Revisiting The Humanities In The Age Of AI

"I think AI tools are changing the learning opportunities for college students. We believe in developing students in core courses, but more and more people also want to get a perspective of computational and statistical thinking," said University of Chicago President Paul Alivisatos in an interview with Deloitte Nitin Mittal at the Davos Forum in January. He believes that people will have to become creators and co-creators of AI, which means that learning and other aspects need to adapt to some major changes.

Digital intelligence and critical thinking

Professor Alexa Joubin of George Washington University in an article published by Phys.org describes artificial intelligence as a “heuristic tool” in the humanities and explores how it changes the way we think:

"AI can simulate fluency, but it does not have the ability to think in itself. Educators have the responsibility to make sure students understand their limitations and learn to ask better questions. Instead of seeing AI as an answer machine, use it to deepen inquiry and redefine critical thinking in the humanities."

In other words, artificial intelligence can play a supporting role.

In fact, listening to many experts talking about the transition to artificial intelligence, you will hear a lot of discussion about assistive technologies—which will not replace humans, but will enhance human abilities. Decision support tools will make humans more efficient.

This is the kind of synergy they talk about when people express positive attitudes toward AI.

No code revolution

In a conversation with Mittal, Alivisatos also mentioned one of the most disruptive trends: codeless design.

What is codeless movement?

With the new LLM model, people can design software for the first time without programming knowledge.

Since the 1970s, as we learn how to use computers, professionals have to master FORTRAN, COBOL, or some other programming language to create anything.

Now we just need to command artificial intelligence to create it for us and we can see the perfect source code.

Although this is driven by the capabilities of artificial intelligence, it is not without precedents of human design. Take HTML as an example - the early Internet required users to write their own HTML to generate web pages, but once Dreamweaver and a series of other tools emerged, the webmaster could suddenly create a website using the "codeless" method. But now, no code appears in a more fundamental way. The end user doesn’t need to be “technicians” – they just need to know how to talk to AI.

Donate and invest

Even today, where AI has attracted a lot of attention, there are some key players who are inspiring work in the humanities.

The National Humanities Foundation operates a series of projects, including this program to help fund humanities work.

" Artificial Intelligence Humanities Research Center This new NEH funding program provides up to $750,000 to universities and independent research institutions to support the creation of humanities research centers focused on the ethical, legal or social impact of artificial intelligence. ”

Despite some confusion surrounding federal funding, this is just one of many projects implemented to support the humanities in the U.S. economy.

Speaking about this trend and more, Alivisatos believes that AI is changing opportunities—not taking away opportunities, but changing the nature of how people innovate and how they stand out.

"In my opinion, there are more opportunities for our students in all aspects. We can suddenly use our knowledge to serve us better. It only creates more opportunities for people, not less. So I think our students should face this moment with huge opportunities rather than fear, and so should Deloitte."

All of this shows that even if AI catches up with humanity in terms of cognition and agency, people are committed to retaining their human nature. Stay tuned for more information.

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