The recent explosion in AI technology may force scholars working in the Humanities to retreat from their increasingly insular preoccupation with things like exploding metanarratives, deconstructing authors’ race and sexuality, and their never-ending masochistic self-critique, to finally return to the fundamental questions the Humanities are about, including why the intellectual foundations of humanism is defensible. From Stephen Marche’s article in The Atlantic:
“Contemporary academia engages, more or less permanently, in self-critique on any and every front it can imagine. In a tech-centered world, language matters, voice and style matter, the study of eloquence matters, history matters, ethical systems matter. But the situation requires humanists to explain why they matter, not constantly undermine their own intellectual foundations. The humanities promise students a journey to an irrelevant, self-consuming future; then they wonder why their enrollments are collapsing. Is it any surprise that nearly half of humanities graduates regret their choice of major?”