The Information Revolution Put Tech Disciplines at the Center — But Now It Needs the Humanities
No university campus is complete without a fierce rivalry between STEM and humanities students — and it's fair to say that the scientists have been winning the competition for a long time now. Artists and thinkers may have dominated during the Renaissance, but the Industrial Revolution has been the era of the tech worker. Apple's market cap is bigger than 96% of world economies, and digitally transformed enterprises now make up almost half of global GDP.
But as technology achieves more milestones and reaches a certain critical mass, I think that humanities are about to make a long-awaited comeback. Technological innovation — especially artificial intelligence — is crying out for us to ponder critical questions about human nature. Let's look at some of the biggest debates and how disciplines like philosophy, history, law and politics can help us answer them.
Related: This Is What You Should Know About AI's Impending Power
The rise of sentient AI
The potentially ominous or destructive consequences of artificial intelligence have been the subject of countless books, films and TV shows. For a while, that might have seemed like nothing more than fear-mongering speculation — but as technology continues to advance, ethical debates are starting to seem more relevant.
As AI becomes capable of replacing an increasing number of professions and many people are left jobless, it raises all kinds of moral dilemmas. Is it the role of the government to offer a universal basic income and completely restructure our society, or do we let people fend for themselves and call it survival of the fittest?
Then there's the question of how ethical it is to use AI to enhance human performance and avoid human failure in the first place. Where do we draw the line between a "human" and a "machine?" And if the lines become blurred, do robots need the same rights as humans? The decisions we make will ultimately determine the future of the human race and could make us stronger or weaker (or see us eliminated completely).
Humans or machines?
One of the AI advances raising eyebrows is Google's Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA). The system was first introduced as a way of connecting different Google services together, but ended up striking debate about whether the LaMDA was, in fact, sentient — as Google engineer Blake Lemoine claimed after witnessing how realistic its conversations were.
Ultimately, the general consensus was that Lemoine's arguments were nonsensical. The LaMDA was only using predictive statistical techniques to hold a conversation — just because its algorithms are sophisticated enough to seemingly have a dialogue, it doesn't mean the LaMDA is sentient. However, it does raise an important question about where things would stand if a theoretical AI system was able to do everything a human can, including having original thoughts and feelings. Would it deserve the same rights humans have?
Related: What Are Some of the Ethical Concerns of Artificial Intelligence?
The Turing test
The debate over what exactly we should see as human is nothing new. Back in 1950, Alan Turing created the Turing test to determine whether a machine can be sufficiently intelligent and similar enough to humans that we can submit that machines have some level of "consciousness."
However, not everyone agrees. The philosopher Jo
