Liberal Learning in a Complex World
Liberal Education and AI Ethics
The claim advanced here is that liberal education might hold significant resources for understanding and responding responsibly to the moral issues presented by AI ethics today. As AI technology becomes pervasive in our daily lives, the contributions of arts and humanities to society are questioned. College campuses are closing their philosophy, fine arts departments, and music performance in favor of data science, computer science, and sports programs. But this mad rush to make education more “practical” is also confronted with a deeply divided population, the decline of liberal democracies around the world, and pervasive populism that is anti-science and solidly opposed to expertise. Even when it is lifesaving.
Liberal learning involves a sustained engagement with a literary canon. Students are asked to read, understand, and think critically about the intellectual history of a culture by reading primary sources. They learn to question the intellectual foundations of their cultural commitments, and this is understood to be the very essence of liberal learning, which frees the mind for self-responsibility. The Western Canon speaks particularly trenchantly to contemporary culture in the United States, not as a hegemonic metanarrative, but as a particular call to understanding the values and traditions that have brought the nation to this point in history. Liberal learning today should focus on the pluralistic and inclusive history of the nation, one which acknowledges its successes and failures of the nation. Critically, it must acknowledge the failures to respect human dignity, promote racism, and deny the full implications of its history. Genuine liberal learning seeks the value of reading and thinking about the totality of the history that brought us to this moment.
Liberal learning needs to be defended, particularly in an age of techno-populism, where informed, nuanced thought is displaced by the propaganda of large corporations, lobbyists, and fringe groups that work to reframe public understanding for their commercial benefits. Simply put, it is harder to have “alternative facts” with a well-read and intellectually engaged population. Apparently, even a good segment of the legal profession today is neither well-read nor intellectually engaged. And, the value of being well-read and intellectually engaged is viewed askance by many lawyers and judges. Informed and thoughtful discourse is in short supply when “experiential learning” takes priority over liberal learning. How many of the recently developed legal technology projects are run by philosophers with AI ethics as a core to their agenda? Yet, since law touches on every aspect of society and is fundamental to democratic politics, why is the importance of social and political ethics overlooked in favor of entrepreneurial legal practice projects? Legal technology needs the benefits of liberal education, which can correct this by showing, as Sheila Jasanoff argues in her Ethics of Innovation, that technology (especially legal technology) can distort the meaning of democracy and citizenship unless we carefully consider how to direct it rather than allowing ourselves to be shaped by it. It supports a bold vision for a future in which societies work together — in open, democratic dialogue to debate the perils and promises of technology.
Ultimately, the erosion of humanities education, even among the legal elite, is linked to the anti-intellectual milieu that has emerged in public discourse. If one has no clear concept of the value of truth, the need for responsibility in politics, or awareness of the contingent and fragile nature of democracy, then it is easy to dismiss truth and rational discourse as necessary in public discourse or to even place any value on democracy at all. Since liberal education is about understanding the ways humans beings experience moral meaning and how to live responsibly in the world, it can work to correct the tendencies in modern techno-populism to be vulgar and shallow.
Taking Responsibility for Technology
Liberal education can speak to a debilitating belief that comes from the current hype around AI, in which an AI-driven polity is viewed as inevitable. Its advocates argue that AI will displace human beings where ever and whenever it competes again inferior human minds. It is our destiny. Of course not! American history is full of bad decisions made in the name of destiny. The opening of the American West was accomplished through murderous genocide of native peoples, the mass slaughter of buffaloes, and the rape of the native prairies. This was not the manifest destiny of a great people, but a series of individual choices by a people who were so enamored by the promise of an orgiastic future that it prevented them from thinking about the moral meaning of their actions. This tendency to rush toward our hoped-for-future without regard to the meaning of our actions is a part of the American character. It is there in Gatsby, longingly looking at the light at the end of Daisy’s pier. It is the restlessness of Wallace Stegner’s Big Rock Candy Mountain. It is always moving on, always looking for the next try at greatness. In the hype about AI and related technology, it looks restlessly for a future of luxury, ease, and efficiency. Even immortality is promised in the singularity of mind and machine.
