Humanities in the age of AI

The author begins with a comment on Pamela McCorduck's memoir This Could Be Important: My Life and Times with the Artificial Intelligentsia (2019). One of the main concerns of this book is the so-called “Two Cultures Problem”. Throughout her life, McCorduck has taken pains to bridge the gap between the humanities and artificial intelligence. The three fields that she detected hope in this orientation are art, storytelling, and digital humanities. Inspired by McCorduck's lifelong efforts, the author wants to highlight the issue of the status of the humanities in the age of AI. To achieve a fruitful collaboration between the two cultures, more philosophical work needs to be done at the foundational level. The author argues that 1) as two forms of human inquiry, science and the humanities are distinct but not dichotomous, and 2) the role played by the humanities is as important as that by science in cracking the nut of intelligence, and that switching back and forth between the scientific and the philosophical approach to intelligence will prove to be productive in tackling the problem of our times.