“It’s becoming clear that artificial intelligence can relieve us of the burden of trying and trying again. A.I. systems make it trivially easy to take an existing thing and ask for a new iteration.”
“The whole painful cycle of trying, failing, revising, judging, and redoing can be replaced with something simpler: plucking the most suitable result out of a pile.”
“It’s reasonable to ask whether, as A.I. proliferates, many people won’t begin to question the value of training their own minds when computers are already so well trained.”
“In a world saturated with technology, we already have to remind ourselves to put down our phones; to go outside; to see friends in person; to go places instead of staring at them on our screens; to have non-technological experiences, such as boredom. If we’re not careful, then our minds will do less as computers do more, and we will be diminished as a result.”
“Ours is the work of helping others hold those artifacts and insights in their hands, however briefly, and of considering what ought to be reserved from the ever-sucking vortex of oblivion—and why. It’s the calling known as education, which the literary theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak once defined as the ‘non-coercive rearranging of desire.’”
“We have, in a real sense, reached a kind of ‘singularity’—but not the long-anticipated awakening of machine consciousness. Rather, what we’re entering is a new consciousness of ourselves. This is the pivot where we turn from anxiety and despair to an exhilarating sense of promise. These systems have the power to return us to ourselves in new ways.”
“You can no longer make students do the reading or the writing. So what’s left? Only this: give them work they want to do. And help them want to do it. What, again, is education? The non-coercive rearranging of desire.”
“Within five years, it will make little sense for scholars of history to keep producing monographs in the traditional mold—nobody will read them, and systems such as these will be able to generate them, endlessly, at the push of a button.”
“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.”
- A performance by Enji.
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