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<p>Sandra Peter </p> <p>Good evening, everyone, and welcome to A Matter of Life and Tech. Or to put it more dramatically, does the rise of AI mean the death of the humanities?</p> <p> </p> <p>Sandra Peter </p> <p>Thanks for that. Thank you for joining us IRL, at the Sydney Opera House. And we really do appreciate you not sending your agent here. It's very nice to see real faces, not AI faces in the crowd. I am Sandra Peter. I'm Associate Professor at the ±¬ÁÏÍõ, and co-director of Sydney Executive Plus. I'd have to say we help leaders stay ahead in this ever-changing world, and my research focuses on the future, and really on how we bring technology into our lives and into our society and into our work. And tonight I'll be your host, I'll be your AI historian, I'll be a discussion provoker, provocateur, and I'll provide the occasional comic relief on this team. Next to me is Sophie Gee, and Sophie is here to extol the enduring power of the humanities. She is a Professor of English at Princeton University and the co-director of the Ilios Collaboration at the ±¬ÁÏÍõ. You may also, though, know her as the co-host of the Secret Life of Books, a hit podcast about classic books. </p> <p> </p> <p>Sophie Gee </p> <p>Don't forget to subscribe!</p> <p> </p> <p>Sandra Peter </p> <p>Yeah, there's some fans. Yes, exactly. There's some fans already in the crowd. And Kai Riemer is a researcher who's done extensive work on technology and philosophy. He's a Professor of Information Technology and Organisation at the ±¬ÁÏÍõ Business School, and also my co-director and fellow European at Sydney Executive Plus, where we've taught 1000s of leaders about artificial intelligence. And, thank you. And you've also got Titus Grenyer, who you've already heard, who is the manager of the University Organ and Carillon, that is bells and whistles at the ±¬ÁÏÍõ. He is an accomplished pianist, teacher, composer, and he will not be taking requests tonight, so please don't yell out 1000 Miles by Vanessa Carlton. </p> <p> </p> <p>Sandra Peter </p> <p>A quick overview of our main event: you can't spell humanities without A and I. Just checking. Thank you very much. But seriously, besides sharing letters, the two topics interact and collide in many surprising ways, which we, which is what we'll be covering tonight here at the Opera House. And because we are very cultured here on stage, we'll be doing this across three acts. We will start with writing, we'll continue with connection, and then we'll end up in thinking, which, with each act featuring a provocation of sorts that we will discuss. You will laugh, you'll learn some stuff, you'll leave with a new fresh perspective on these things, but first I think we do need to whiz through the history of humanities and artificial intelligence, and I need to message my AI to be able to do this. So I think I'm going to let Sophie start up. </p> <p> </p> <p>Sophie Gee </p> <p>Excellent, I'm keeping it very low tech.</p> <p> </p> <p>Sophie Gee </p> <p>You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoyevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me the most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or whoever had been alive. That's James Baldwin, one of the greatest writers, social activists, and problem solvers of the 20th century. And the words that he gave in that interview, they hook you, don't they? They pull you straight in, as does the tune that Titus was playing Over the Rainbow, which is one of James Baldwin's favourites. He used to play it every morning when he was getting his creative juices flowing before he sat down to write. So Baldwin's alone with his heartbreak. He's isolated, he's trapped, and then he realises. That he can face it in connection with others through the power of reading and encountering art, and it sets him free into action and activism. So, the story that I'm going to be telling over the next few minutes is the story of why we need to feel our heartbreak in order to have the joy and the excitement of being in community with other people. The humanities, the history of the humanities is the story of how humans have realized over and over again that we have to be able to enter other human minds through art and the imagination if we're going to survive, and if we're going to get ourselves out of our current ghastly predicament, so let's go back in time. We're in the late Roman Republic, and we're going to meet the hero of this section of our talk, Marcus Tullius Cicero, who many of you will, of course, know already the great rhetorician and lawyer of the Roman Republic. So it was Cicero who invented the phrase Studio Humanitatis, the study of being human, and he came up with it when he had to defend his old tutor and teacher, who was going to be kicked out of the Roman state for sedition. Cicero knew that he was really up against it with this case, because his tutor had some extremely powerful political enemies, and Cicero knew that if he fell back on the old tricks of rhetoric or legal defense, he wasn't going to stand a chance. So he went wildly off script. He made a very bold and audacious claim, and he made the argument that you cannot have a great state, you can't have powerful politics, you can't have virtuous citizens, you can't have happy people unless you have poets, and by poets he meant all writers and artists. Poets are the people who speak truth to power. Poets are the people who know how to use language in surprising, unexpected, arresting ways, and the chaos, the surprise, the emotional truth of human art is what lets people truly see the world differently. What Cicero perceived in this speech, so long ago, was that the Studio Humanitatis were going to become the key to human transformation. Cicero was watching the rise of authoritarianism and imperial power, and he knew that the weapons against authoritarianism are human feelings transformed by an artist's creativity. He pointed out that the word humanitatis was the opposite of the word acerbitas, which means cruelty. When we embrace and study our humanity, we are going to stand together against cruelty and violence, so Cicero won his case, but he was right. He knew that the Roman Empire would not stand forever, and Western Rome fell under the weight of its own ambition and authoritarianism. For many centuries, Europe entered a poly crisis, escalating problems that were characterised by unpredictability, volatility, complex causes, and uncertain outcomes. We used to call this period the Dark Ages, but I'm rebranding it to a big bright wake-up call to the challenges that we're facing right now in the 21st century. Smash cut 1000 years.</p> <p> </p> <p>Sophie Gee </p> <p>As you can tell, we're officially in the Middle Ages. Europe's first universities are created in Bologna and Oxford, and everyone's studying the arts, rhetoric, grammar, logic, geometry, arithmetic, music, and astronomy, not for their own sake, but in order to be able to solve the really complex human problems of the period. This scene has a certain ring of familiarity. I think everybody you see in that slide got an ATAR of over 99 and they're studying the arts in 13th century Bologna. Back then you could fine your professor if he bored you or ran late for class. Those were the days. So the university system was created to train virtuous citizens in law, medicine, accounting, politics and many other professions, and the great thinkers of the day saw that the humanities undergirded all knowledge, because when very grave, complex human problems come up, we have to solve them by welcoming and accepting the human feelings of pain and suffering, failure, and the fear of uncertainty. Disaster strikes. The Black Death. It comes by ship in 14th century Europe, and it wipes out almost half the continent. This was the great age of heartbreak across humanity, but once again the humanities came to the rescue. The Black Death was the beginning of the Renaissance, the great flowering of the creative arts, of beauty, and of a new kind of financial prosperity, and the possibility, the glimmerings of freedom across many parts of Europe. There was a deep understanding that came out of leaning into the catastrophe of the Black Death, of the plague, that money and power, and yes, even great real estate mean nothing without human intelligence, creative beauty, and deep thinking to bring people together to keep them connected in contact with their emotions and understanding their own inner lives. So now fast forward 300 years.