The arts and humanities are already embedded in AI: Values, visions and the future university — Part 3
I will conclude with two recent reflections on AI and the world it is creating from an arts and humanities perspective. The first is from Steve Fuller’s recent book Back to the University’s Future: The Second Coming of Humboldt. Fuller is a philosopher of science and self-described “social epistemologist”, whose long-term project has been concerned with the democratization of knowledge, or the ‘demystification of cognitive authority’. [1] From Fuller’s perspective — which is the opposite of Dreyfus — AI is to be welcomed as it simplifies the process not only of acquiring knowledge, but of demonstrating its utility in a replicable form. As a result, the collective intelligence of a society is advanced, and there is the opportunity to explore new and different questions.
Its implication for universities, in Fuller’s view, is that it clarifies the purpose of teaching, which is not to transmit the findings of research (which is increasingly done by those other to the researcher anyway, whether a sessional academic or ChatGPT), but to enable the findings of research to be the starting-point for a conversation which ‘amounts to teachers casting themselves as learners by presenting their field of research as an open horizon with many unexplored possibilities awaiting fellow travelers’.[2]
This is similar to Slavoj Žižek’s claim that with AI the students can use ChatGPT to write the assignments and teachers can use ChatGPT to grade the assignments, and the learning process can go down a path that untethers it from assessment. It profoundly disrupts the business model of the modern mass university, but — and in the spirt of Creative Destruction Marxism — has the potential to put universities on a new and different footing, to which the Humboldtian goals of humanistic scholarship are central.
My second reflection comes from Wendy Brown’s recent Tanner Lectures, published as Nihilistic Times: Thinking with Max Weber. In these lectured, Brown undergoes an often painful reconciliation with Weber’s lectures on “Politics as a Vocation” and “Science as a Vocation”. The latter is particularly tricky for Brown, as it posits such ideals as the fact/value distinction and the promise of value-neutral social science, which she sees as having doe great damage in terms of the impact of universities as knowledge institutions upon public discourse.
But what Brown shares with Weber is the sense that science requires conversations outside of its own disciplinary structures in order to give it a sense of purpose and steer its endeavours away from nihilism, or practice that is unmoored from underlying values:
As it topples religious and theological accounts of order and meaning, science cannot replace what it destroys. The inclination to do so, more than merely misguided, is itself a dangerous nihilistic effect, the voids opened in a radically desacralized world create a demand, Weber says, for prophets and demagogues everywhere, and for ideas that excite and incite. [3]
AI development without a mission, and values, in other words, is prone to being shaped by “prophets and demagogues”. In order to give its development and deployment a sense of social purpose, it is not enough to simply regulate it, although that is important. It is to be prepared to open up conversations about values and the space that learning, as distinct from politics, provides for the exchange and contestation of competing visions of the good society. And those are humanities type questions.
[1] Steve Fuller (2023), Back to the University’s Future: The Second Coming of Humboldt (Cham: Springer), p. 9.
[2] Steve Fuller (2024), ‘Classroom as Crucible in the Humboldtian University: Reply to Collin’, Philosophy of the Social Sciences DOI: 10.1177/00483931241229446, p. 2.
[3] Wendy Brown (2023) Nihilistic Times: Thinking with Max Weber: The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, p. 65.
