A.I. Doesn’t Relieve Us of the Need to Think

There's magic in the humanities too

Diogenes by Jean-Léon Gérôme, 1860 (public domain - Wikimedia Commons)

“We must learn to balance the material wonders of technology with the spiritual demands of our human nature.” — John Naisbitt

In a 1968 letter to Science magazine, Arthur C. Clarke wrote what eventually became known as the third of Clarke’s Laws: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Indeed, it is magical, allowing us to conjure up a liveried vehicle with the touch of a button or make our wish its command to deliver a summary of The Iliad faster than a caffeinated classics professor.

We’re so fascinated with the digital dazzle of the present that we’re not only becoming less enamored with the humanities, we’re sometimes forgetting that they ever existed, when they’re more necessary than ever.

In the age of the AI and the rising importance of STEM education, philosophizing about the humanities might seem a counterintuitive.

At first blush, Plato doesn’t seem to be of much use in coding.

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