</p> <p> </p> <p>Sophie Gee </p> <p>The age of enlightenment. We're in the 18th century, and all is well. Daniel Defoe writes Robinson Crusoe, which is the first novel in English. For anyone who wants to get snickety about that, we can discuss it afterwards. Defoe, in this novel invented characters and events that looked and sounded and talked just like reality. 18th century readers found novels so realistic, so plausible, so convincing that they often couldn't tell the difference from truth. So it's this man on the left who tells us everything we need to know about generative AI. Just for the record, he's wearing a goat suit, which he made himself. Now that is the first deep fake. With the story of the novel, what we have is the story of humans grappling with generated text about people who seemed so real that for a while we thought, or the 18th century people thought, maybe they wouldn't need real human relationships anymore, maybe people would become so enthralled in the fictions that they'd created, these fakes and forgeries, that we wouldn't care about other humans. Maybe with the novel we were becoming post human. Spoiler alert, we were not. So the last stop on our whirlwind tour of the humanities is in 1818. The young Mary Shelley goes on a wet walking holiday with her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron, and on one especially boozy drug-fueled night, they sit up late, they tell stories, and Mary Shelley writes Frankenstein. Victor Frankenstein is a scientist who makes an artificial human. He trains it, but he doesn't train it right. Frankenstein's creature kills all the people Victor cares about, but Frankenstein isn't a story about how artificial intelligence destroys the humans who have created it. It's about what happens when humans don't respect and understand and properly train the nature of their artificial creations. So we have to be really clear in our minds about what makes us human, heartbreak, chaos, uncertainty, and the ability to reflect on them together with art. These aren't glitches in the human system. These are the greatest assets that we have. Sandra.</p> <p> </p> <p>Sandra Peter </p> <p>But what if. What if every aspect of knowledge, every feature of our intelligence could be so precisely described that a machine could be made to simulate it? We've been fascinated by building intelligent machines ever since the dawn of the humanities, and this is John McCarthy back in the day, who tackles on the most ambitious project. He gets together the greatest minds of his generation, computer scientists, mathematicians, cognitive cognitive psychologists, philosophers, and they get together to build intelligent machines, ladies and gentlemen. We're now in 1956. A rock and roll revolution is happening back in 1956. I see what you're doing there. I see what you're doing there. Elvis Heartbreak Hotel was topping the charts, and somewhere another revolution was brewing. It was all heartbreak, by the way. Back in the day, there was heartbreak with James Baldwin, and there was heartbreak with the tech bros of 1956. At the very famous now Dartmouth conference, which, ladies and gentlemen, was not a conference. It was more like a two month long summer camp where 47 blokes got together, 11 of them showed up to the actual meetings. No women were harmed in the making of AI. Ladies and gentlemen, 47 blokes got together to basically set up the science of building and the engineering of building intelligent machines, and their idea was that we could encode everything that we know into machines, the rules to playing chess, how to organise a birthday party, how to bake a brownie, or even what a cat is. The idea was that experts would encode this, is where coding comes from, into machines every aspect of our knowledge, of our learning, our intelligence. So, if it was a cat, it would be an animal, it could be black, it could be white, it would have four legs and two ears and two eyes and a tail. And this worked. This worked extraordinarily well. Money poured into universities, defense money, government money. We built the first chat bots, like Eliza, that could fool people into thinking they were talking to an intelligent human on the other end, but then very quickly some cracks started to appear in our great plan, because a three-legged cat from the pound, ladies and gentlemen, still a cat, so it has would have three cats, and Picasso's cat with the eyes all messed up, that's still a cat, and the bald cats, they give people with allergies. Still a cat, it was cats all the way down. This was the common sense problem. We would have to explain everything to the machine, so I would have to say that yes, Kai has come to the stage, and so have his on-brand shoes, and Sophie's come to the stage, and her on-brand necklace has come to the stage with her, and my on-brand socks have also come to the stage. We would have to explain everything, and everything turns out is a lot. So the money kind of dried up, and people lost interest in artificial intelligence for quite a while. Winter was coming. Long winter, Peter, Peter Dinklage. Winter was coming, ladies and gentlemen, for 59 episodes, much like that. Nothing happens, except for the nerds in universities, like the three of us, who continue to try to think and come up with a new way of doing artificial intelligence, and by the late 70s, early 80s, we figure out a new way of doing cats. Seriously? Left that one right open. Thank you. A new way of doing cats, and also AI. You will remember this, because this was the last time we did cats. Well, ladies and gentlemen, back in the 1980s, and it's also the last time we had a brilliant idea about how to do AI differently. This carries us all the way to today to ChatGPT, because that brilliant idea was let's not explain the world to the computer, let's give it data about the world, pictures of cats, and let it figure out patterns in those pictures. Heartbreaking moment, by the way. We realise we don't need experts, we just need brute force, lots of data and computing power, but over the years we got exceptionally good at it, because we got more and more data, because you put your grumpy cat on Instagram and said, "My grumpy cat" on this couch on the internet, and we took that data and we figured out how to encode patterns in this data and create a new wave of artificial intelligence. One more thing had to happen to tell my story about AI, and that thing happened just before Covid, the new BCE, so I'm doing there, Sophie, new BCE. We figured out that if you could find patterns in data, we could just flip those algorithms around and create data and patterns, patterns like the ones we've seen before, and first we did that with faces, because we just had a lot, a lot of data, a lot of pictures of faces, because you take a lot of passport pictures and mug shots and other things. By the way, these are all pre-COVID fake faces created by the New York Times, who have a lot more time than us researchers at the ±¬ÁÏÍõ, and probably a lot more money than us at the ±¬ÁÏÍõ, to sit around and create fake faces. We were really good at creating these patterns before Covid, and then during Covid, we had an enormous amount of time to think about what else could we do that with, and we figured out, well, technically you could also do that with text, so we did that with the internet. That is the New York Times website, and the ±¬ÁÏÍõ website, and Wikipedia, and Reddit, and links out of Reddit, the good, the bad, of the humanity. We put it in there, and we figured out simply what words go with what other words in context, we got so good at it that by 2022 something else started to spread a bit like a virus, and we all got it. By 2022 We had figured out a new way of doing patterns in data, we were generating something very, very different to what we expected in the first place, that we would back in 1956, because we always thought we would teach the computer what a cat is, and the way we would encode it is with the letter c a t. We ended up with a machine that encodes numerical patterns in data. This is the word cat for a language model? It's simply the statistical distance to any other word in the English language that matters to the word cat, the word dog and pet, and owner and food and river and sack and microwave oven and vet, everything that might matter to the word cat, and if you stare long enough at the matrix, you will be able to read it. Thank you very much. Because everything that we now generate is generating through these numerical probabilities. I'm going to end my bit on some absolutely gratuitous pictures of cats just because we can. Thought you were just going to keep going tveryhere. nice. </p> <p> </p> <p>Sophie Gee </p> <p>Oh. So relaxing, it really puts me in the mood for some classic literature. </p> <p> </p> <p>Sandra Peter </p> <p>Or act one should be writing. </p> <p> </p> <p>Sophie Gee </p> <p>Yeah, </p> <p> </p> <p>Sandra Peter </p> <p>That's why we are here. It is the humanity, so we are going to start with writing, and I thought, since it is writing, we should bring a couple of pieces of writing. There will be some audience participation, and at least one of these passages is written. At least one is written by Jane Austen. Is it the first one? I'll let you read it out. </p> <p> </p> <p>Sophie Gee </p> <p>I can. </p> <p> </p> <p>Sandra Peter </p> <p>Well, you are, you know,</p> <p> </p> <p>Sophie Gee </p> <p>I inhabit the role, don't I. Here I go, </p> <p> </p> <p>Sandra Peter </p> <p>Professor of English some, somewhere.</p> <p> </p> <p>Sophie Gee </p> <p>I cannot fix on the hour or the spot or the look or the words which laid the foundation. It is too long ago I was in the middle before I knew that I had begun. Is that Jane Austen?</p> <p> </p> <p>Sandra Peter </p> <p>Or is it the second one?</p> <p> </p> <p>Sophie Gee </p> <p>With every civility he offered, and each glance of quiet regard, she felt her once resolute heart surrender, though she scarcely dared confess the depth of her regard. Or is that Jane Austen?</p> <p> </p> <p>Sandra Peter </p> <p>That's some beautiful reading. Let's hear some applause if you thought it was the first one, that is actual Jane Austen.</p> <p> </p> <p>Sophie Gee </p> <p>And the second, you can keep applauding. Thank you very much, all will be revealed.</p> <p> </p> <p>Sandra Peter </p> <p>All will be revealed. Also, now we have applause for the end of the recording, in case that doesn't work out.</p> <p> </p> <p>Sophie Gee </p> <p>Sandra's always thinking ahead, and so was Jane Austen. So, here she is. It took the real Jane Austen 10 years to write that sentence. She started writing Pride and Prejudice in the 1790s and she finished writing it sometime in the early 1800s. And in that interlude she suffered heartbreak, devastating loss, and having to completely remake her life because her father died. She was thrown out of her childhood home. She and her mother wandered somewhat aimlessly from relative's house to relative's house until eventually they ended up in a cottage of their own where Jane Austen would practice the piano every morning at 6o'clock before she would sit down and start to write her books. Now the fascinating thing about the way that Jane Austen did her writing is that she didn't like listening to kind of highbrow, highfalutin stuff of the sort that we would think Austin would like to listen to. She basically liked to listen to the kind of Taylor Swift of her day, the ballads and the airs, and this is what she practiced every morning before she got going. So you can kind of see why it took her 10 years to write it.</p> <p> </p> <p>Sandra Peter </p> <p>Now, Kai, I want to bring you in here to see how the other passage got written, because if that's what Jane Austen's experience was.</p> <p> </p> <p>Kai Riemer </p> <p>First of all, I realise to impersonate an AI expert, I should have worn a goat suit.</p> <p> </p> <p>Sophie Gee </p> <p>Yes, you missed a trick there.</p> <p> </p> <p>Kai Riemer </p> <p>Next time, yes. Better briefing notes. Thank you. Okay, so</p> <p> </p> <p>Sandra Peter </p> <p>Keeping it up for the big stage,</p> <p> </p> <p>Kai Riemer </p> <p>It took, it took</p> <p> </p> <p>Sophie Gee </p> <p>Let's not bog down on the goat suit,</p> <p> </p> <p>Kai Riemer </p> <p>Challenge accepted, challenge accepted, challenge accepted. So it took Jane Austen 10 years to write her bit. It probably took Chat GPT about five seconds to write it's bit, but the question is, how? How can it do that? </p> <p> </p> <p>Sandra Peter </p> <p>Because I'm guessing it was, she wasn't sorry, ChatGPT wasn't practicing</p> <p> </p> <p>Kai Riemer </p> <p>Jane Austen. Well, no, </p> <p> </p> <p>Sandra Peter </p> <p>Or, the piano,</p> <p> </p> <p>Kai Riemer </p> <p>We can. We can show you how this works in a language model. So, how does a language model learn? We always, we do a lot of this in AI when we use terms like learn, because it mathematically encodes the style of Jane Austen-ness. So, we can have a look at what this looks like. So we're bringing you a baby GPT</p> <p> </p> <p>Sandra Peter </p> <p>We're being sizest now. </p> <p> </p> <p>Kai Riemer </p> <p>It's a, it's a small language model. Yeah, we're not being sizest, but it's only seen, not the internet and Reddit, only seen the work of Jane Austen. Okay, so baby GPT, we're training it to learn Jane Austen. So we're looking at a mathematical model, right. There's just numbers in there. There's, by the way, big revelation. There is not a single word of text inside ChatGPT, right. It's all numbers. It's a mathematical model that encodes patterns. So, let's have a look what happens when we train this model. Before we train it, it's just random numbers in the model, so we create a prompt, and I can't read.</p> <p> </p> <p>Sandra Peter </p> <p>You must decide for yourself, said Elizabeth, is the prompt.</p> <p> </p> <p>Kai Riemer </p> <p>Thank you. Is the prompt, and as you can see, it's basically a strong password generator at this point, because it's just random characters, whatever the computer alphabet has. So, what happens now is we start training it, or the training algorithm starts training. It's an automatic brute force problem, that's the heartbreak moment. So it works in rounds. Every round we create an output, we do a mathematical distance comparison between the numbers that represent real Jane Austen text and whatever the output is. We change the model numbers, do another, have another go, and every time we increase the probability that we get closer. Okay, so we do this</p> <p> </p> <p>Sandra Peter </p> <p>250 rounds, </p> <p> </p> <p>Kai Riemer </p> <p>250 rounds.</p> <p> </p> <p>Sandra Peter </p> <p>Same prompt, you must decide for yourself, said Elizabeth.</p> <p> </p> <p>Kai Riemer </p> <p>No more hashtags, no more German umlauts. We're getting closer to English letters.</p> <p> </p> <p>Sandra Peter </p> <p>We'll try 500 rounds.</p> <p> </p> <p>Kai Riemer </p> <p>Yeah, small words appear. He, his, him, there's lots of that, in Jane Austen time, apparently. We do, we do a bit more.</p> <p> </p> <p>Sandra Peter </p> <p>We're at 5000 rounds</p> <p> </p> <p>Kai Riemer </p> <p>5000 rounds. We get close to sentences, bigger words takes about 30,000 rounds for the thing to sound like Jane Austen. Now this is an entirely computational mathematical process by which the model learns to impersonate Jane Austen.</p> <p> </p> <p>Sandra Peter </p> <p>The same prompt, you must decide for yourself, said Elizabeth, rather repeatedly. This is a very agreeable displeasure that they will ever be a very lively makes absolutely no sense, </p> <p> </p> <p>Kai Riemer </p> <p>But sounds</p> <p> </p> <p>Sandra Peter </p> <p>Sounds like Jane Austen, now. It's learned the Jane Austen-ness,</p> <p> </p> <p>Kai Riemer </p> <p>So there you go. This is how ChatGPT does it. </p> <p> </p> <p>Sophie Gee </p> <p>No piano practice at all. </p> <p> </p> <p>Kai Riemer </p> <p>Okay, so just pointing out that the applause was louder for Chat GPT. </p> <p> </p> <p>Sandra Peter </p> <p>So, than the </p> <p> </p> <p>Kai Riemer </p> <p>Yeah</p> <p> </p> <p>Sandra Peter </p> <p>Real</p> <p> </p> <p>Kai Riemer </p> <p>At this stage the goat suit is winning.</p> <p> </p> <p>Sandra Peter </p> <p>So I have a provocation for both of you, and Kai I'll probably go back to you, because you know, these two things looked very similar, but the process is clearly very, very different. Talk about, you know, nonsense and sensibility. </p> <p> </p> <p>Sophie Gee </p> <p>Kaching!</p> <p> </p> <p>Sandra Peter </p> <p>See what I did there? Where's the piano,</p> <p> </p> <p>Kai Riemer </p> <p>Titus!