the future, who determines which of us get to imagine that future? Whose voices will be heard, and whose imagination and vision will be realized? Films discussed include The Black Baptism, Coded Bias, Dirty Computer, and Her.
Do we believe digital employees will become indistinguishable from human employees this decade? As democratization of AI leads to proliferation of such digital agents, how should we prepare for humans to continue to be in command? When questioning if morality can be built into computers, we must simultaneously ask: whose morality? Could there be a successful deep learning AI that answers moral dilemmas? Or is there reason to think that matters are different in the case of morality?
Chetan Dube envisions a world where humans and machines work closely together to build a radically more efficient planet. His research has focused on deep AI, and he pioneered the use of AI-enabled digital labor across industries. Amelia’s brain uses episodic memory, process memory, intent recognition, and emotional intelligence to respond to complex queries, process transactions, and deliver personalized customer service. Amelia stores facts, concepts, and the associations between them in her semantic memory. From standard operating procedures (SOPs) to policy documents, she can be trained to apply them to conversations.
Can AI have emotions, can machine learning models truly learn? Can AI systems be used to improve human moral judgments? How might collaboration between humanists and technologists produce more rigorous forms of learning and verification? These and other questions are the subject of a lively exchange between panelists Wendy Chun, Sebastian Liao, Safiya Umoja Noble, and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong.