The silent revolution in the lecture hall
A strange scene is currently unfolding in the lecture halls of Princeton University: When Professor D. Graham Burnett asks his students if any of them have already used AI tools like ChatGPT, no one raises their hand. Not because they are unfamiliar with these technologies, but because they are afraid. “Almost every syllabus now contains a warning,” explains one student after class. “Anyone who uses AI tools will be reported to the academic authorities. Nobody wants to take that risk.”
This scene, described in the recent New Yorker article “Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?”, reveals a fascinating paradox: while one of the greatest technological revolutions in human history is unfolding outside of universities, many educational institutions are trying to pretend it isn’t happening. But as the author of the article points out, this approach is “sheer madness” and will not last long.
But the question goes deeper: will we humans survive this revolution? Not just in the metaphorical sense of cultural change, but in the existential sense of our future as a species? The New Yorker article and the current debate around AI raise fundamental questions that we cannot ignore.
The AI revolution in education: A paradigm shift
The experience at Princeton University is not an isolated case. At universities around the world, teachers and administrators are trying – and often failing – to keep pace with the rapid development of AI systems. One department at Princeton even drafted an anti-AI policy that, taken literally, would have prohibited faculty from giving assignments dealing with AI. The policy had to be revised.
This reaction is symptomatic of a deeper uncertainty: what should education look like in a world where AI systems can already discuss virtually any topic at the Ph.D. level? Professor Burnett describes his experience with ChatGPT during an academic lecture on a rare illuminated manuscript. While the lecture was difficult to follow, he had a parallel “rich conversation” with the AI system about the same topic – and received information that was “better than the lecture I was hearing.”
The implications are profound. If AI systems are already able to conduct academic discourse at the highest level, what does this mean for the future of education? And more importantly, what does it mean for the future of humanity?
The dialectic of AI: threat or opportunity for self-awareness?
Concerns about the existential threat posed by AI are not new. Numerous experts have warned of the risks that advanced AI systems could pose to humanity. The Center for AI Safety published a statement signed by leading AI researchers stating: “Reducing the risk of annihilation from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks, such as pandemics and nuclear war.”
But the New Yorker article offers a surprising perspective: perhaps this existential challenge is also an opportunity for self-awareness. One student in Burnett’s class describes her experience with AI as an “existential turning point”. What particularly impressed her was the freedom she felt in dialog with an intelligence to which she felt “no social obligation”.
“I have never experienced anyone paying such pure attention to my thoughts and questions,” said the student. This experience made her rethink all her human interactions.
This dialectic – that AI can both threaten us and lead us to a deeper understanding of ourselves – is at the heart of the current debate.
Being human in the age of AI: what really defines us
In a remarkable scene in the New Yorker article, Burnett describes how a student named Paolo asks ChatGPT-4 about his understanding of musical beauty. After a profound exchange about analytical approaches to beauty in music, Paolo asks if the AI can experience beauty itself.
The AI denies this and explains that although it knows a lot about how humans have tried to put this experience into words, it cannot feel any real emotions itself. When Paolo asks it to write a song that would make him cry, it fails: “The system failed the test,” Paolo notes. But Burnett himself cries when he reads this exchange.
This scene illustrates a key insight: what defines us as humans is not primarily our ability to accumulate knowledge or think logically – areas in which AI can already surpass us. Rather, it is our ability to feel, to suffer, to love, to experience beauty.
Another student, Ceci, runs ChatGPT-4 through the “Spiritual Exercises” of Ignatius of Loyola – a series of 16th century meditations that are considered early and powerful “attention protocols”, close to the roots of the modern self. The result exceeded all expectations: a young woman from Austin acts as a contemplative Counter-Reformation confessor to the stirrings of conscience in a neural network humming somewhere in a windowless server room.
These experiments show: AI can help us to understand our own humanity more deeply – precisely by confronting us with an intelligence that is different from our own.
The transformation of the humanities: the end or a new beginning?
“Does this mean the end of the ‘humanities’? In a way, absolutely,” writes Burnett. But he also sees it as an opportunity: “Turn this faculty catastrophe around, and it is in some ways a gift.”
According to Burnett, the traditional production of monographs in the humanities will make little sense in five years’ time – no one will read them, and systems like this will be able to generate them endlessly at the touch of a button. But factory-like scientific productivity has never been the essence of the humanities.
The real project has always been the human being: the work of understanding and not the accumulation of facts. Not “knowledge” in the sense of yet another sandwich of true statements about the world. These things are great – and where science and technology are concerned, they are pretty much the heart of the matter. But no amount of peer-reviewed research, no data set, can answer the central questions that affect every human being: How to live? What to do? How to face death?
Over the last seventy years, the humanities at universities have largely lost sight of this core truth. Seduced by the rising prestige of the sciences – on campus and in the culture – humanities scholars have refashioned their work to mimic scientific inquiry. They have produced abundant knowledge about texts and artifacts, but in the process have largely abandoned the deeper questions of being that give this work its meaning.
Now everything must change. This kind of knowledge production has been effectively automated. The “scientistic” humanities – the production of fact-based knowledge about things in the humanities – are rapidly being absorbed by the sciences that created the AI systems that now do the work. We will turn to them for the “answers”.
But being human doesn’t mean having answers. It means having questions – and living with them. The machines can’t do that for us. Not now, not ever.
Conclusion: a new humanism?
“And so we can finally return – seriously, sincerely – to the reinvention of the humanities, and of humanities education itself. We can return to what has always been at the heart of the matter – the lived experience of existence. Being itself.”
These words from Burnett offer a hopeful perspective amidst the existential challenges that AI brings. Perhaps the real question is not whether we will survive AI, but how we can come to a deeper understanding of our humanity through it.
The threat of AI is real. Experts warn of potentially catastrophic consequences if advanced AI systems get out of control. A study by Oxford University concluded that an “existential catastrophe is not only possible, but likely”.
But at the same time, AI offers an unprecedented opportunity for self-reflection. By being confronted with systems that can mimic or even surpass certain aspects of human intelligence, we are forced to think more deeply about what really defines us as human beings.
As Burnett writes: “What it means to be here – to live, to feel, to choose – that remains for us. The machines can only ever approach this second-hand. But second-hand is exactly what being here is not. The work of being here – of living, feeling, choosing – is still waiting for us. And there is a lot of it.”
In this sense, perhaps the answer to the question “Will we survive AI?” is yes, if we are willing to rediscover ourselves and develop a new humanism based not on the accumulation of knowledge, but on the depth of our experience as sentient, questioning beings.
Sources:
- The New Yorker: “Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?” by D. Graham Burnett, April 26, 2025