</p> <p> </p> <p>Sandra Peter </p> <p>When you need it, so my first provocation to the two of you is, can AI write classics?</p> <p> </p> <p>Kai Riemer </p> <p>I don't know.</p> <p> </p> <p>Sandra Peter </p> <p>Probably not.</p> <p> </p> <p>Kai Riemer </p> <p>So, so are most people. So what we know is, we know is that we can encode the voice of writers, and we've just seen this, and we also know that humans are really not very good at telling the difference, right? So we've just seen this here, and there's lots of research. So Nature's published a study where people couldn't basically tell the difference between AI-generated poems and real poems, in fact, they actually preferred the AI-generated poems for rhythm and beauty, whatever that means.</p> <p> </p> <p>Sandra Peter </p> <p>So, you're in good company, no one can tell. </p> <p> </p> <p>Kai Riemer </p> <p>We've tested this with essays where people couldn't tell the difference. It's basically just random whether they can see it or not. However, interesting fact, and that's a Princeton study. When we tell people they look at the same text, we tell them it's written by a human or it's written by AI, they clearly prefer the human written text, even though they're looking at the same one, by about 14%. By the way, you do that with ChatGPT, ChatGPT is even more biased, prefers the human written text in 35% of the cases, even though there's no difference, so clearly there's something going on there.</p> <p> </p> <p>Sandra Peter </p> <p>Yeah, is that surprising, Sophie?</p> <p> </p> <p>Sophie Gee </p> <p>Well, it's a little disappointing that this great art form that took Austen and countless others so long to master it can be replicated in a matter of mere seconds. The question to me from all of this is, sort of, why does it matter now? I think when I first heard about ChatGPT being capable of writing, I thought to myself, well, that's insane. And then when I saw it do it, I thought, whoa, that's a game changer. That's insane. We're all going to be out of a job. So what I sort of want us to think about is, is what what is human writing, you know, what, what actually takes place when we write as humans, and in a kind of correlated question, what actually happens cognitively when we read, because that those feel like the really crucial questions here, so I think that there's a certain kind of fear surrounding AI, right, which is, if this machine can do it, then do I need to learn how to make the machine do it? Do I need to stop, stop writing? Do I need to kind of abandon this craft if I'm, if I or my children are interested in the art of writing, the art of reading in humanity subjects, should I be throwing those things away? Because suddenly we see that we have these very powerful machines that can do it for us, and you know, as you've probably figured out, I'm going to say no, we shouldn't, we shouldn't stop writing. So here are some things that happen to us when we write, we have this default modal network in our brain, and it's kind of whirring away all the time, and it's the side of our brain that is our creative side, but it's also our very incoherent side. It's the side where the sort of slosh thoughts are kind of running through it, and it can be very free flowing, but it also can be intensely ruminative, and it's not particularly good at making sense or solving problems. Now, what happens when we write, when we either physically write or do computer writing, is that we activate neural pathways that integrate our prefrontal cortex and the emotional centres in our brain, and they help all of this activity in the default modal network to kind of settle down and to become structured, and the impact of that is to give us coherence, to give us a capacity for critical thought, to give us a capacity for emotional regulation, and none of these things do we have unless we are fit. Physically and cognitively engaging in the act of writing, and correlatively the act of reading. So, in other words, you might be able to generate writing from chat, and sometimes it might give us some pleasure, but what's really important is not the fact of having written something, it's not the generating of writing, it's this process that takes place when we as humans write, and that's the first thing that I kind of want to say by way of intervention. So, what have you got to say to that, chat bot?</p> <p> </p> <p>Sandra Peter </p> <p>Is it fair then to say that AI can't write at all?</p> <p> </p> <p>Kai Riemer </p> <p>Did you just call me a chatbot, by the way? That is now a real thing, right? Humans are spending a lot of time trying to not sound like a chatbot online.</p> <p> </p> <p>Sandra Peter </p> <p>There's an.. there's an app to make whatever you wrote by Chat GPT sound like a human,</p> <p> </p> <p>Kai Riemer </p> <p>It's called 'Sinceerly' misspelled. That's the point. So, </p> <p> </p> <p>Sandra Peter </p> <p>You can have human and CEO, I think.</p> <p> </p> <p>Kai Riemer </p> <p>Yeah, yeah, they're two separate categories, human and CEO. CEO just removes most of the words and put send from my iPhone at the end, But, but the point is you can basically use AI to sound more human, right? So you want to think about that for a bit, but, but that's it, right? Yeah, so that is interesting, right? So, what we want, what we want you to understand is that we need to be very careful judging AI on the basis of its outputs. We tend to think because it produces text ergo it must write, right? But the point is that it arrives at the same output in a very different way, right? So, when we as humans, write as you said, we learn, we have thoughts, we actually work on the words, and we are creating the mind. AI doesn't do any, like anything like that, so it might shock you, but AI does not learn. Now, what we mean by that is, we've seen earlier the training process, right, when we mathematically encode, even if we called that learning. This happens before you use Chat GPT. The moment we deploy these models for you to use, this thing has no ability to still learn. It's static every time you use it. It's the same model,</p> <p> </p> <p>Sandra Peter </p> <p>The P in GPT.</p> <p> </p> <p>Kai Riemer </p> <p>That has to actually be retrained. Yeah, the P in GPT, generative pre-trained transformers, right? So, nothing happens inside the model, other than we are generating text, but it doesn't change that. </p> <p> </p> <p>Sandra Peter </p> <p>We can do some tricks to fool you into thinking that they learn.</p> <p> </p> <p>Kai Riemer </p> <p>Yeah, right. And so this, I think, is the biggest difference. So, if you, if you look at the human process of writing on on that account, no AI doesn't write, but it does produce something that looks an awful lot like it,</p> <p> </p> <p>Sophie Gee </p> <p>so it can be sort of quite handy. One of the most telling studies that I've read on this topic was an MIT Media Lab study, where they had a bunch of students do an essay writing task, and some of the students had no assistance, i.e. they didn't use ChatGPT or the internet, they didn't use anything, they just wrote. Some of the students were allowed to use ChatGPT to do some research, some of them were allowed to use the internet to do some research, and they used various MRI technologies to observe their brain patterns while this was going on. Now there was a really marked drop in brain activity, not just for the students who were using ChatGPT to do their writing, but for the students who were using any kind of assistance or digital and technological intervention, and what this is kind of telling us is that these absolutely crucial human capacities, which include our capacity for critical analysis, our capacity to have working memory to build what we call model of mind, which is being inside your own self and being able to extrapolate or understand or empathetically project what it's like to be inside another mind, all of those basic human skills, which are fundamental not just to our survival, not merely to our survival, but to our capacity to work effectively and to be in human communities in a way that's actually going to allow us to prosper. All of these things are literally generated by the act of writing, and it's, and it's co-pilot the act of reading. So this kind of comes back to this question, which I think is genuinely fascinating, namely, what the hell, why do people enjoy synthetically generated classic texts more than they appear to enjoy the real thing? I mean, that's a, that's kind of a damning little factoid about AI, I think. I mean, what's your take on it?