Should we be afraid, very afraid? I remember when AI had a different if equally pregnant meaning. Readers from an agricultural background will understand and have the sensibility not to be outraged at the old joke about the farmer’s wife who brought the AI man to a shed where her cow was waiting and instructed him to “hang your trousers there”, pointing to a peg on the wall.
Back then AI meant Artificial Insemination and was employed to impregnate a cow when there was less bull around.
Nowadays, it means Artificial Intelligence and inspires equal amounts of terror and excitement, sometimes interchangeably. The terror is based on a fear that this self-educating technology will soon be in control and there is nothing we can do about it.
More positively, it is expected to revolutionise research, particularly where diseases are concerned, and free humanity from repetitive, boring jobs towards, hopefully, more fulfilling lives. And we have no idea yet what it may bring about in further revolutionizing technology.
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What worries me is that this extraordinary AI tool is being driven by a generation of brilliant young people who are lacking in the emotional intelligence and depth that the humanities helped provide at our third-level institutions in times-not-so-long past.
Their brilliance is surface, rational and mathematical. An example would be Sam Bankman-Fried (31), a genius who founded the FTX cryptocurrency exchange, jailed for fraud in the US last November. The crime does not take from what was achieved technically.
Here is his view of Shakespeare as the greatest writer: “About half the people born since 1600 were born in the past 100 years. When Shakespeare wrote, almost all Europeans were busy farming and very few people attended university; few people were even literate – probably as low as 10 million people. By contrast, now there are almost a billion literate people in the Western sphere. What are the odds that the greatest writer was born in 1564?”
This is literary criticism by numbers, and numbers are all that many of these young geniuses understand. They lack insight, intuition, and any understanding of human emotion or human nature. They are the greatest argument for a revival of the humanities in our education system.
And Shakespeare never attended university either.
Humanities, a ”class of studies concerned with human culture”, from Latin literae Humaniores.
