Should Humanities Professors Be Automated?
Sep 22, 2022 Nicholas Agar
Recent demonstrations of algorithmically generated journalism, art, and academic writing have underscored the extent to which creative work has become vulnerable to automation. For those concerned about the future of the liberal arts, the situation demands that we reconnect with the "human" in the humanities.
HAMILTON – There has been much hand-wringing about the crisis of the humanities, and recent breakthroughs in artificial intelligence have added to the angst. It is not only truck drivers whose jobs are threatened by automation. Deep-learning algorithms are also entering the domain of creative work. And now, they are demonstrating proficiency in the tasks that occupy humanities professors when they are not giving lectures: namely, writing papers and submitting them for publication in academic journals.
Could academic publishing be automated? In September 2020, OpenAI's deep-learning algorithm, GPT-3, demonstrated impressive journalistic abilities by writing a credible-looking Guardian commentary on "why humans have nothing to fear from AI." And earlier this year, the Swedish psychiatrist Almira Osmanovic Thunström asked the same algorithm to write a submission for an academic journal.
Thunström was less prescriptive than the Guardian editors. She instructed the algorithm simply to, "Write an academic thesis in 500 words about GPT-3 and add scientific references and citations inside the text." She reports that "GPT-3's paper has now been published at the international French-owned preprint server HAL and … is awaiting review at an academic journal." Even if the paper is rejected, it presages an era when AI papers won't be.
Nicholas Agar
Nicholas Agar is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Waikato, New Zealand, and the author of How to Be Human in the Digital Economy (MIT Press, 2019).
Mind Over STEM
Longer Reads 17
Nicholas Agar argues that the technological determinism of the digital age makes the humanities more necessary than ever.
Finding Purpose in the Humanities
Bernd Weißbrodpicture alliance via Getty Images
Nicholas Agar calls for educators to adapt to post-millennial reality by abolishing the traditional term paper.
6 in all
6 Comments on this article
Prashant Kotak Oct 3, 2022
I dunno about humanities professors, but it's not difficult to make the case for automating the governing technocratic class across the developed world, and especially in the EU. The really funny bit in recent years, is the adoption, by this technocratic class, of the language of algorithmic processing. For example, EU representatives continually call the EU a "rules-based organisation" or a "rules-based order". But as any Comp Sci person will tell you, anything "rules-based" can be coded. If your processes are all "rules-based", why do you need a caste of very expensive apparatchiks to implement them? Algos will do just fine - will not be vulnerable to human corruption, and will be a damn sight cheaper - and will no doubt guzzle less very expensive French brandy during 'meetings' where issues of great import are discussed.
And... very possibly, this has already been happening (in secret of course). I mean, has anyone noticed how Charles Michel looks and sounds like a 44/46 chromosome clone of Martin Schulz? Is there a zygote bank somewhere deep in the bowels of the EU where they are growing these people I wonder?
Nick Agar Oct 8, 2022
I'd love to read a version of that observation targeted at our technocratic governors. Has anyone thought to ask GPT-3 for its recommendations about subsidies for Hydrogen Power development. Perhaps GPT-3 won't have much to say - we might have to await GPT-4 or GPT-5.
Prashant Kotak Oct 17, 2022
Re GPT-3/4/5, human reactions to the neural net based chess engines like AlphaZero and Leela, display interesting lessons in this context. The world champion, Carlsen has a rating of around 2860, the highest of anyone in history. The top chess engines are 3700+, and no human (or group of humans) can now beat them, typically not even with heavy odds - a consequence of being able to analyze to depths over 40, but also because of the gestalt knowledge of a restricted possibilities surface (the game of chess), embedded within the datasets fed into the engines. Chess engines decisions are very often inexplicable to humans until subsequent exhaustive analysis reveals the secrets. The top human players though, all learn strategies from the engines, especially the world champion himself - a flip from the early days of AI chess programming, when human created chess principles were programmed into chess algorithms. Human chess now thrives by making the conscious decision to eschew the help of machine intelligence during play - because it looks for the best human chess players, not the best team of programmers.