</p> <p> </p> <p>Kai Riemer </p> <p>Well, shockingly, I agree with you, but the main thing is, I mean, you know, when we give students essays to write, we're not interested in filling our hard drives or folders with their product, right. We want them to go through the process of actually learning and wrestling with the thoughts in order to basically have these insights and build neural pathways and learn. So, I think that's an important bit. So, people, I think they enjoy time saved, right? And you know, there's so much going on in the student's life, right. So we want, we want,</p> <p> </p> <p>Sandra Peter </p> <p>And an educator's life, right, because</p> <p> </p> <p>Kai Riemer </p> <p>And an educator's life we want to reduce the friction,</p> <p> </p> <p>Sandra Peter </p> <p>Usually provide the lesson plans, the feedback.</p> <p> </p> <p>Kai Riemer </p> <p>What?</p> <p> </p> <p>Sandra Peter </p> <p>Am I giving it away?</p> <p> </p> <p>Kai Riemer </p> <p>What I want to say is interestingly, and I think this is also important. There's been a study in Canada where they had 600 odd college students go through this exercise of writing an essay or writing whatever assignment it was, and then use ChatGPT to edit it, and they found that when ChatGPT was editing it, they thought the output was stronger, right? Maybe sounded more confident, but it wasn't theirs any longer, they couldn't see themselves in the writing, and they sort of had this alienation, and was like, this is no longer my product, right? This doesn't represent me. Now, probably not important for every college class, but it does tell us a little bit about what happens in writing, right, because we are producing something that is ours and that reflects us, and we put a lot of, you know, heartbreak into it when we, you know, come up against the deadline. Now,</p> <p> </p> <p>Sandra Peter </p> <p>This becomes an existential challenge to how we see ourselves, right? Because writing is something that we use to find out who we are. It's also part of our identity at work, and we know one of the projects in which the two of us have tracked conversations around AI, that this idea of the impact of AI on identity and who we think we are is one of the biggest, most important conversations across whether you're looking at things like The Economist or the Harvard Business Review or the best business books of the year, our concern is very much with what is it doing to our identity,</p> <p> </p> <p>Kai Riemer </p> <p>But</p> <p> </p> <p>Sophie Gee </p> <p>And. Are we going with the but or the end?</p> <p> </p> <p>Kai Riemer </p> <p>We're going to go with the and, and then I'll bring your but.</p> <p> </p> <p>Sophie Gee </p> <p>So there's this field called of study about embodied cognition, which is this idea that when we write and when we read and do other manual human tasks, we are producing an artifact. We're producing an object that appears not to be embodied, it appears not to have a kind of embodied trace of human intervention, but actually it holds within it these traces of not just human cognition, but the fact that when a human produces something using the mind, we are also using our whole body, which includes our emotional lives, our literally our metabolic lives are kind of loaded into these objects that we create, and so that feeling that people have when they produce something that they haven't actually produced with their own hearts and minds and bodies that feeling of slight alienation that's real, and it's because they haven't actually loaded a kind of embodied self into the thing that they've been creating, and to me that comes back to this question of the fake Jane Austen versus the real Jane Austen. Now, there's something sort of soothing and pleasing about synthetically generated classic literature, because it kind of, it, it sounds like you want an Austen-y voice to sound. It's sort of, it's soothing, it's pleasant, it's kind of fancy. It makes you sound sort of smart and educated. The real Jane Austen, actually, is much harder to read, it's spotty, it's got some weird word choices. It sort of doesn't make you feel that good. The syntax kind of trips you up, it's kind of convoluted, it's kind of a little bit uncomfortable, especially when you read a whole bunch of it. And that, I think, is precisely the problem, because we have to be able to immerse ourselves in that kind of discomfort. It's called deep reading and deep writing, and it's the discomfort and the cognitive and embodied and emotional processes that take place when we are actually involved in these processes, and we don't like them because we are avoiders of discomfort, we humans.</p> <p> </p> <p>Kai Riemer </p> <p>But ,I have to write an awful lot of committee reports, and I don't want to put my embodied existence into it. </p> <p> </p> <p>Sophie Gee </p> <p>No way! Forget embodied cognition! </p> <p> </p> <p>Kai Riemer </p> <p>I just need to get it done, right. </p> <p> </p> <p>Sophie Gee </p> <p>Yeah, </p> <p> </p> <p>Kai Riemer </p> <p>So, you know, we also want to say that this stuff is still really, really useful, because in a lot of what we do day in, day out, we have to produce a lot of text without, you know, going through the act of writing, and I think what we want to say is this technology is immensely useful for many of the tasks where text is in play in many of our jobs, but we do want to also keep a balance, recognising that writing in whatever profession is still important, where you have to shape your thoughts and you have to learn and produce something that is novel, and then for the rest of it, just feel free to use the chatbot.</p> <p> </p> <p>Sandra Peter </p> <p>Okay, so let me, let me sum this up, because two more provocations for you. What does this mean for all of you? You need to find some balance, and by all means, as Kai said, embrace the convenience of text production for stuff like filling out forms or drafting passive aggressive emails, but when it comes to writing as meaning making, as thinking, as learning, do that yourself. Automate the admin be, but author the big things. Yeah,</p> <p> </p> <p>Sophie Gee </p> <p>I think that's fair.</p> <p> </p> <p>Sandra Peter </p> <p>Think we should have Titus in the office every day, and every time we have a thought,</p> <p> </p> <p>Kai Riemer </p> <p>Every time we start a new committee report, it's like,</p> <p> </p> <p>Sophie Gee </p> <p>Thank you Titus. </p> <p> </p> <p>Sandra Peter </p> <p>So we're closing that chapter, and we're now going to focus on feelings, which machines do not have, or do they? Damn it, I thought that was a good, that was a good, </p> <p> </p> <p>Kai Riemer </p> <p>That was, </p> <p> </p> <p>Sandra Peter </p> <p>To be fair, act two is, act two is connection, and there's something really interesting happening with connection, because literature, pop culture, Hollywood have gotten us all used to the very idea that if artificial intelligence was ever going to come, it would be accurate and objective and rational. It would be Commander Data from Star Trek, or it would be The Terminator. Seriously, now you do it?</p> <p> </p> <p>Sandra Peter </p> <p>Thank you. The idea is that we were promised these really cold machines that would be accurate and objective, but would struggle with humanity. This guy couldn't crack a joke, collect any source of empathy, and what we ended up with is something completely different. We got you them charming chatbots, because these machines are not accurate, not objective, but they are more persuasive than humans. They can mimic empathy, they can read you and respond to you. There are charming robots at play. Hence, my second provocation of the day. My second provocation is, can AI understand you? What does that mean for us? If we created this sycophantic Mr. Darcy Robots,</p> <p> </p> <p>Kai Riemer </p> <p>Are you looking at me?