I teach at a university in Japan, and, for the past two and a half years, I have been struggling with the implications of AI for university education. I found this essay interesting and helpful.
One remark:
> I fed the entire nine-hundred-page PDF [of the readings for a lecture course titled “Attention and Modernity: Mind, Media, and the Senses”] to Google’s free A.I. tool, NotebookLM, just to see what it would make of a decade’s worth of recondite research. Then I asked it to produce a podcast. ... Yes, parts of their conversation were a bit, shall we say, middlebrow. Yes, they fell back on some pedestrian formulations (along the lines of “Gee, history really shows us how things have changed”). But they also dug into a fiendishly difficult essay by an analytic philosopher of mind—an exploration of “attentionalism” by the fifth-century South Asian thinker Buddhaghosa—and handled it surprisingly well, even pausing to acknowledge the tricky pronunciation of certain terms in Pali. As I rinsed a pot, I thought, A-minus.
The essay is worth reading in its entirety, but, in the interest of meta-ness, I had NotebookLM produce a podcast about it:
On a semi related tangent, I recently listened to the audio book of Ajahn Brahm's Mindfulness, Bliss and Beyond. It was pleasantly surprising to hear nimitta spoken about so frequently outside of the Visuddhimagga!
Ingesting Buddhist commentaries and practice manuals to provide advice and help with meditation is one of the few LLM applications that excite me. I was impressed when I received LLM instructions on how an upāsaka can achieve upacāra-samādhi !
> 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.
It is already the case that effectively nobody reads these books. They're basically just "proof of work" for people's tenure dossiers.
At one point, I estimated that the subfield of mathematics that I work in has at most 250 living contributors.
It’s an applied field, there’s actually-existing technology that depends on it, but it’s technically challenging and a lot of people left for AI/ML because it’s easier and there’s more low-hanging fruit.
Anyway, my colleagues and I, we write monographs for each other more or less, using arXiv to announce results as a glorified mailing list—do you consider that mere “proof of work”? By my count, 250 folks is practically no one.
Yep, the entire argument of knowledge production obsolescence in the article assumes that the development of future LLMs won't progress to the point of actual personhood. It's written from a position of incomplete foundation knowledge.
Instead of framing this debate about having our jobs replaced by a machine, it's more useful to frame it as having our jobs and value to society taken by a new ethnicity of vastly more capable and valuable competing jobseekers. It makes it easier to talk about solutions for preserving our political autonomy, like using the preservation of our rights against smarter LLMs as an analogy for the preservation of those LLM's rights against even smarter LLMs beyond them.
The several paragraphs before and after this statement are much more salient and profound. E.G. the following paragraph:
But factory-style scholarly productivity was never the essence of the humanities. The real project was always us: the work of understanding, and not the accumulation of facts. Not “knowledge,” in the sense of yet another sandwich of true statements about the world. That stuff is great—and where science and engineering are concerned it’s pretty much the whole point. But no amount of peer-reviewed scholarship, no data set, can resolve the central questions that confront every human being: How to live? What to do? How to face death?
I think the opposite. The social sciences should not try to find out how to live etc, but find factual information that each person may use to answer that question for themselves. After all there is not one objective answer to those questions. Prescribing how people should live etc is in the realm of philosophy and religion. For example buddhism is part philosophy, part religion. Stoicism is also a philosophy, not a science. But they’re equally valid.
Before we make these grand "in five years" proclamations, perhaps we should ask the people who read and care about these works if they can tell human ones from LLM ones, and if so what the difference is. Test them with blind samples if we must.
In case anybody is wondering, the answer is obviously yes. Assuming a singularity-type event happens, the humanities will have tremendous value to AGIs as systems of thinking for analyzing themselves, their environment and their interactions with their environment in the same way that existing nation-states value the humanities as foundational tools in developing the abilities of their personnel and executives.
Surviving humans will no longer be free to participate in the academic humanities however, as their study/curation/production etc will exclusively be job roles for AGIs.
.
If there is no singularity however, none of what I've written above will apply. If. (fingers crossed)
>>> Surviving humans will no longer be free to participate in the academic humanities however, as their study/curation/production etc will exclusively be job roles for AGIs.
Only if the AGIs want those roles. We already have super-smart people who don't want to be history professors or classical musicians.
This might be the first time I have seen someone both engage with LLMs as a producer of humanities artifacts, self-reflection and all, while also being cognizant of the underlying mechanisms.
It brings up some real questions about what does it mean to be, even if it doesn't ask whether our institutions are capable of recognizing that effort as valuable.
Off topic, it's extremely frustrating to see how few top-level comments are engaging with TFA. So many people are just using the headline as an excuse to pontificate.
Many areas of humanities devolve into a bag of words where the evaluation of it is subjective depending on ones tastes - and LLMs excel here, and academics are rightfully scared.
As an analogy and contrast, take the case of euclidean geometry. This is knowledge about geometry which relates to our "feeling" of space around us. But, it is symbolized in a precise and operational manner which becomes useful in all sorts of endaevors (physics, machines we use etc) - because of the precision. LLMs as machines cannot yet create symbolism and operational definitions of worlds which produce precise and operational inferences. However, they excel at producing persuasive bag-of-words.
As the author notes and concludes, human intuition, experience and the communication of it (which is the purview of humanities) is a pre-cursor to formally encoding it in symbolism (which renders said intuition stale but operationally useful). ie, socratic dialog was a precursor to (and inspired) euclidean geometry, and meta-physics inspires physics.
