32 Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced founder of the nowdefunct crypto exchange FTX, once proudly told an interviewer that he would never read a book. “I don’t want to say that no book is ever worth reading,” he conceded, before adding, “but I actually do believe something pretty close to that.” In light of his own story’s ending, it might well be argued that the true value of a humanistic education is most evident in its absence. “The role of the humanities has always been twofold,” says Prof. Daniela Dueck, the dean of Bar-Ilan’s Faculty of Humanities. “First, it aims to preserve the knowledge accumulated over centuries of wrestling with eternal questions about the human condition. But second, it seeks to promote discussion on what it means to be human in the face of unprecedented possibilities. And the age of AI and machine learning,” she concludes, “is nothing if not that.” True to form, at a faculty-organized conference this March on “AI and the Future of Academia,” therewas plenty of discussion about theways technology can enhance humanistic education, as well as how the humanities can enhance learning and working in our technology-driven age. And with a roster of speakers that included a senior product manager at Google and chief scientist at Microsoft Israel, “this was the opposite of an echo chamber,” says Dueck. “On the contrary, it was a proactive engagement on the part of our scholars with the software that is shaping tomorrow’s world. And no less important, it was a statement that engineers and computer scientists will soon need the historians, sociologists, and philosophersmore than ever, whether to determine the ethical use of chatbots, for instance, or what self-driving cars deem right or wrong.” Perhaps a familiarity with the great texts that have guided civilizations for millennia might have prevented BankFriedman’s self-defeating, means-to-an-end worldview, too? “We’ll never know,” she laughs. “And in the end, that might just tell us everything.” Machine Learning and the Meaning of Life The Humanities Image generated by AI
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