AI and the Humanities
Wai Chee Dimock · PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America · 2020
session: in a midsize room at the Washington State Convention Center, well attended but not quite filled to capacity, with people leafing through their programs, checking their phones, drifting in and out.It was session 388, Being Human, Seeming Human.Arranged by the Office of the Executive Director, it was the first of its kind.Four of the six speakers were from Microsoft,1 expressly invited to start a conversation about what it means for those who self-identify as human to share the planet with those who seem to be.The Microsoft representatives talked about OpenAI's GPT-2, a widely used text generator.Can we always tell that the writer is an algorithm?And should we object if it happens to write like us?2These playful conundrums were exactly right for the occasion, but just the tip of the iceberg.Indeed, "seeming human" might turn out to be one of the less scary things AI can do.Replacing, supplanting, and eliminating human beings are also in the cards.From self-driving cars to facial recognition biometrics to drones carrying out remote assassinations, AI is poised to transform the fabric of life and the future of work.The Brookings Institution, drawing on a study by the Stanford graduate student Michael Webb,3 reported on 20 November 2019 that, unlike the automation enabled by robots such as those in Amazon warehouses (Edwards), which mostly affects low-paying jobs, the predictive and decision-making powers of AI-in the form of machine-learning algorithms-will affect every employment sector, hitting educated workers the hardest (Muro et al.).Those "with graduate or professional degrees will be almost four times as exposed to AI as workers with just a high school degree" (Muro et al.).