</p> <p> </p> <p>Sandra Peter </p> <p>No, I'm looking at you,</p> <p> </p> <p>Kai Riemer </p> <p>Well, as you said, </p> <p> </p> <p>Sandra Peter </p> <p>You with your emails and everything,</p> <p> </p> <p>Kai Riemer </p> <p>We have, a, we have a whole bunch of research now that shows that these chatbots can write more empathetically. They did a study with about 200 actual patient questions on Reddit that real doctors responded to. They rewrote responses with ChatGPT, and people found the ChatGPT ones consistently more empathetic than the real doctor ones, and there's been,</p> <p> </p> <p>Sandra Peter </p> <p>ChatGPT is not overworked and on the page, but sure, continue.</p> <p> </p> <p>Kai Riemer </p> <p>Right, but also they've been more than 10 studies since that have found similar results, so the patterns we encode that mimic our humanity can be brought to bear in ways that surely sound fairly empathetic and also more persuasive, so they had about 800 people debate either humans or ChatGPT, GPT four online, and they were both doing basically on par, but when they gave some demographic socio-demographic background on the person to the GPT and the human, the GPT was about 80% more likely to convince the human of its </p> <p> </p> <p>Sandra Peter </p> <p>80.</p> <p> </p> <p>Kai Riemer </p> <p>Point. Yes, so with a bit more background or context, AI is more persuasive than the average human writer, and far, and by far, so. So you know, does it understand us? It doesn't have the capacity to really do it, but it is very good at mimicking it, right? And, and that is both something that is significant and can be very useful to us, but it's also a problem, right, because we can use it to manipulate people at scale, so it's something that we really should be paying attention to, because as you said, we didn't build the kind of AI that we thought would arrive when it finally arrives,</p> <p> </p> <p>Sophie Gee </p> <p>Right? It's like Mr. Darcy, it's not like the Terminator. Yeah, exactly,</p> <p> </p> <p>Kai Riemer </p> <p>Which is also good news, because it's unlikely to ever want things and destroy us, but it might want to seduce us.</p> <p> </p> <p>Sophie Gee </p> <p>Well, it definitely wants to seduce us, and we want to be seduced. We've always been these, these discomfort-avoiding creatures, and now we've got the perfect way to avoid discomfort, which is by conversing with a chat bot, and you know, I think probably everyone in the room knows a teenager who has, who has used Chat GPT to try out some social scenario GPT or versions of AI are being used for for various therapeutic interventions for different ways of training conversation, so there's there are lots of things to sort of pay attention to in this realm of connection and community, and the question of whether AI in any way can replace a human version of it. So, you know, I would start as a humanist by going back to the same point that I was making about reading and writing, which is that the crucial thing about all these human capacities is that they're not simply cognitive, they don't simply produce words, they are embodied, and they involve our whole what we call affective lives or emotional selves. And so, when we are engaged in an act of communication or connection, what we're actually doing is sharing bodies and minds through words, and we're doing that without even really fully being aware that we're doing so, which is why when you hear the James Baldwin passage, or someone says something to you that really just strikes at your heart, you find yourself completely taken aback, you find yourself almost having an out of body experience, because actually, what's happened is that your body, your mind has been touched by that of another person, and it's this truly miraculous human capacity that we have. So I think we sort of want to come back to the question of how AI is useful, very briefly. No, go,</p> <p> </p> <p>Sandra Peter </p> <p>No, go on.</p> <p> </p> <p>Sophie Gee </p> <p>On the subject, </p> <p> </p> <p>Sandra Peter </p> <p>How can it be useful?</p> <p> </p> <p>Sophie Gee </p> <p>Well, this is kind of it. Tell it goes both ways. These pieces of information. So, two of the most famous studies done, longitudinal studies done, about predicting human longevity are the Harvard Adulthood Study, which is now directed by Robert Waldinger, it's been going since 1938 and it has shown it studied adult men at various stages of their lives, and it's shown that by a long way, more important than diet, more important than health, more important than wealth, human connection is the biggest predictor of longevity being in human relationships and human communities. And then there's another study, which is a kind of parallel and also very interesting longevity study called the Framingham Heart Study, that went for 20 years. It was done by Harvard and Yale researchers, and what that discovered, what that learned is that people who are surrounded by other happy people, the happiness starts to spread outward. People aren't just, people aren't just either happy or unhappy in their network of friends, but if you are surrounded by people who share a kind of emotional or embodied cognition with you, then it starts to spread. It has a kind of viral effect, and so what these studies show us, of course, is that being in real human connection with our, with our bodies and our emotions is absolutely fundamental to human survival. So that raises some questions, because we have these really convenient, easy to access, useful tools for conversing and training the emotions and training us in all sorts of social skills, which are these these AI-generated models. So, what place can they play in this landscape where ultimately what we need is embodied emotionally driven, affectly driven, affectively driven human communication.</p> <p> </p> <p>Kai Riemer </p> <p>So, there's obviously a lot of research going on, and it, this technology finds us ill prepared, right? Because we didn't expect this to happen, and it's fairly new, and it comes to us full on, right, and people are building relationships and connections with this technology. We know this from ChatGPT to bespoke companion apps. There's a lot of technology out there that is basically there to seduce us and allure us into building relationships and spend more time, right. Um, so on the one hand, we want to say this seductive nature and the way in which they play to our vulnerabilities, because language is the social operating system. It basically opens us up, and the chatbot understands us, right, and it mimics human connection really, really well. It also answers my questions about complex social situations, right, that I might have, and, and so people go to it and ask about how should I have behaved, and there's, we've seen cases where people record their dates, right, disturbingly, and give it to Chat GPT afterwards, and </p> <p> </p> <p>Sandra Peter </p> <p>Date maxing,</p> <p> </p> <p>Kai Riemer </p> <p>Date maxing, yes, date maxing, you know, well, How should I have reacted, you know, why did she not come home with me? You know, what did I got? What did I do wrong, right? So, and the fear now is, do we actually sort of enter a spiral of social deskilling? Is there, is that a problem? And research is being done on doing this, and you know, on the one hand, I want, we want to say AI isn't your friend, because there's big tech at the other end.</p> <p> </p> <p>Sophie Gee </p> <p>Yeah,</p> <p> </p> <p>Kai Riemer </p> <p>On the other hand, we also see a lot of positive uses of the kind of conversational interfaces, because we can use the same technology that seduces us into thinking there's something more going on than there really is to make, you know, applications complex text, medical information more accessible to all kinds of audiences. We can use this, and we've seen this to a certain extent. We can people feel less lonely when they use these companion apps. We've seen positive example in trauma therapy with PTSD, where people are opening up to a chatbot precisely because they know there isn't a human to judge them, right? So you have the conversation abilities, but you take the human element off the plate. So there's a lot of good about it, and there's a lot to be concerned about it, and it's early days.