About the show
Artificial intelligence has emerged as a force in culture today with the potential power to do immense good and immense harm. Journalists and other commentators have focused on the technological glitz of these new mechanisms and foregrounded the perspectives of their creators and their supporters. In this episode, a different set of questions will focus on how AI is already at work in our everyday life and what responsible deliberation about the potentials of these tools would look like.
While engineers and entrepreneurs have often been driven to achieve greater speed and efficiency, a humanities focus asks about the implications of AI and what offloading tasks once done by human beings might mean for virtue, ethics and the good life, according to John Christman, director of the Humanities Institute and Penn State and professor of philosophy, political science, and women’s studies.
"Every day we're hearing new and shocking things about the technical power of AI. What we're not hearing enough of are the perspectives of humanists about what these advances mean, both for society and for what it means to be human,” said Christman. “The scholars we talked to in this episode urge us to think more about such questions, and in particular about who, in the end, is controlling the processes that lead to these advances."
Matt Jordan, a Penn State associate professor of media studies and executive producer of "HumIn Focus," said, “For years, technology journalists have breathlessly promoted each new advancement from Silicon Valley, helping the tech industry raise capital while moving fast and breaking things. We think this time should be different. Society should include more than just engineers in a conversation about tools with enormous potential for good and bad. In this episode, we want to raise different questions that might help slow down the speed at which this emergent technology is adopted and give us time to talk about it before it causes irreparable harm.”
The Humanities Institute created the "HumIn Focus" series in 2018 to showcase the social value of humanities research, and to spark dialogue between humanities scholars and members of the community on topics of pressing social importance. Confederate monuments, immigration, the complexities of American democracy, health care during the pandemic, the American incarceration system, and cultural communication were topics examined in the series’ previous episodes.
The series is produced by WPSU in collaboration with the College of the Liberal Arts and the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications.