All posts by Gary C. Woodward

Count Yourself in as an Advocate for the Humanities

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It is a given in some schools and universities that more time should be devoted to job training, with less effort helping students build on their latent passions.

Much of the news about schools and universities is dominated by the current fashion of complaining about the “soft” and “wasteful” curriculum of the humanities and liberal arts. It is a given in some institutions that most funding and hiring should be organized around direct career-related majors, with less resources available which would help students discover their under-developed passions. One could also hope that there would be more campus-based experiences that might offer new insights that would extend beyong their inherited religious and political beliefs.

Luckily, most students still want more out of their education than “hard skills” that come with good programs in engineering, business or the sciences. Many have also had enough life experience with music, theater, film, and narrative writing to get a taste of what is possible in a full and busy life. Only later, perhaps, will they realize that these also cultivate “soft skills” that are respected by all sorts of forward-thinking organizations.

Enter the humanities of history, the fine arts, literature, philosophy, rhetoric and cultural studies. Whatever claims we can make to our own civilization rests with our willingness to engage with naturally creative and playful minds. Indeed, in the humanities creativity and innovation are essential and, when done well, will take a person far beyond what machine learning can do. As Forbe’s Benjamin Wolff notes, “Graduates in disciplines like history, literature and philosophy are comfortable with ambiguity and contested meaning; they know how to detect bias, contradictions and narrative gaps in large blocks of text….”  These are skills for critical thinking, and only the start of what is possible.

Speaking more broadly, the Atlantic’s David Brooks sees the pursuit of passions in the humanities as an enduring strength of our universities, which can channel the nascent ideals of our best students in ways that help them become more complete persons.

“Life is essentially a battle between our noblest aspirations and our natural egotism. Humanistic education prepares people for this struggle. Yes, schooling also has a practical purpose—to help students make a living and contribute to the economy. But that practical training works best when it is enmeshed within the larger process of forming a fully functioning grown-up—a person armed with knowledge, strength of judgment, force of character, and a thorough familiarity with the spiritual heritage of our civilization.”

stage lighting omnibus journalIf Brooks seems a bit abstract, many of us can sight direct paths to our life’s work through what might first seem like back doors. For example, and in a personal account I have related before, only through the forbearance of a high school drama teacher was I allowed to play a small role in the senior class play. There were so few of us in the class that all hands were needed. The truth was I was completely unconvincing even with just a few lines, but also in the ways I chose to wander around the stage seemingly without purpose. Soon I learned about “blocking” a play, and especially about the need to find a character’s motivations for their actions.

In this distracted teen a light went on. The idea of performance as a durable paradigm never left me. That insight began to grow a few years later after discovering related ideas in the language of self-presentation common to classical of sociology and literary theory. I was clearly no actor, but that moment on a high school stage was enough to shape a long career exploring the ways we relate to each other through politics, speech and movement. It started with an exceptional high school drama teacher and continued with the help of colleagues that have included medievalists, sociologists, biographers, filmmakers, political scientists, journalists, art historians, photographers and American historians.

What modes of the humanities enterprise deserve our support? My list is only suggestive, since there are wonderful specializations within each discipline:

NEH

  • Art History
  • Studio arts
  • Fiction and Nonfiction Writing
  • Journalism
  • Rhetoric, Logic and Argumentation
  • Cultural studies
  • Classical Studies
  • Media Theory and Analysis
  • American Colonial History
  • Music Theory and Performance
  • Play and Screen-writing
  • Filmmaking
  • Peformance Studies
  • Acting
  • Philosophy
  • Scenic, Lighting and Sound Design

These are mostly offshoots of the classical liberal arts that have been part of the core curriculum in the world’s universities for hundreds of years.

What You Can Do

=>Contribute to community arts organizations.

=>Attend performances and exhibitions.

=>Support live music in the community.

=>Visit and support local libraries.

=>Turn your children into avid into readers and writers.

=>Demand creative curricula that goes beyond teaching to standardized tests.

=>Help your children understand the varied cultural history of the nation.

=>Push back when friends express what was a misplaced sympathy because of your daughter’s decision to pursue a college major in philosophy. We knew better. She and I had no doubts about her coming successes. 

 

What I Got Wrong and Right about Artificial Intelligence

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Personhood is a unique state rooted in carbon-sourced biology, not easily replicated by silicon-based machines. 