</p> <p> </p> <p>Sandra Peter </p> <p>It is early days, but again with the what does this mean for you in the room, and I think again balance is key, because AI can, as you've heard, help you explore or even prepare for some complex situations that you're facing down the road. Please do not do the date maxing thing, but the challenge is to resist it, because this is a very, very seductive technology. So, maybe we could consider this kind of a wake-up call to identify, understand, and continue to cultivate those most distinctive and virtuous aspects of being human. I know that there's one more, we've got five more minutes for one last provocation, one last act that I want to bring in here, </p> <p> </p> <p>Sandra Peter </p> <p>Yeah, you didn't do that when we rehearsed it, did you? Very nice, but the last one is the most important provocation of them all, because this is going to be all about thinking, because on the one hand we do know that some of these technologies are actually really, really good at passing tests, and there's a 2025 study that I'm sure one of you will bring up where Open AI aced most law school final exams, not ±¬ÁÏÍõ Law School final exams, one of the finest institutions in the world, and one of the best law schools, but another fine university, and we know that already in 2023 it was passing the bar exam, so this thing seems to be very good at taking exams, makes you wonder where learning is heading, but on the other hand, I remember you said stuff about Cicero being a lawyer, so you know,</p> <p> </p> <p>Sophie Gee </p> <p>So could he have used Chat GPT to win that speech for him?</p> <p> </p> <p>Sandra Peter </p> <p>Yeah,</p> <p> </p> <p>Sophie Gee </p> <p>Well, I'm going no on that one, and I want to kind of go back to the explanation Cicero gave for why he went completely off script when he gave that famous defense speech, where the stakes were really incredibly high, and an actual human's fortunes were involved. He knew that he couldn't just go to kind of boilerplate or predictable arguments from legal history or from his bar exams. He said, in the presence of a crowded audience of citizens, my speech should be made in a style out of keeping, not merely with the conventions of the bar, but also with forensic language, and so what Cicero is picking up on there, obviously, is that for real transformative thought to happen, we have to be not predictive, not referring back to human patterns of thought or cognition or conclusion that we have already reached, but we have to be able to leap forward into new frontiers that can't be predicted and can't be foreseen, and this I think is where AI starts to become more of a problem.</p> <p> </p> <p>Sandra Peter </p> <p>That is my provocation, though. Well, can't unfortunately, all speak like Cicero, so some of us are still using AI, and the idea of getting it to pass tests is really tempting. So, my last provocation, and I'll hear brief arguments from both parties, is do we still need to think now that we've got AI? </p> <p> </p> <p>Sophie Gee </p> <p>Yes,</p> <p> </p> <p>Kai Riemer </p> <p>Yeah. You know, well, first of all, I want to say AI isn't actually thinking right. These model developers use a whole lot of human language to give the illusion that it's thinking, and even the models that do the reasoning or the thinking mode, and they sort of show you their thinking traces. Researchers at Arizona State did a study to try and see whether these intermediate sentences, these intermediate tokens, had any role to play in whether the actual outcome was better. And spoiler alert, no, they're basically generated to make you feel better and to pass the time that it takes to generate an output, a complex output, right. So these reasoning traces are nothing like reasoning traces, they're just probably just for show. However, still very useful technology to work, to help us work through complex problems, right. And I think the key here is to not outsource your thinking. There's been interesting studies by Anthropic that have shown that programmers who work a lot with these tools to create their code had a severe drop off in comprehension in coding skills and things like that, so you know, we might be able to produce outcomes, but we might actually erode our own skill and expertise, which, ironically, because the people who have this expertise are much better using the tools is the necessary ingredient to be effective with the tools, so the question is, how do we elevate and still keep our expertise that makes us effective in working with the tools, giving context, and not erode that because we offload our thinking to the tools, and I think that's the thing that we need to talk about. This thing helps us thinking, maybe, but we still have to think, because we're the only one in this relationship that does the thinking.</p> <p> </p> <p>Sophie Gee </p> <p>Yeah, so I mean, there's a balance to be struck, right? And I think the common fear that people have is that these AI models, these AI tools that we have, we can plug out, we can plug questions into them, they're going to give us answers back quite quickly, and when you start to see how quickly and actually, how relatively accurately AI answers can be to thought prompts that we give them. You start to kind of doubt yourself. You think, well, it takes me much longer to think that through. My thinking is much muddier, my thinking is much less crisp, and it's much less definitive. You know, human thought patterns tend to be far more, gravitate far more toward ambiguity, uncertainty, a kind of state of not knowing, whereas you're never going to get a state of not knowing out of AI. It's going to immediately give you an answer, and it's going to be its best answer that it can come up with. Now, there can be something kind of disconcerting about that, and so again, as with the other categories of provocation that we've spoken about tonight, I want us to think about the nature of human thinking, because I think in order for us to understand the real power that artificial intelligence can have, we really have to understand the nature of human thought, and vice versa. In order to understand the power of human thought, we really have to understand the nature of artificial intelligence. So, as you've said, artificial intelligence does all these things behind the scenes that I don't understand with numbers, and it spits out a very quick, definitive, relatively accurate answer. Human thought is the absolute opposite of that, it meanders it, it finds contradictions, it holds multiple contradictions, it gets confused, it says things that are wrong a lot of the time. Now it turns out that all of these qualities, all of these capacities are unbelievably important to the development of our cognitive capacities to our maintaining memory to our being able to be in empathetic social situations and actually to be able to process the very complex realities of human emotional struggles and the feeling of being humans in real living changing bodies over time, now none of these things can be encapsulated or incorporated into artificial intelligence. So the very things that we think count against human thought, that make it messy and muddy and murky and inaccurate, those are the very qualities of human thought that we need to prize, and we need to pay attention to. Now, since my job tonight is to flog arts degrees, loop back very briefly to the history of the humanities, to remind us all that what that history keeps showing us is that we think we can hack our problems, we think we can avoid heartbreak, which is the sort of shorthand for all embodied emotional awareness that we have as humans, we think we can avoid that, right? We can, we can cheat around it. It always comes back, and if we're not ready, then it's really going to get us in the end. So, what the humanities are doing is building up these capabilities in critical thinking, in flexibility, in listening for multiple voices, in watching for contradictions, and holding uncertainties and ambiguities simultaneously over long periods of time, these are extraordinary skills for us to be able to have, and one of the things I stop in one second, but one of the things that I hope that people are starting to see.</p> <p> </p> <p>Sandra Peter </p> <p>Titus is going to make you,</p> <p> </p> <p>Sophie Gee </p> <p>Titus is going to do an intervention. One of the things that I hope people are starting to see is that precisely because of these very powerful AI tools that we have, we can actually do this quite brilliant interaction between the human capacity for uncertainty and ambiguity and the AI capacity for certainty and definition.</p> <p> </p> <p>Kai Riemer </p> <p>And. See, I learned</p> <p> </p> <p>Sophie Gee </p> <p>Nice!