Making AI Headlines · Page 3
MIT Reminds the Technical World That People Have Context
· New York time
MIT President Sally Kornbluth told the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences' 75th Anniversary Symposium that the university has never needed its scholars' "particular insight and guidance" more than it does now. The statement places human understanding prominently inside an institution better known to much of the public for technical achievement. Apparently the people asking what a machine should do still deserve offices near the people building it. The anniversary offers a useful setting for that argument. Humanities, arts and social sciences are not recent accessories attached to a technical campus after artificial intelligence became fashionable. Their longstanding presence gives the university a vocabulary for discussing purposes, institutions and human experience alongside capabilities. Kornbluth's appeal is a statement of educational priorities, not an experimental finding about the permanent limits of machines. Its practical force lies in asking whose knowledge belongs in decisions about technological change. That question can become awkward in organizations where everything important is expected to fit on a performance dashboard. Human understanding tends to arrive with historical context, competing values and paragraphs. It refuses to turn green simply because someone met a quarterly target. At a minimum, the symposium supplied a dignified reminder that "can we build it?" remains an incomplete meeting agenda.
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