• Home
  • Opinion
  • Quizzes
  • Redistricting
  • Sections
  • About Us
  • Voting
  • Independent Voter News
  • Campaign Finance
  • Civic Ed
  • Directory
  • Election Dissection
  • Events
  • Fact Check
  • Glossary
  • News
  • Analysis
  • Subscriptions
  • Log in
Leveraging Our Differences
  • news & opinion
    • Big Picture
      • Civic Ed
      • Ethics
      • Leadership
      • Leveraging big ideas
      • Media
    • Business & Democracy
      • Corporate Responsibility
      • Impact Investment
      • Innovation & Incubation
      • Small Businesses
      • Stakeholder Capitalism
    • Elections
      • Campaign Finance
      • Independent Voter News
      • Redistricting
      • Voting
    • Government
      • Balance of Power
      • Budgeting
      • Congress
      • Judicial
      • Local
      • State
      • White House
    • Justice
      • Accountability
      • Anti-corruption
      • Budget equity
    • Columns
      • Beyond Right and Left
      • Civic Soul
      • Congress at a Crossroads
      • Cross-Partisan Visions
      • Democracy Pie
      • Our Freedom
  • Pop Culture
      • American Heroes
      • Ask Joe
      • Celebrity News
      • Comedy
      • Dance, Theatre & Film
      • Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging
      • Faithful & Mindful Living
      • Music, Poetry & Arts
      • Sports
      • Technology
      • Your Take
      • American Heroes
      • Ask Joe
      • Celebrity News
      • Comedy
      • Dance, Theatre & Film
      • Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging
      • Faithful & Mindful Living
      • Music, Poetry & Arts
      • Sports
      • Technology
      • Your Take
  • events
  • About
      • Mission
      • Advisory Board
      • Staff
      • Contact Us
Sign Up
  1. Home>
  2. artificial intelligence>

Without the humanities, artificial intelligence spells trouble

Eliza Newlin Carney
https://twitter.com/ElizaRules?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor
June 21, 2023
Without the humanities, artificial intelligence spells trouble
Getty Images

Carney is a contributing writer. She also heads The Civic Circle, a member of the CivXNow Coalition.

Of all the things there may be to fear and loathe about Google’s new generative artificial intelligence tool, the most offensive is its name: Bard.


In scholarly circles, there is only one “Bard,” and that is “The Bard”—namely, “The Bard of Avon,” better known as William Shakespeare, whose writings are everything that AI is not: wise, witty, compassionate, and above all, deeply human.

There may always be disputes over who actually wrote the approximately 39 plays that comprise the so-called Shakespeare canon. But there’s one thing we know for certain: It was not a chatbot.

To name a generative AI tool after one of the world’s greatest humanists is ironic at best, and at worst belittles the true Bard, whose name the tech industry has now reduced to a marketing commodity, a gimmick to sell software.

The deeper problem, though, isn’t just the cheapening of Shakespeare’s moniker. It’s the devaluing of the humanities—of history, literature and art, and of inquiry, creativity and critical thinking—in every sphere.

Amid massive federal investments, the pro-STEM craze has swallowed the humanities whole. In the past decade alone, the college-level study of English and history has dropped by a third. In K-12 classrooms, history, civics, literature and the arts have been pushed to the margins as educators struggle to meet standards-driven testing mandates. Culture wars over what books students should read don’t help.

Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter

It's not that Science, Technology, Engineering and Math aren’t essential. STEM investments are crucial to American economic competitiveness and national security. And AI itself holds great promise for medical breakthroughs, disaster relief, industrial automation, and a host of other areas, including education. Some even argue that generative AI can be a boon to democracy, inviting new voices into public debates, and helping digest citizen opinions.

But if there’s anything the advent of AI has taught us, it’s that STEM is not enough. To unleash generative AI on the world with no thoughtful constraints or oversight would be to invite disaster on a scale we humans can hardly imagine. That’s why more than 1,000 technology experts have called for a six-month moratorium on the development of new AI systems, citing “profound risks to society and humanity.”

One need not fear that machines will end up controlling humans to appreciate that AI will be highly disruptive—to jobs, to social interactions, to virtually every global industry and institution. Those most at risk may well be the world’s “creatives”—the artists whose works new software tools may exploit without credit, the writers now striking in part because they fear AI will put them out of work.

Yet humanists are the ones best equipped to get us out of the AI mess. How can we ensure that AI does not invade privacy, facilitate fraud and extortion, intensify discrimination, fuel monopolies, and flood the internet with false texts and images that are impossible to verify? Answering these questions will take discernment, empathy, critical thought, imagination, an appreciation for nuance, a grasp of ethics and history—in other words, all the skills at the heart of a liberal education.

