May 13, 2025 05:58 PM
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-we...telligence
EXCERPTS: In many ways, all is not well on American college campuses. Humanities enrollments are plummeting, and the academic job market for Ph.D.s has effectively collapsed. These are grim times for the disciplines entrusted with carrying forward the humanistic project...
[...] 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.
For the past seventy years or so, the university humanities have largely lost sight of this core truth. Seduced by the rising prestige of the sciences—on campus and in the culture—humanists reshaped their work to mimic scientific inquiry. We have produced abundant knowledge about texts and artifacts, but in doing so mostly abandoned the deeper questions of being which give such work its meaning.
Now everything must change. That kind of knowledge production has, in effect, been automated. As a result, the “scientistic” humanities—the production of fact-based knowledge about humanistic things—are rapidly being absorbed by the very sciences that created the A.I. systems now doing the work. We’ll go to them for the “answers.”
But to be human is not to have answers. It is to have questions—and to live with them. The machines can’t do that for us. Not now, not ever.
And so, at last, we can return—seriously, earnestly—to the reinvention of the humanities, and of humanistic education itself. We can return to what was always the heart of the matter—the lived experience of existence. Being itself... (MORE - details)
RELATED: Rampant AI cheating is ruining education alarmingly fast
EXCERPTS: In many ways, all is not well on American college campuses. Humanities enrollments are plummeting, and the academic job market for Ph.D.s has effectively collapsed. These are grim times for the disciplines entrusted with carrying forward the humanistic project...
[...] 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.
For the past seventy years or so, the university humanities have largely lost sight of this core truth. Seduced by the rising prestige of the sciences—on campus and in the culture—humanists reshaped their work to mimic scientific inquiry. We have produced abundant knowledge about texts and artifacts, but in doing so mostly abandoned the deeper questions of being which give such work its meaning.
Now everything must change. That kind of knowledge production has, in effect, been automated. As a result, the “scientistic” humanities—the production of fact-based knowledge about humanistic things—are rapidly being absorbed by the very sciences that created the A.I. systems now doing the work. We’ll go to them for the “answers.”
But to be human is not to have answers. It is to have questions—and to live with them. The machines can’t do that for us. Not now, not ever.
And so, at last, we can return—seriously, earnestly—to the reinvention of the humanities, and of humanistic education itself. We can return to what was always the heart of the matter—the lived experience of existence. Being itself... (MORE - details)
RELATED: Rampant AI cheating is ruining education alarmingly fast
