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This lecture is an experiment that should be of interest to all students who care about their field of studies: Based on an ongoing project, it presents ideas towards an understanding of the role literary studies (and the humanities generally) might play in an age of AI, populism and wide-spread scepticism about academia, even of drastic attacks on academic freedom (take, for instance, recent developments in the U.S.). The lecture initially discusses some of the major challenges to the humanities: threats of job losses through AI, the perceived irrelevance of our field, the challenge AI poses to teaching in the humanities, political threats against some fields in the humanities (gender studies, research on diversity, minorities etc.). A section on AI will discuss the familiar challenges to teaching, will look at AI-generated poetry and at representations of AI in fiction. Primarily, however, we will here have a critical look at programmatic essays on the future of AI by key figures in the field (e.g., Sam Altman of OpenAI, Dario Amodei of Anthropic, or Marc Andreessen as a key tech investor). A second section will explore the connections between technology, authoritarianism, populism, and the humanities: Have concepts developed in the humanities been useful to populist and authoritarian movements? Which concepts from the humanities lend themselves to such appropriations? In this section, we will also look at literary representations of what has come to be called "surveillance capitalism" (Sh. Zuboff) and its representation in fiction (e.g., Dave Eggers, The Every). Finally, we will ask whether the concept of "dual use" (the potential military uses of originally "civilian" technologies) can be applied to the way in which humanities concepts can be appropriated for other purposes. Discussing a wide range of non-literary as well as literary texts, the lecture thus explores ideas for the future of literary studies (and the humanities) in a period of numerous challenges for our field(s). Everyone is welcome! All materials to be discussed will be made available electronically in the course of the semester. |