The full promise of AI will never be realized if we abandon the humanities—and our humanity—along the way. Even Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, one of the tech industry’s greatest innovators, famously celebrated “the intersection of technology and liberal arts.” There will be no easy answers to the regulatory, ethical and legal questions that the coming AI explosion will pose. But the key may be, as Jaswinder Bolinda recently wrote, to “think like a poet.”

A poet himself, Bolinda recently took heart from the underwhelming, “jejeune” and “hackneyed” stanzas that ChatGPT3 produced when he asked the AI software to generate some verses in his own style. True poetry, Bolinda recently wrote in The Washington Post, “must be earnest, singular and unpredictable. … In a word, it must be human.”

The world’s workers, Bolinda argues, can make themselves irreplaceable by “taking classes in creative writing, music, theater, painting and dance; by studying and making literature and art, those allegedly pointless pursuits that our culture and our universities have increasingly neglected.” It’s the lessons learned in “creative enterprise,” as he sees it, that will enable us to invent “new and more humane ways of using technology to answer human concerns and solve human crises.”

It’s a point that The Bard—the true Bard—would have appreciated well. Shakespeare had much to say about the human condition—about love, envy, wisdom, folly, wealth, power, time, luck, evil and death. Of generative AI, he might have said, as Troilus does on reading (and then tearing up) a letter from Cressida: “Words, words, mere words, no matter from the heart …”. Or perhaps he might have called, as so many tech leaders have, for a judicious pause. After all, as Lady Macbeth bemoans amid her descent into madness: “What’s done cannot be undone.”

From Your Site Articles
  • Q&A with Stephanie Bell on the rise of AI and civil society’s response ›
  • Fear not AI, fear certain people ›
  • Vice President Harris convenes a meeting to discuss the societal impact of AI - The Fulcrum ›
  • The new world of AI - The Fulcrum ›
artificial intelligence

Want to write
for The Fulcrum?

If you have something to say about ways to protect or repair our American democracy, we want to hear from you.

Submit
Get some Leverage Sign up for The Fulcrum Newsletter
Confirm that you are not a bot.
×
Follow

Support Democracy Journalism; Join The Fulcrum

The Fulcrum daily platform is where insiders and outsiders to politics are informed, meet, talk, and act to repair our democracy and make it live and work in our everyday lives. Now more than ever our democracy needs a trustworthy outlet

Contribute
Contributors

Grand Canyon gap in America today

Dave Anderson

Chief Justice John Roberts and Chief Justice Roger Taney are Twins– separated by only 165 years

Stephen E. Herbits

Conservatives attacking Americans’ First Amendment rights

Steve Corbin

To advance racial equity, policy makers must move away from the "Black and Brown" discourse

Julio A. Alicea

Policymakers must address worsening civil unrest post Roe

Sarah K. Burke

Video: How to salvage U.S. democracy from the "tyranny of the minority"

Our Staff
latest News

America’s greatest resource- Education

William Natbony
29 September

The Carter Center and Team Democracy unite to advance candidate principles for trusted elections

Ken Powley
29 September

There is no magic pill for postpartum depression

Priya Iyer
28 September

Advancing human rights, worldwide

Leland R. Beaumont
28 September

How statelessness gambles with the lives of American families

Samantha Sitterly
27 September

Podcast: Is reunification still possible?

Our Staff
27 September
Videos
Video: Expert baffled by Trump contradicting legal team

Video: Expert baffled by Trump contradicting legal team

Our Staff
Video: Do white leaders hinder black aspirations?

Video: Do white leaders hinder black aspirations?

Our Staff
Video: How to prepare for student loan repayments returning

Video: How to prepare for student loan repayments returning

Our Staff
Video: The history of Labor Day

Video: The history of Labor Day

Our Staff
Video: Trump allies begin to flip as prosecutions move forward

Video: Trump allies begin to flip as prosecutions move forward

Our Staff
Video Rewind: Trans-partisan practices and the "superpower of respect"

Video Rewind: Trans-partisan practices and the "superpower of respect"

Our Staff
Podcasts

Podcast: Is reunification still possible?

Our Staff
27 September

Podcast: All politics is local

Our Staff
22 September

Podcast: How states hold fair elections

Our Staff
14 September

Podcast: The MAGA Bubble, Bidenonmics and Playing the Victim

Debilyn Molineaux
David Riordan
12 September
Recommended
America’s greatest resource- Education

America’s greatest resource- Education

Big Picture
Grand Canyon gap in America today

Grand Canyon gap in America today

Elections
The Carter Center and Team Democracy unite to advance candidate principles for trusted elections

The Carter Center and Team Democracy unite to advance candidate principles for trusted elections

Big Picture
There is no magic pill for postpartum depression

There is no magic pill for postpartum depression

Big Picture
Advancing human rights, worldwide

Advancing human rights, worldwide

Big Picture
Chief Justice John Roberts and Chief Justice Roger Taney are Twins– separated by only 165 years

Chief Justice John Roberts and Chief Justice Roger Taney are Twins– separated by only 165 years

Big Picture