The AI Mirror & Magnifica Humanitas - feat. Dr. Shannon Vallor & Dr. Thomas Hibbs

He, he's, uh, he's muted.

Okay, good.

Thank you.

Yeah, I thought, uh, both books are wonderful.

I'm using this book in, uh, in a philosophy of art class this fall with Baylor students.

I, um, I wanna pick up on a couple things that Shannon just said.

One is the, uh, the, the reason I decided to use the book is not just because it's a very good book, but I sense what Shannon is sensing in students is this real hunger, a deep confusion.

And one of the dangers, uh, that, uh, Dr. Vallor i- identifies at a certain point in the book, techno-pessimism really sinking in in this, this generation of college students.

But that's partly because it seems so overwhelming, and it's spoken of purely in terms of threats- ... to, uh, to personal life.

They, this is the generation after the, the impact of social media, so they're, they're much more acutely aware than college students were five, six, seven years ago of the negative impact of social media, and are, I think, actively trying to protect themselves against it.

But they sense this new threat, and they sense it as a threat to jobs.

They sense it as, as a threat to individual and political self-governance.

Uh, so...

And they don't have a vocabulary to talk about this.

They don't have vocabulary.

And that's because, as Dr. Vallor also points out, universities have done a really poor job so far at trying to address this and reckon with it for students.

I think the, the two ways in which I hear it talked about is, at Baylor, is one, students are increasingly asked in initial job interviews, "What experience do you have with AI? Do you know how to use AI? Are you comfortable using AI?" So we see it partly as training for resu- resume building.

Uh, and then faculty are concerned about the threats to academic integrity.

We can't, we can't tell when someone is cheating if they're using AI in the way we could 5 to 10 years ago.

But the moral discourse in university seems to me so far to be limited.

There are pockets where people are trying to do what Dr. Vallor's doing, but the u- the institution as a whole is really limited to resume building and threats to academic integrity, and that just won't do for our students or for our institutions.

Uh, yeah, Dr. Vallor was a student in the PhD program at Boston College when I was there as a faculty member.

A really wonderful more continental than analytic department.

So, you know, you think of figures like Husserl and the Crisis of the European Sciences or Heidegger and the Question Concerning Technology.

That brand of philosophy, uh, was in a way, way ahead of the game on the question of the problem-