Students familiar with Greek mythology, for example, might be less prone to these mistakes. For those familiar with the tension between Prometheus and Orpheus, which was brilliantly described by the classicist, Pierre Hadot, in his Veil of Isis, as posing two alternative visions of technology. Prometheus stole fire from the gods and was punished by being nailed to the rocks on a cliff and sentenced to watching his liver being pecked out every day for eternity. For him, technology (fire) comes at the cost of angering fate, which is jealous and capricious. On the other hand, Orpheus is in perfect harmony with nature until his wife, Eurydice, dies from a poisonous snake bite shortly after they are wed. Hades allows him to leave the underworld provided he does not look back to see if Eurydice is following him. Tragically, he is overwhelmed by doubt and, in looking back, sends her back to the underworld. For Orpheus, technology is a gift that restores harmony with nature, if we place our trust in it. Both myths are present to the modern reader. Is technology a secret that comes at a cost? Or, is it a means for peaceful harmony and a happy life? The liberal learner will, no doubt, understand that both myths contain wisdom, at times each is controlling. Sometimes technology will come at a great price, and sometimes it will be a great savior. To know how to distinguish between the two myths is the essence of wisdom.
Liberal Learning and Virtue in a Complexity Society
Liberal learning also helps to understand and cope with particular issues involving virtue that are presented by the new technologies. One of the most significant revelations that computer science has brought to the study of social behavior is the theory of complexity in social systems. That is, the Big Data collected about societies now show them to be vastly complex, dynamic, and evolving systems that defy simplistic causal explanations. With this understanding of complexity, it is no longer realistic to believe in manifest destinies. The data show that human decisions shape societal outcomes, and therefore, responsible choices matter. Thinking richly and deeply about the moral goals of our actions is necessary and possible for a virtuous society. Thoughtless commitment to shallow ideology leads one to fit facts into a pre-determined interpretation. It blocks a genuine engagement with the moral meaning and significance of one’s actions. It blinds us to the moral meaning of using children as instruments of immigration policy, for example. Thoughtless claims about destiny, racial and ethnic superiority, and the like make atrocities like genocide a political option. The morally unthinkable becomes an instrument of policy.
In our society today, the ideology tends to come from neoliberalism, which places value on commercial exchange and ethical utility. For example, Stewart Russell, in his book, Human Compatible, favors a rough-and-ready utilitarianism. The moral goal, he believes, should be to design systems that maximize the choices of future generations. This goal of freedom of choice, however, conceals in it a totalizing value of everything reduced to its use. Even one’s own life, as Hubert Dreyfus pointed out in his reading of Heidegger’s critique of technology, is reduced to its use. And to what end should one use one’s life? Pleasure, presumably. But anyone who has struggled with end-of-life decision-making, particularly for a loved one, knows that the value of a life is far less certain and far more searching than that. The ideologue avoids the issue with a platitude or bromide, but thinking about the moral meaning of the claim is avoided. Liberal education challenges this assessment.
Sadly, one sees elements of such an ideology in legal technology. If one takes ideology to be a dogmatic commitment to a set of beliefs despite facts to the contrary, then the term applies to legal thinkers who argue for the formalistic application of the law. It also applies to legal technologists who view technology only in terms of its inevitable benefits to the pockets of lawyers, or to the efficiency of courts, or even to access to legal services for those who are traditionally underserved. These are myopic assessments, it seems, that do not consider the scope of law (which touches on nearly every aspect of life, even deciding what and who deserves to be alive). Altering it, even with the most well-meaning intentions, will have far-reaching consequences that will impact populations far from the intended benefactors. What will online courts do to the public perception of judges? How will stochastic assessments of the value of legal actions influence the understanding and perception of the rule of law? Will the ubiquitous presence of blockchain-based contracts influence the perception of other contract-like relationships, like marriage? And what of the virtue of trust? Will trustless transactions further erode the role and vitality of trust in society? Can democracy survive these transitions?
A liberal education helps us to place these questions within the long discourse about relevant issues. It helps to refine our thinking about what goes into understanding the lived experience of being a citizen in a democratic society, what the virtue of liberty might be, and what are the ends to which it might be put. What are the ultimate values and ultimate ends of life? How does the law help to achieve them? These are the questions that must be addressed, and ideologues who reduce the subtle, nuanced reasoning that is involved in addressing these issues are dangerous to society and in need of supervision.
