Agenda

17 June - Herman Cappelen (University of Hong Kong) 
AI and Universities: Extinction or Transformation? 

Bio
Professor Herman Cappelen is a philosopher. He currently works as a Chair Professor of philosophy at the University of Hong Kong and the Director of AI&Humanity-Lab@HKU. His current research focus is on the philosophy of AI, Conceptual Engineering, and the connections between those two. However, his philosophical interests are broad – they cover more or less all areas of systematic philosophy.

Abstract:
Debates about AI often assume that the capacities needed to use AI well are fixed individual competencies. Understanding, critical judgment, and curiosity are treated as things users bring to the technology, rather than capacities partly shaped by it. That assumption is mistaken. These capacities are technology-relative. What counts as understanding, good inquiry, or critical judgment depends partly on the technologies through which thinking is conducted. AI does not simply affect pre-existing human abilities. It changes the conditions under which those abilities are formed and exercised.

This matters because many of the questions that matter most are not questions to which AI, or anything else, can simply provide the correct answer. Moral, political, aesthetic, and other normative questions, as well as questions deeply shaped by human preferences, do not have unique answers. The claim that they do is itself a substantive and disputed philosophical thesis. For these questions, AI can at best present a range of options, each supported by considerations that do not settle the matter. The selection and endorsement of one of those options, and its integration into individual or collective thought and action, is not something AI can do for us.

The implications for higher education are significant. If understanding and judgment are technology-relative, then education cannot aim simply to preserve pre-AI forms of cognition. It must teach students how to think with AI while also cultivating the capacity AI cannot exercise: endorsing ideas and integrating them into inquiry and action. This may be what people have in mind when they say that “humans must take responsibility.” But the slogan does not solve the problem. It points to the philosophical challenge this talk addresses: understanding what endorsement and integration into thought and action amount to in an AI-mediated world.

Registration for online participation: link

The event is part of the seminar series organized by the Venice Centre for Digital and Public Humanities (VeDPH), Department of Humanities, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice.