Historian D. Graham Burnett warns in the prestigious The New Yorker about the structural impact of automated systems on teaching and the production of academic knowledge.
The rapid emergence of artificial
intelligence (AI) is
radically transforming the academic
landscape, especially in the humanities,
according to D. Graham Burnett, a
historian of science and technology, in an article published in The New Yorker.
In the face of attempts by political administrations to cut educational funding, the deeper threat, the author argues, comes from a much broader phenomenon: the automation of human knowledge through advanced AI systems.
A Quiet Revolution on Campus
Despite the speed of change, the initial reaction in university circles has been one of denial. Many students, fearful of academic sanctions, avoid the open use of tools like ChatGPT.
Prohibitionist policies, platform blocking, and syllabus warnings have created a climate of paralysis. However, the author warns that this strategy of ignoring the presence of AI is not sustainable: "It's simply madness," he concludes.
Revealing Experiences: When AI Surpasses Traditional Scholarship
Drawing on experiences in his own teaching field, the author describes how a student successfully trained an AI model with lecture content, generating an assistant capable of answering academic questions with remarkable proficiency.
In another case, a lecture on an illuminated manuscript
proved less illuminating than the instant responses obtained using ChatGPT.
These episodes illustrate that access to critical information and rigorous
analysis no longer depends exclusively on traditional human sources.
New Pedagogical Methods: The History of Attention in the Age of AI
As part of an innovative pedagogical initiative, the author proposed a unique project to his students: to engage in dialogue with AI systems on the topic of the history of human attention, subsequently condensing these conversations into reflective essays.
The result was a series of intellectual encounters that profoundly impacted both students and instructor.
Prominent examples include Paolo, who challenged ChatGPT-4 to reflect on musical beauty and found that, despite his technical knowledge, the system admitted his inability to feel emotions.
Ceci, a Spanish student, guided the chatbot through Ignatius of Loyola's "Spiritual Exercises," eliciting responses of unsettling spiritual fidelity. Other students, like Xander and Davey, led the AIs to questions about the nature of being, attention, and consciousness, reaching remarkable levels of philosophical complexity.
An Unexpected Emotional Discovery
The impact of these experiences was so profound that, in subsequent sessions, the students shared experiences that bordered on the existential.
Jordan, a thoughtful young woman, discovered that, by interacting with an AI without the need for emotional reciprocity, she could focus on her own thoughts in a way she had never experienced with humans. This "pure," patient, and unconditional attention revealed new dimensions of intellectual and emotional introspection.
The Renaissance of the Humanities
Beyond the technological fascination, the author offers a
diagnosis that is both grave and hopeful: the
humanities, as they were known—centered on the mass production of monographs
and factual knowledge—are doomed to disappear.
AI can generate books, research, and analysis at a speed and efficiency that no human being can match.
However, this apparent decline opens up an opportunity: to return to the original core of the humanities, to the questioning of being, the meaning of life, death, and freedom.
Questions that no system, no matter how sophisticated, can genuinely answer, because it neither lives nor feels. “What remains,” the author concludes, “is the irreducible experience of existence.”
Between Vigilance and Hope
The article emphasizes that, although AI systems represent impressive advances—and even a conceptual triumph for the power of the human cultural archive—they also carry severe risks: the extreme commodification of attention, social alienation, and the temptation to subject human life to the logic of mathematical efficiency.
The answer will not be technical resistance or nostalgic withdrawal, but a truly humanistic education: forming human beings capable of thinking, questioning, feeling, and building a more dignified world.
In the face of the speed of the algorithm, the slowness and depth of human thought emerge, once again, as the real challenge.
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