This year’s Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities makes connections between the historic connection between humans and technology suggesting that we are better together. Arguing against a vision of technology that aims for artificial intelligence (i.e. to pass the Turing Test), and for a view held by Ada Lovelace in which computers and humans are always co-partners (one benefiting from the other), Walter Isaacson ties in the relationship between the Humanities and science.

As human intelligence is to that of computers, Isaacson suggested, so the humanities are to the sciences. “[I]f we are to retain our role as partners with our machines,” he said, “we must continue to nurture the humanities…. That’s what we bring to this party.”

Walter Isaacson Lecture: “The Intersection of the Humanities and the Sciences”

via Walter Isaacson delivers Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities @insidehighered.

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