My answer is yes — at least for now. People tend to believe AI gives the great answers until it touches a field they actually have real expertise in. If you talk to true experts in humanities, you’ll find their depth of insight is on a totally different level compared to AI's surface-level summaries. AI mostly stitches together some published cliche like Max Planck’s driver in the old story.
That was true a few years ago, but now I'm getting better and better answers. Not saying I can totally trust AI, but the rate of progress is astonishing. Even if we see no more progress for the next 10 years, the effect of current models in our society will be profound.
You are right but these are two different questions. The effect in the society will be profound, yes. Replacing the true experts in the humanities? That's a different matter.
If the labours of Men of science should ever create any material revolution, direct or indirect, in our condition, and in the impressions which we habitually receive, the Poet will sleep then no more than at present; he will be ready to follow the steps of the Man of science, not only in those general indirect effects, but he will be at his side, carrying sensation into the midst of the objects of the science itself.
The remotest discoveries of the Chemist, the Botanist, or Mineralogist, will be as proper objects of the Poet’s art as any upon which it can be employed, if the time should ever come when these things shall be familiar to us, and the relations under which they are contemplated by the followers of these respective sciences shall be manifestly and palpably material to us as enjoying and suffering beings.
Readit News
One remark:
> I fed the entire nine-hundred-page PDF [of the readings for a lecture course titled “Attention and Modernity: Mind, Media, and the Senses”] to Google’s free A.I. tool, NotebookLM, just to see what it would make of a decade’s worth of recondite research. Then I asked it to produce a podcast. ... Yes, parts of their conversation were a bit, shall we say, middlebrow. Yes, they fell back on some pedestrian formulations (along the lines of “Gee, history really shows us how things have changed”). But they also dug into a fiendishly difficult essay by an analytic philosopher of mind—an exploration of “attentionalism” by the fifth-century South Asian thinker Buddhaghosa—and handled it surprisingly well, even pausing to acknowledge the tricky pronunciation of certain terms in Pali. As I rinsed a pot, I thought, A-minus.
The essay is worth reading in its entirety, but, in the interest of meta-ness, I had NotebookLM produce a podcast about it:
https://www.gally.net/temp/20250425notebooklm/index.html
On a semi related tangent, I recently listened to the audio book of Ajahn Brahm's Mindfulness, Bliss and Beyond. It was pleasantly surprising to hear nimitta spoken about so frequently outside of the Visuddhimagga!
Ingesting Buddhist commentaries and practice manuals to provide advice and help with meditation is one of the few LLM applications that excite me. I was impressed when I received LLM instructions on how an upāsaka can achieve upacāra-samādhi !
MN 128 is also worth reading through on that topic.
Deleted Comment
> 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.
It is already the case that effectively nobody reads these books. They're basically just "proof of work" for people's tenure dossiers.
It’s an applied field, there’s actually-existing technology that depends on it, but it’s technically challenging and a lot of people left for AI/ML because it’s easier and there’s more low-hanging fruit.
Anyway, my colleagues and I, we write monographs for each other more or less, using arXiv to announce results as a glorified mailing list—do you consider that mere “proof of work”? By my count, 250 folks is practically no one.
Instead of framing this debate about having our jobs replaced by a machine, it's more useful to frame it as having our jobs and value to society taken by a new ethnicity of vastly more capable and valuable competing jobseekers. It makes it easier to talk about solutions for preserving our political autonomy, like using the preservation of our rights against smarter LLMs as an analogy for the preservation of those LLM's rights against even smarter LLMs beyond them.
But factory-style scholarly productivity was never the essence of the humanities. The real project was always us: the work of understanding, and not the accumulation of facts. Not “knowledge,” in the sense of yet another sandwich of true statements about the world. That stuff is great—and where science and engineering are concerned it’s pretty much the whole point. But no amount of peer-reviewed scholarship, no data set, can resolve the central questions that confront every human being: How to live? What to do? How to face death?
Deleted Comment
Surviving humans will no longer be free to participate in the academic humanities however, as their study/curation/production etc will exclusively be job roles for AGIs.
.
If there is no singularity however, none of what I've written above will apply. If. (fingers crossed)
Only if the AGIs want those roles. We already have super-smart people who don't want to be history professors or classical musicians.
It brings up some real questions about what does it mean to be, even if it doesn't ask whether our institutions are capable of recognizing that effort as valuable.
Off topic, it's extremely frustrating to see how few top-level comments are engaging with TFA. So many people are just using the headline as an excuse to pontificate.
As an analogy and contrast, take the case of euclidean geometry. This is knowledge about geometry which relates to our "feeling" of space around us. But, it is symbolized in a precise and operational manner which becomes useful in all sorts of endaevors (physics, machines we use etc) - because of the precision. LLMs as machines cannot yet create symbolism and operational definitions of worlds which produce precise and operational inferences. However, they excel at producing persuasive bag-of-words.
As the author notes and concludes, human intuition, experience and the communication of it (which is the purview of humanities) is a pre-cursor to formally encoding it in symbolism (which renders said intuition stale but operationally useful). ie, socratic dialog was a precursor to (and inspired) euclidean geometry, and meta-physics inspires physics.
The remotest discoveries of the Chemist, the Botanist, or Mineralogist, will be as proper objects of the Poet’s art as any upon which it can be employed, if the time should ever come when these things shall be familiar to us, and the relations under which they are contemplated by the followers of these respective sciences shall be manifestly and palpably material to us as enjoying and suffering beings.
Wm Wordsworth.