Posts Tagged ‘Aqsa Ijaz’

You could easily miss this long article with the long title, “Writer, podcaster “Robert Harrison challenges A.I. brain delusion, the Humanities’ deathbed and Fear & Loathing with the Love Bots.” I wouldn’t pass it up I were you. Scott Thomas Anderson has a conversation with Robert Pogue Harrison, Stanford’s leading humanist and Dante scholar, and Aqsa Ijaz, who writes for The Marginalia Review (we’ve written about her on the Book Haven here) and it shouldn’t be missed.

An excerpt:

“We were talking about the horrifying and exciting possibilities of Chat GPT, and I asked, ‘What if it starts to write books like you?” Ijaz reminded Harrison. “And you said, ‘I’m not worried that A.I. will be able to think metaphorically, or write books like mine. I’m worry that it will hasten the day when human beings themselves will no longer be able to think metaphorically and lose access to those depths.’ What do you think is happening in the Humanities? Have students already lost access to their metaphoric depths?”

“I think so, yeah,” Harrison admitted. “At Stanford, when I arrived in the 80s, there was the whole war over the Western canon. It had gone from Western Civilization to ‘Civilization, Ideas and Values.’ So, when they changed the reading list from Western Civ. to ‘C.I.V.,’ essentially, they threw out all the poets. They retained Thomas Aquinas but threw out Dante. They retained Machiavelli and threw out Shakespeare. They retained the theorists, the people who think in terms of concepts, but not in terms of images. So, this isn’t even due to technology, it’s just the fact that our culture is getting more and more prosaic, and professors are more and more in the profession of trafficking in concepts and not in spirit. So, it’s that de-spiritualization. And we’re becoming completely illiterate in terms of the language of imagery, symbol, metaphor. This increasing literalization of reality is a terrible blight on the poetic imagination.”

For Harrison and many of his listeners, that has consequences: This weakening of the full breadth of the human experience is accelerating at the very same moment that the zealots of Tech utopianism would have A.I. replace the human creative capacity all together. Harrison thinks that many of his colleagues are too consumed with indoctrination to see this grim writing on the wall.   

“Rather than them being an antidote or tonic or some kind of corrective to the general disaster that has been visited upon our ordinary human intelligence by technology, and the whole sorcery of the screen, I think the majority of my colleagues in the Humanities – according to my general awareness of the tribe to which I belong – won’t be in a position where we should expect much from them,” Harrison offered. “They won’t be providing a productive alternative or some kind of counter-impulse to the worst disfigurations … It seems to me that it’s just going to render everyone more and more vulnerable to fraud, propaganda, ideological manipulation and greater political polarization. And it’s the same technology that enhances and enables all of these exploitations of human loneliness.”

The conversation turned to AI, perhaps inevitably: NYU professor Gary Marcus, who spoke recently about the extreme confusion society will now face between reality and unreality.

“What criminals are going to do here is create counterfeit people,” Marcus said. “It’s hard to even envision the consequences of that. We have built machines that are bulls in a China shop. Powerful, reckless and difficult-to-control.”

In other words, as these forms of machine learning teach themselves how to play to people’s egos and vanity, breathing in our collective online behavior – and how we use social media to desperately grasp for breadcrumbs of affirmation – these bots get better and better at gauging how a person secretly likes to imagine themself. They will learn to cater to such vulnerabilities, doing so from the guise of some vaguely independent, apparently all-knowing ghost. This alone gives A.I. the potential to be as addictive, or more addictive, than any force we’ve yet encountered in our mammalian experience, especially when love and sex are forced into the equation. And Marcus’s reference to criminals? Up until this point, con artists of average intelligence have been successfully preying on isolated, withdrawn and hurting people, often managing to catfish those victims for tens of thousands of dollars; or in some cases hundreds of thousands. Now imagine what a predictive “super-intelligence” can do to isolated, withdrawn and hurting people.  

Can Silicon Valley and the academic breeding ground that bolsters it somehow chain this part of the genie?  

Having taught at Stanford University for 38 years, Harrison has little faith that the ivy league institutions will be the answer … Read the whole thing here.

Thomas Harrison grew up next to the oldest bridge in the world, on the Aegean in İzmir, Turkey – a city known as Smyrna in the ancient world. The bridge marked the western endpoint of the “Assyrian Route,” the 1500-mile stretch that was the most important trade route in the ancient world. (Legend has it that Homer crossed it as a boy.) The UCLA professor has just written a book about bridges:  Of Bridges: A Poetic and Philosophical Account, (University of Chicago Press). We wrote about that endeavor here.

Which brings to mind another “Harrison” who also grew up in İzmir, next to the same bridge: Stanford’s Robert Pogue Harrison, who is his brother. Thanks to the Robert’s celebrated radio/podcast series, Entitled Opinions, they found a spiritual ally half a world away. Aqsa Ijaz was teaching literature in Pakistan when she discovered the show in 2012. “The show was a strange expansion of my world,” she said. So much so that she’s now a doctoral candidate at the Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University, where she teaches all levels of Urdu. The writer and translator’s academic focus is the North Indian reception of a 12th-century Persian poet, Nizami Ganjavi and his love stories. She’s also featured in an Entitled Opinions interview on Rumi here.

She’s written a review of the Thomas Harrison’s book. It’s over at Marginalia and begins:

“Bridges, of all kinds, have traditionally represented our desire to know and connect with what’s on the other side. They symbolize our hopes to traverse vast and sometimes impossible distances across time and space. As I finished reading Thomas Harrison’s fascinating new book, entitled Of Bridges: A Poetic and Philosophical Account, I remembered that it was the image of the bridge that my grandfather gave me when, as a young girl, I asked him about the nature of our existence and the life hereafter.

“Fond as he was of metaphors, he explained to me that our journey here is like walking on a bridge (pul) a kind of crossing over to the other side. He wanted me to understand the transitory nature of life, which like a bridge allows us only a passage to the other side–not a home. Reading Harrison’s meditations on ‘word bridges’, it struck me that my grandfather used the ultimate bridging capacity of language, i.e., the metaphor to make me comprehend what was essentially incomprehensible. Through the inherent paradox of a bridge; he connected me to the other side in a figure of speech but essentially kept me separate from it. In language, he joined for me what was essentially apart.”

She points out that the Urdu word for death (inteqāl) actually means “crossing over to the other side”, or more accurately, “to transfer.”

Which is in a sense what all three of them have been doing all along. Making bridges of all kinds, whether via books, podcasts, radio shows, or teaching – across continents, linking minds.

Read Aqsa’s article over at Marginalia here.