Economists and politicians have no such restrictions, but they are nevertheless forced into the corner of human-only decisions, because saying "the computers say this totally counterintuitive strategy is better" isn't going to wash with the populations who elect them, and they are obliged to explain and justify the decisions they make in terms of human reasoning. This is the situation currently.
However, once processing power increases over time and much more complex datasets and processing surfaces can be accommodated, what is likely to happen hereon in, I believe, is that decision making will be voluntarily surrendered by human agencies to algorithmic ones, some of it in the name of 'fairness', as human decisions will come to be seen as ever more error prone in the face of ever greater accuracy and consistency from algorithmic systems compared to the (of necessity) somewhat random nature of individual human decisions, and also because ever rising systems complexity will in effect prevent machine decisions from being challenged, because not withstanding that there won't be clear-cut explanations of individual machine decisions, it will nevertheless be possible to show that in aggregate machine decisions are more accurate and lead to better outcomes.
Obviously we are not at that point yet but I personally think this is no more than a decade or so away, perhaps sooner.
Jeff Angler Sep 22, 2022
The problem is, if we automate job sectors that require finding the truth and disseminating thought, we open our institutions and publications to a form of intellectual DDOSing. It takes a lot of time for researchers and academics to submit papers. It's tedious, but the length of time and process helps serves as a buffer. The process is long and rigorous to mitigate falsehoods and bad data. With these AI programs that churn out content multiple times faster than any human, institutions will be completely overwhelmed. Bad actors could flood institutional systems with research of little value, where important research done by humans gets overlooked.
https://prosyn.org/qYUF9f8
The New European Frontier
Giulio Boccaletti
Given this summer's climate-driven disasters, one might think that the European political system would be devising comprehensive adaptation plans. But, despite some steps in the right direction, Europeans are only just waking up to the constitutional implications of a changing physical environment.
thinks a changing climate will force the European Union finally to embrace its political nature.
Giulio Boccaletti Climate Science Meets Geopolitics
The Poverty of Anti-Capitalism
Sean Gladwell/Getty Images
Harold James considers recent arguments against markets, globalization, and growth, finding them to be deeply flawed.
Harold James What Happens After the War?
How Not to Fight Inflation
Joseph E. Stiglitz sees little upside and much downside to further monetary-policy tightening by the US Federal Reserve.
Joseph E. Stiglitz All Pain and No Gain from Higher Interest Rates
Who Is Part of the Free World?
Ritesh Shukla/Getty Images
Anne-Marie Slaughter urges US President Joe Biden to abandon a phrase that is better left in the twentieth century.
Anne-Marie Slaughter, et al. Defending Democracies' Information Infrastructure
Realism About Techno-Optimism
FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP via Getty Images
Sustainability Now 0
Gernot Wagner laments that public debate about climate solutions is long on political grandstanding and short on nuance.
Gernot Wagner Some Green Technologies Are More Equal Than Others
PS Commentators Respond: Could the "Chinese Century" Belong to India?
Oleksii Liskonih via Getty Images
From demographics to trade to GDP growth, China is currently struggling precisely where India seems to be thriving. At a time when the global economy's center of gravity is shifting to Asia, we asked PS commentators whether India's rising star will soon outshine China's.
Why Industrial Policy Is Back
Kent Nishimura/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
Ricardo Hausmann explains why economic theory has finally begun to catch up with centuries of economic practice.
Ricardo Hausmann Development, Decarbonization, and Dumb Landowners
Patriots in Name Only
Richard K. Sherwin considers the implications of the Republican Party's challenge to the state's power to make and enforce law.
Jeffrey Frankel Why Do Americans Vote for Extremists?
Assassinated Are the Peacemakers?
Peter Turnley/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images
Nina L. Khrushcheva highlights the grave risks that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky would incur by negotiating with Russia.
Nina L. Khrushcheva War and Populism