I’d like to say these are aphorisms, but they’re just not punchy enough…
The Al(ia) involved is mostly the university.
- The university is both the product and caretaker of a literary society.
- LLMs/AI are fundamentally an oral technique, not a literary one.
- LLMs turn language into a sub-faculty of the math department, among the other statistical sciences. Language is turned into a study of waves and differential equations.
- As literacy vanishes, so will the university. It will be, and to some extent is already in the process of being, replaced by something which may adopt the nominal name, “university,” but will be essentially different.
- The university is also informed by and preserves a kind of aristocratic-democratic politics. LLMs/AI supports caesaro-democratic politics.
- The book, at its best, is an exterior testimony of interior memory. LLMs/AI, at their best, are for our exterior deposit what the index was for the book in the 12th century.
- The skills learned in the university, historically, assume a depth and complexity in the interior life of the student. LLMs/AI, like all oral techniques, do not assume any such depth or complexity. The skills taught in the university with or without AI are different, because the consciousness of the student is differently assumed and differently formed.
- The Humanities dep. has always been in crisis, especially since the 1300s in Paris, and especially since the 1500s in Europe, and especially since early 1800s in Germany.
- The humanities will endure, even thrive. Assuming all else perishes.
- If the “university” adopts AI except within the humanities dep., the university will only exist within the humanities department. We have yet to find a suitable term for what the larger entity will have become.