</p> <p> </p> <p>Kai Riemer </p> <p>And, and we want to basically say that there are lots of occasions where it's absolutely okay, use it as an assistant, offload your work, and get some input. However, in this, we do this a lot in our AI upskilling to try and get, </p> <p> </p> <p>Sandra Peter </p> <p>Something too,</p> <p> </p> <p>Kai Riemer </p> <p>Trying to get people to change their relationship or add to their relationship with AI a different dimension where you had, you have it help you think, because it can be an amazing thinking partner, where it creates stuff that prompts you to think better. You might not use the text, but you can have it challenge you. You can upload your work and have it give feedback, and there are lots and lots of ways of working that help you build your expertise and help you build thinking, but they're not immediately obvious, because the user interface, and we're trained to be a creatures of habit, right? The user interface entices us to ask a question to get an answer right, because this is how we train from search engines, right? So the challenge then also is to people to think about ways in which this amazing technology that has so much compressed patterns and knowledge can help you think better rather than, you know, think for you, right. We want to help sort of uplift what is human about us, the thinking bit, rather than surrender it to the machine, and I think that's the challenge to all of us. </p> <p> </p> <p>Sandra Peter </p> <p>Can you guess what that means for you? Have a think, starts with a B. Balance again, treat this as an assistant, as an advisor, as a sparring partner, but do not let it take the wheel. Right. Steve Jobs called these things bicycles for the mind, computers. You don't want the thing that's in Wall-E, where the people just wobble around, right? Do not let AI take the wheel. AI can't think, and it's more important than ever now that we do that thinking. And now that I come to think about it, someone should do a show, a much longer show about this at the Opera House, </p> <p> </p> <p>Kai Riemer </p> <p>But we are at the Opera House!</p> <p> </p> <p>Sophie Gee </p> <p>That is the true takeaway,</p> <p> </p> <p>Sandra Peter </p> <p>That is the true takeaway. We do want to end this, however, with a few more notes. Yeah, there we go, because I think AI impacts how we write, how we read, how we feel, how we relate, how to, how we think about things, and it's important to strike a balance, but we think there's something else you could also do, and the thing about life is that every time you learn something, there is another lesson just around the corner, and you never really know everything. In times of upheaval, we turn to great philosophers, as you suggested. We turn to a figure who, like James Baldwin and Elvis, and all the AI researchers and tech bros, is really acquainted with heartbreak. We turn to the poet laureate of feelings big and small. We turn to,</p> <p> </p> <p>Sandra Peter </p> <p>Very, very good. Besides balance in this very rapidly changing world, your curiosity is absolutely critical. We want you to learn new things, new things. We want you to unlearn ideas that maybe no longer serve you well. We want you to indulge your human desire for discovery. And by being here tonight, you've already off to a very good start. And we, the people on stage, can also help you learn and unlearn things about both AI and the humanities. If you are into AI, the AI dexterity sprint will help you learn how to make AI work for you, and if you're keen on the humanities, we have the Humanities Thinking Masterclass, where you will learn to read between the lines, and if you're about anything else, the Skills Horizon, you'll learn how to make sense of all the messiness in the future. This is the last report you will ever need, and we will put out, put it out every year, but we do want to thank you all for joining us for a freemium version of this Opera House performance. There are no post-credit sequences, but we do have a blockbuster version of what you've just seen tonight in the works, so please stay tuned for that. Very nice! Slide jokes, slides, and jokes. Events like these do not make themselves, so we do want to thank our team at Sydney Executive Plus and the ±¬ÁÏÍõ Marketing and Events Team for making this possible. And thanks in advance to the Opera House for hosting our next event. For more information about very, very awesome public talks and learning resources, you should go to Sydney Ideas at sydney.edu.au/sydney-ideas. I want to thank Sophie and thank Kai, and I do want to thank the magnificent Titus there at the end, who will, </p> <p> </p> <p>Sophie Gee </p> <p>Thank you Titus.</p> <p> </p> <p>Sandra Peter </p> <p>Play us out. Thank you, Titus, and thank you, everyone, and have a good night.</p>
For centuries, the humanities and technology have existed alongside and augmented each other. If we dive into their shared story, we can learn valuable lessons about how to both embrace our humanity and engage withÌýnew technology, so weÌýdon'tÌýget trapped in ‘either/or’ thinking. By exploring how our human intelligence works, humanities can also make artificial intelligence less daunting and more meaningful.
In this special event, your storytellers will be Sophie Gee, Sandra Peter, and Kai Riemer. Plus, music from Titus Grenyer. Together, they’llÌýbring the evolving—and sometimes contentious—relationship between the human spirit and machine intelligence to life in various vivid ways.Ìý
Explore a shared story 600-years in the making that will surprise, inspire, and help you thrive IRL in our tech-inflected future.
This event was held on Tuesday 19 May at the Sydney Opera House.
 is a professor in the English Department at Princeton University. At the ±¬ÁÏÍõ she holds roles as theÌýinaugural Vice-Chancellor's FellowÌý(2024–) and co-director of theÌýEleosÌýCollaboration in theÌýOffice of theÌýDeputy Vice-Chancellor (Community and Leadership). TheÌýCollaboration builds academic knowledge that is compassionate and communal.ÌýÌý
She is a novelist, journalist and scholar and her most recent book is a history of 18th century novels, eating rituals and empire called Ìý(Princeton University Press, 2026). Sophie isÌýco-host of the , a podcast about classic books.
Ìýleads executive and leadership development inÌýcutting-edgeÌýareas of business, technology, and society.  She has spoken around the world and been told that she should do stand-up (be warned: some of her presentationsÌýcontainÌýAI-generated cats). Ìý
As an Associate Professor at the ±¬ÁÏÍõ Business School and Co-Director of Sydney Executive Plus (SE+), Sandra spends her time thinking about the future, researching the future, consulting on the future, and speaking about the future.Ìý
Alongside Dr Kai Riemer, she heads Sydney Executive Plus (SE+), which focuses on preparing leaders for what comes next. So far, SE+ has helped upskill executives and leaders across 20+ industries in areas ranging from AI Fluency to Geopolitics and Business to Quantum Opportunities.
Ìýworks with boards and executives to bring foresightÌýexpertiseÌýand deep understanding of emerging technologies into strategy and leadership.Ìý
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HeÌýspecialisesÌýin digital technology, artificial intelligence, the future of work, leadership and skills, and the management of change and transformation. He has shared his thinking and insights on these areas with audiences across the globe.Ìý
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Kai is Professor of Information Technology andÌýOrganisationÌýat the ±¬ÁÏÍõ Business School. Alongside DrÌýSandraÌýPeter,Ìýhe’sÌýthe Co-Director of Sydney Executive Plus (SE+), which focuses on digital-first leadership development. So far, SE+ has helped upskill executives and leaders across 20+ industries in areas ranging from AI Fluency to Geopolitics and Business toÌýQuantumÌýOpportunities.
Titus isÌýManager, University Organ and Carillon at the ±¬ÁÏÍõ. He is one of Australia's leading organists, with a passion for sharing accessible music with local and international audiences.
Titus graduated from the University with a Bachelor of Music (Perfromance) in Organ Studies at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music in 2020 with First Class Honours. He is also an accomplished pianist, teacher and composer.ÌýÌý
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