What AI Makes MIT Students Ask About Being Human

Linda Rabieh, a senior lecturer in MIT's Concourse program who has been teaching in the first-year learning community since 2010, argues that AI has done the humanities a favour. Her point, as MIT News reports it, is about what the technology makes visible: AI has been useful for making vivid to students today the question of what it means to be human.

The urgency, she says, is new. Students arrive asking what intelligence actually is — whether it is only mathematical intelligence, whether it is only an aggregation of information. That is not a technical question at all, which is presumably why it lands in a humanities seminar.