Case Studies

The impact of AI on humanity hinges significantly on the scholarship guiding its development and alignment. Properly aligned, AI has the potential to revolutionize sectors like healthcare, education, and science. If alignment is neglected, AI could exacerbate issues such as privacy infringement, inequality, and misinformation. But not only ethics are at stake here. We need to look at AI “in the round,” examining all of its possible ramifications for human life, while simultaneously using AI to benefit existence–and that that may happen is matter for deep consideration.

The medical humanities, another new field created by thinking across borders, has become the center of great new interest.A multidisciplinary field, it combines the arts, humanities, and social sciences to improve medical education, policy, and patient care. But there are many more connections between medicine and social context, medicine and indigenous beliefs, medicine and advertising, that need to be considered as we move forward.

Science is awash in the humanistic: Metaphors in cell biology. Schizophrenia and shamanism. Science fiction and technological advances. The art in textbooks. Status, caste, and data production. Why people don’t make rational decisions, and what “rational” even means in this context. The mere fact that scientists are human. STEM education needs to engage with the fact that it is already humanistic – but ignores these angles because their instrumental value may not be clear (yet). We should reunite them with science, as they once were, to create deeper forms of knowledge. And this a prerequisite to our creating new Leonardos, new Al-Haythams, new Aristotles.

Applying theories from History departments about “events,” “memory,” and “concepts” to the techniques of Natural Language Processing from Computer Science reveals patterns of change over time otherwise invisible to data scientists. For example, FIR member Jo Guldi’s research demonstrates a systematic pattern of indifference among U.S. speakers in the House and Senate to the history of race from roughly 1925 to 2010. Another project demonstrates the emergence of organized attacks on environmentalists in the speeches of certain speakers in the U.S. Congress since 1968.

How do we talk about the earth? And how do we represent it to ourselves? A blue dot, a planet about to blow, a symbiotic home for its inhabitants, a speck in an expanding university? And how does the answer to that question depend on subjective factors that in turn stir us to one action or another? In other words, how is the perception of our world linked to what we act on?

We tend to forget that the modern university isn’t an “expert” on knowledge-production but an institution whose birth took place at a specific place and time. With time, the university’s existence became increasingly reliant upon an administrative structure that would be altered and added to, but not fundamentally changed, over the next two hundred years.

American research universities have been organized according to a 19th century model of knowledge in which disciplines isolate themselves. But for decades we have known — and it has become increasingly clear — that their boundaries are artificial in world of interdependent, chaotic systems. Thanks to global networks that connect us and of machine learning systems that thrive on the consequent information overload, those boundaries are obstacles to be overcome. This shift creates its own challenges for the evaluation of scholarship, since disciplinary standards are the unavoidable basis of certifying knowledge.”

Higher education finds itself in a political crisis, in which its social legitimation is under threat. Restoring trust will require something different than resurrecting traditional approaches to teaching, learning and research.