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Accounting for the Human Element: Science, Technology, and the National Humanities Center
“Absent a humanities perspective, solutions to racial divides, environmental degradation, climate change, immigration, water rights and resources, food consumption, geopolitical cataclysms, and the implementation of new technologies will remain incomplete. Technology cannot assess the multiple masks of evil, the complicated ethics of choice, the pain of loss, the joys of love, or the frustrations and celebrations our yearning to be both human and more than human produce.”
—Robert D. Newman, “Humanities Moments and the Heroic,” October 22, 2015
Accounting for the Human Element
Science, Technology, and the National Humanities Center
In his first public address upon assuming leadership of the National Humanities Center in 2015, Robert D. Newman spoke of the absolute necessity of humanities thinking in an age when the promises and perils of technological innovation inflect nearly every aspect of our lives.
His remarks echo those of theologian Ian Barbour (NHC Fellow, 1980–81) who remarked upon receiving the Templeton Prize that “Science can tell us what is possible, but not what goals and values we should seek. Some segments of the population usually received most of the benefits of a new technology, and other groups carry the burden of risks and indirect costs, so questions of social justice are at stake. Moreover, new technologies give us new powers over nature and human nature, requiring choices which have never been faced before…”
The effort to help inform these choices, to contextualize and critique advances in science, technology, engineering, and medicine, has been the focus of over a hundred NHC Fellows, from those whose research combines humanistic and scientific methods to those who use a humanistic lens to examine technological change, scientific figures, or medical practice. Their work on projects in bioethics, medical humanities, the history and philosophy of science, and integrative work involving humanities and technology has shed light on scientific and medical endeavors encompassing everything from experiments in alchemy by Enlightenment scientists to the pivotal role of healthcare in the US Civil War. They have also helped raise serious concerns about the corporatization of genomic research and the ways that injustices are being replicated and exacerbated by artificial intelligence and internet algorithms.
Some of the Center’s notable Fellows working in these areas include Joni Adamson (NHC Fellow, 2018–19), a founding figure in environmental humanities; Leon R. Kass (NHC Fellow, 1984–85), physician, philosopher, and former chairman of the President’s Council on Bioethics; Ryan E. Emanuel (NHC Fellow, 2020–21), hydrologist and Lumbee historian; Nancy Tomes (NHC Fellow, 1999–00; 2022–23), pioneering medical historian and member of the US Medical Licensing Examination Board; Peter Galison (NHC Fellow, 2017–18), Harvard physicist and historian of science; and eight past presidents of the American Society for Environmental History.
Bridging the Two Cultures
- Lorraine Daston (NHC Fellow, 2012–22), Rivals: How Scientists Learned to Cooperate
- Valia Allori, ed. (NHC Fellow, 2017–18), Statistical Mechanics and Scientific Explanation: Determinism, Indeterminism and Laws of Nature
- Frances Bordogna (NHC Fellow, 2006–07), William James at the Boundaries: Philosophy, Science, and the Geography of Knowledge
- Leon R. Kass (NHC Fellow, 1984–85), Toward a More Natural Science: Biology and Human Affairs
- Andrew Jewett (NHC Fellow, 2013–14), Science Under Fire: Challenges to Scientific Authority in Modern America
- Mab Segrest (NHC Fellow, 2017–18), Administrations of Lunacy: Racism and the Haunting of American Psychiatry at the Milledgeville Asylum
- Darlene Clark Hind (NHC Fellow, 1986–87), Black Women in White: Racial Conflict and Cooperation in the Nursing Profession, 1890–1950
- Gregg Mitman (NHC Fellow, 2004–05; 2020–21), Breathing Space: How Allergies Shape Our Lives and Landscapes
- Paula A. Michaels (NHC Fellow, 2008–09), Lamaze: An International History
- Elizabeth Schechter (NHC Fellow, 2014–15), Self-Consciousness and "Split" Brains: The Minds’ I
- Benjamin Kahan (NHC Fellow, 2016–17), The Book of Minor Perverts: Sexology, Etiology, and the Emergences of Sexuality
- Ian Barbour (NHC Fellow, 1980–81), Ethics in an Age of Technology
- Eric G. Wilson (NHC Fellow, 2003–04), The Melancholy Android: On the Psychology of Sacred Machines
Similarly, the Center’s public engagement programs have highlighted the need for greater dialogue and partnering among humanists and scientists. Recent conferences organized by the NHC on medical humanities (A Crisis of Caring) and artificial intelligence (In Our Image) have featured scientists, healthcare providers, business leaders, artists, educators, and policymakers and brought them into conversation with humanists to help address complex challenges in health care and the rapid adoption of AI technologies.
Another example of interdisciplinary public engagement work is the NHC’s COVID-19 Oral History Project, created to help health professionals articulate their own narratives around the shared experience of a pandemic. The project is unique among oral history collections arising out of the pandemic in that it is squarely grounded in scholarly work and includes training and research opportunities for humanities and pre-professional students from across the country who are preparing for careers in healthcare and other fields.
How Do We Know What We Know: Developing and Enhancing the Curriculum
At a startling pace and in unexpected ways, artificial intelligence technologies have infiltrated our lives over the past couple of years. They are reshaping the ways that we conduct business, govern, provide healthcare and security, even the ways students do homework. The large-scale cultural and societal implications of these changes—and the ethical questions they raise—pose a serious challenge.
The NHC has taken an active role in helping address these challenges. First, by hosting In Our Image: Artificial Intelligence and the Humanities in 2021, an international conference on the role the humanities can play in understanding and harnessing the enormous power and potential of artificial intelligence.
Highlighting perspectives from leading humanists, scientists, engineers, artists, writers, and software company executives, the conference generated a series of recommendations that inspired even deeper and broader engagement on these issues through the Center’s Responsible AI Curriculum Design Project. Working in partnership with fifteen of the nation’s top universities and colleges, the Center has facilitated the development of undergraduate courses that address ethical questions about the role of artificial intelligence in our world. Each course was designed by a nominated faculty member, and each institution made the course available for credit. Considered together, these courses offer insights into the emerging role of artificial intelligence in our world, and the part post-secondary institutions can play in preparing students to assess the impact and value of those technologies.
