What is the role of the humanities and social sciences in an AI future? Where does literature fit in? Smart money amongst the intelligentsia say that it has never been more important – and I am very much with them. But I fear this is a more difficult argument to make to the investors, looking at the the ROI needed on the vast data centres’ spend requirements…
Information is not knowledge. Knowledge is the bedrock of wisdom. Wisdom, and some time, is what we need to contemplate our way through to a sustainable future, one where we’re not melting to death…Kemi Badenoch is an Engineer; Andy Burnham is a career politician, but importantly, one who studied English. Of course we need scientists and engineers – without doubt – but surely we need thinkers and dreamers. And social scientists and philosophers, and the wise folk who can stitch all of this together.
As an Economist, I have seen my discipline, in its race for perceived legitimacy, becoming entirely lost in the application of sometimes spurious statistical analysis – and lost more often in the even more removed and extreme mathematicisation of the subject. I didn’t do my MSc Economics until I was in my 40s, and whilst everybody could wax lyrical about the role of the second differential, very few people out of a class of 100 could explain the profundity of Keynes’s ideas – or who knew who Hayek was…
Literature was my own grounding and I remember well that it took me three attempts to finish Solzhenitsyn’s “August 1914″… I may well have battled through the history of the East Prussian war 🤦🏻, but much more than this… It introduced me soon after, to the Gulags, and Stalin, and the simple reality of man’s inhumanity to man, even today – not in the history books… I’m blessed to have three children, and a thousand books, and despite my banging on about it, they hardly read!…. They are lost to the 30 second videos of Tik tok, seeing the entirety of the world – and yet understanding less and less of it…🌹
Let’s never stop celebrating ideas, and figure out a way of reintegrating humanities and social sciences into the reason why we are doing things… And more importantly, for whom…
#ideas #socialscience #humanities #AI
Economics x.0: the debate continues
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