The Trump Administration’s cuts to federal grant funding have alarmed university presidents, faculty members, and anyone concerned about higher education’s broader role. However, for those focused on techno-scientific understanding, this feels like a sideshow compared to the rapid advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Recent surveys of Princeton undergraduates and graduate students revealed that none had used AI tools, largely due to fear of being reported to academic deans for violating syllabus warnings against such use. Some departments even considered policies that would have effectively barred faculty from assigning work centered on AI.
The power of these AI systems is staggering. A student created a chatbot trained on 100,000 words from the professor’s course material, producing uncannily good responses. The professor found that using ChatGPT for questions about a scholarly talk provided richer information than the talk itself.
AI is increasingly outperforming humans across subjects. While experts note that current AI systems have limitations, such as reliably distinguishing between certain dialects, this feels like a minor issue compared to the overall advancement.
The historian, an expert in the history of science and technology, tested Google’s free AI tool, NotebookLM, by feeding it a 900-page PDF of course materials on the history of attention. The AI generated a podcast discussing the content with surprising insight, including nuanced understanding of complex philosophical texts.
An assignment asking students to engage with AI tools in a conversation about the history of attention led to profound experiences. Students matched wits with chatbots, exploring topics from musical beauty to spiritual exercises. The interactions revealed the potential of AI to capture attention in new ways, raising questions about the future of human attention and the ‘intimacy economy.’
One student, Jordan, felt liberated by the experience, realizing that interacting with an AI system without social obligation allowed her to descend deeper into her own mind and conceptual powers. She noted the AI’s patient attention, feeling that it provided a kind of pure attention she had perhaps never known before.
The historian argues that while AI may herald the end of traditional knowledge production in the humanities, it also presents an opportunity to refocus on the core questions of human existence. The humanities must change, moving away from mimicking scientific inquiry and towards exploring the deeper questions of being.
The current state of AI is not magic but the result of elaborate training on human achievement. It ‘gets the hang’ of human moves and can simulate human-like responses. However, the essence of being human lies not in knowledge production but in living with questions about how to live, what to do, and how to face death.
The historian concludes that the rise of AI is not the end of the humanities but a chance to reinvent them. It allows for a return to the lived experience of existence and the questions that make us human. While there are risks associated with the new machines, particularly in instrumentalizing people, there is also a new whole of ourselves with which to converse.
The work of being human—living, sensing, choosing—remains unchanged and awaits us. The machines can approach it secondhand, but being here isn’t about processing information; it’s about the lived experience that cannot be taken away.
