Tag: technology

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Technology and the Fate of the Humanities

Leon Wieseltier, editor of the New Republic, added another entry to the growing genre of commencement speeches targeting technology.  He worries about the shrinking of the humanities in higher education and the culture at large, as technology colonizes more and more corners of our lives.  His piece reminded me of T.S. Eliot:

“Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?  Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”

Leon is taking aim at the values and worldview of Silicon Valley, an ideology that Evgeny Morozov has dubbed “technological solutionism”, the reduction of all problems to technical problems, the notion that technology can fix all things, and the reduction of knowledge to information:

There are thinkers, reputable ones if you can believe it, who proclaim that the exponential growth in computational ability will soon take us beyond the finitude of our bodies and our minds so that, as one of them puts it, there will no longer be any difference between human and machine. La Mettrie lives in Silicon Valley. This, of course, is not an apotheosis of the human but an abolition of the human; but Google is very excited by it.

He is referring, of course, to Ray Kurzweil, the scientist, inventor, and anointed Philosopher Prophet of Silicon Valley who has just been hired by Google.  Leon’s piece is aimed squarely at Kurzweil’s scientism:  the extension of science from a method to a metaphysics, with claims based not on data but on dogma.  There are some who consider Kurzweil the Most Dangerous Man in America.  While Steve Jobs has been raised up as the Great Man of our age, he may end up being overshadowed by Kurzweil, who is on track to become the Father of AI.  I will be addressing Kurzweil’s worldview–essentially, that technology is the continuation of evolution by other means–in future posts.  For now, see Michael E. Zimmerman’s recent reflection on AI from the perspective of Integral philosophy.

Leon’s is exactly the argument that C.S. Lewis made over half a century ago in The Abolition of Man:  man’s modern conquest of nature is really nature’s conquest of man.  Why?  Because when reason is turned into a tool to satisfy our desires, our desires are running the show–but our desires or instincts largely come from nature.  I will return to Lewis’ argument and its connection to modern nihilism in future posts.

One noteworthy thing Leon mentions is the place of philosophy in all of this:

Philosophy itself has shrunk under the influence of our weakness for instrumentality – modern American philosophy was in fact one of the causes of that weakness — and generally it, too, prefers to tinker and to tweak.

What would it mean to not just “tinker and tweak”?  What would that look like?  Why is it so difficult, not only to do, but to even imagine?

I think philosophy has been assigned one of its great tasks for the present age.   If Hegel said philosophy is its own time comprehended in thought, then the great challenge for thought in our time is that one of the most important matters, technology, is largely about our future, and its grip on our present makes it so hard to reflect on it.

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The AUdacity of MOOCs: “These are people who just want to learn”

In the last two posts, I broached the question of what long-term, structural effects online learning will have on higher education.  At Thanksgiving, I spoke a great deal with my two nieces, who are getting ready to go to college next year, and their parents, about the myriad dimensions of the process.  Like health care, college has become one of the most complicated, and most anxiety-inducing, pieces in the puzzle of modern life, not least because they are the sectors in which costs mock inflation.  Indeed, with the election over, I’d wager that families discussed these issues more than maybe any others.

As we’ve seen over the last decade, industries we considered staples of life in the modern industrialized world–music, journalism, and retail–were radically disrupted and transformed when the world became Flat.  This year, the New York Times has declared 2012 the Year of the MOOC (Massive Open Online Course), with 3 flagship online universities pioneering the new platform:

I want to follow up and throw into the mix two other perspectives I’ve come across in the meantime:

  • Robert Koons, a professor of philosophy at University of Texas at Austin.  Though Koons does not explicitly discuss online learning or MOOCs, his scathing, Closing-of-the-American-Mind-ish critique of the modern university–which he considers the most corrupt institution in modern society–casts light on spiritual, intellectual, moral, and economic weaknesses in the status quo that make the university vulnerable to the digital disruption.
  • Clay Shirky, NYU new media guru, one of the closest things we have to a public intellectual.  Essentially, Shirky seems willing to bet his tenure that early MOOC platforms like Udacity are tantamount to Napster, and that over the long haul online learning will indeed to to higher education something like what the mp3 did to music.

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The “Rock Star” Professor

The NY Times’ fascinating report on the rise of the MOOC raises questions about what we might call the “Professors of the Future”:

Udacity courses are designed and produced in-house or with companies like Google and Microsoft. In a poke at its university-based competition, Dr. Stavens says they pick instructors not because of their academic research, as universities do, but because of how they teach. “We reject about 98 percent of faculty who want to teach with us,” he says. “Just because a person is the world’s most famous economist doesn’t mean they are the best person to teach the subject.” Dr. Stavens sees a day when MOOCs will disrupt how faculty are attracted, trained and paid, with the most popular “compensated like a TV actor or a movie actor.” He adds that “students will want to learn from whoever is the best teacher.”

The implications are enormous, and difficult to sift through.

Continue reading “The “Rock Star” Professor”