In 2015 I wrote that “In reality, “humans have nothing to fear” from the growth of artificial Intelligence. “Most measures of it use the wrong yardsticks.”

Well, knock me over with a feather.

istock man falling

I seem to have been wrong about that. Job losses caused by new uses of A.I. make it apparent that many word and data handling jobs have indeed been given to computers running A.I. programs. The first contact many of us have with doctors offices, food services or even mental health services is some chatter-bot mascarading as the functional equivelant of an adaptable and sensitive person. The hubris that makes that possible is our mistake.  I feel like a fraud every time I “chat” with a machine. But the fraud is on the other side.

Banks and Silicon Valley tech firms are now beginning to purge their staffs. Estimates suggest that perhaps organizations and businesses in the near future will have twenty percent fewer employees. Even so, I would still guess that A.I. is not going to cut it in some functions. Imagine as a new retailer you tout the advantage of guaranteeing a real customer service person immediately if you have a problem.  That’s a claim I saw in an ad recently, representing a unique selling proposition.

What I missed in the first post here was that my mind was too focused on those workers whose jobs are either creative, or tied to the trickiest of forms of human problem solving.   And my heart goes out to people who have been let go for nothing worse than serving as one of the  human faces of an organization.

short black line

Well, knock me over with a feather. Job losses from new uses of A.I. make it apparent that many word and data handling jobs have indeed been given to computers running A.I. programs.

One key point in that rash post still stands and seems to be ignored by many in the A.I. community. It hinges on what personhood means, including having a sense of self. If this sounds wooly, it isn’t. If we think that computers, robots or chatterbots have a sense of individual identity, I would beg to differ. Without a personal human history that includes the biology of living in the physical world and adapting to a socially mediated and carbon-based life cycle, a machine is just a machine.  We have a biography, a family lineage, a sense of place, and a collection of life-transforming experiences. Our lives must reckon with the processes attraction, illness, aging, and fostering new beings as members of a tribe. A machine can only fake the experiences and feelings of a human being.

GW: "Alexa, How are you feeling today?"

Amazon A.I. Assistant: "My Monday is starting off marvelously." 
 
(This actual response can't help but be fraudulent. Forms of "me" suggest a living person,a being, someone's son or daughter, and social intelligence based on a lifetime of interactions. "Marvelously" suggests an ordinary language stab at an unearned feeling.)

All of these features are essential prerequisites for a sense of self, which is thinly constructed using the feedback and interactions of other humans. Humans can estimate the interiority of another person from the wealth of experiences that we and they have undergone. How does that get communicated in terms of the social intelligence values of empathy, sympathy, or feelings of alienation or identification? These states of mind or more than the products of algorithms in large language models of A.I.. They are unique to the human mind. It’s another reason to reassuract the idea of a person’s “soul,” and perhaps to routinely italicize artificial as a reminder that the word truncates the much richer meanings behind “intelligence.”

dudriks flickr

As I previously noted, just this issue of selfhood should remind us of the special status that comes from living through dialogue with others. A sense of self is complicated, but it includes the critical ability to be aware of another’s awareness of who we are. If this sounds confusing, it isn’t. This process is central to all but the most perfunctory communication transactions. As we address others we are usually “reading” their responses in light of what we believe they already have discerned about us. We triangulate between our  perceptions of who we are, who they are, and what we imagine they may be thinking about our behavior. Put this sequence together, and you get a transaction that is full of feedback loops that involve estimates if intention and interest, and—frequently—a general desire born through human social intelligence to protect the feelings of others.

It’s an understatement to say these transactions are not the stuff of machine-based intelligence, and probably never can be. To be sure, the intricacies of many newer A.I. systems are beyond me, but I am still comfortable asserting that feelings, attitudes, experiences and beliefs that create human agency cannot be generated by GPUs, TPUs, and NPUs programmed to produce simulacrums of consciousness. As Walter Isaacson reminds us in The Innovators, we are carbon-based creatures with chemical and electrical impulses that create unique and idiosyncratic individuals. This is when the organ of the brain becomes so much more: the biographical homeland of an experience-saturated mind. With us there is no central processor. We are not silicon-based. There are the nearly infinite forms of consciousness in a brain with 100-billion neurons with 100-trillion connections. And because we often “think” in ordinary language, we are so much more—and sometimes less—than an encyclopedia of large language algorithms.