If you ask English Professor Betsy Huang about the future of humanity and the humanities, which face disruption from seemingly unmitigable forces such as climate change and artificial intelligence, she will direct you to pragmatic visions of hope and eye-opening messages of caution offered by contemporary speculative fiction writers.
“It is very important to study all things that make us human.”
Huang says speculative fiction, like Octavia Butler’s dystopian Parable series, helps to make meaning of it all “by forcing us to take stock of what we find valuable in our everyday life.” Likewise, studying the humanities brings people face to face with questions about “the pursuit of the good life, and what that good life means,” she says.
In this age of AI and other emerging technologies, speculative fiction also raises questions about what it means to be human and to be alive, she says. To better understand those who embrace “technology as the solution to everything,” Huang took a class on AI through MIT’s Sloan School of Management.
What was missing from classroom discussions, she says, was something that she believes Clark can introduce into its liberal arts curriculum: “The overarching philosophical and existential questions about what AI is really going to mean for the human race.”
“The humanities provide a person with the vocabularies they need to make sense of their experience in the world in all its dimensions, to be able to articulate it, and to feel that they are creating their own experience and value rather than simply receiving it,” she says. “It is very important to study all things that make us human, but it’s also in the act and in the performance of our humanity that truly reminds us of who we are in this world.”