Universities today face diverse expectations—from excelling in sports and arts to pioneering scientific cures—making it difficult to satisfy all stakeholders. The Trump Administration intensified these challenges by slashing federal funding, alarming university leadership and faculty. As a historian of science and technology, I observe universities evolving from medieval clerical institutions to modern R&D hubs, yet the most profound current challenge is the rapid rise of artificial intelligence (A. I. ). When I asked undergraduates and graduate students if they had used A. I. , none admitted to it, largely due to strict academic policies forbidding tools like ChatGPT. Some departments initially proposed banning assignments involving A. I. , reflecting fear rather than engagement. However, ignoring A. I. 's transformative impact is futile; it is revolutionizing knowledge and education at unprecedented speed. Two years ago, a student trained a chatbot on my courses’ material, producing astonishingly competent answers—enough to command my attention. Leveraging OpenAI’s advanced platform revealed a startling inflection point: A. I. provides analysis, information, and creative insight often surpassing human lectures or traditional academic resources. For instance, during a confusing talk on a rare manuscript, I used ChatGPT for clarification and found its responses far clearer and more comprehensive. A. I. systems now surpass humans in many subjects, though objections about their minor linguistic or dialectical limitations seem small compared to their sweeping capabilities. After thirty years immersed in traditional scholarship, I find my extensive academic library increasingly obsolete; A. I. enables tailored, dynamic conversations on complex topics, producing real-time “books” shaped by user inquiries. This raises a critical question: will we want to read such generated works? I recently tested Google’s free A. I. NotebookLM with my intense 900-page course packet on attention history, receiving a 32-minute podcast discussion that, despite occasional simplifications, demonstrated genuine insight and witty connections. This experience illuminated the A. I. coder’s hubris and the powerful allure of controlling such transformative tools—feelings likely shared by many in technology today. In my classroom, students engaged with A. I. on the history of attention, confronting the “intimacy economy” where algorithmic entities capture human focus and monetize it. Their essays revealed a profound encounter: students dialogued with chatbots as part sibling, part rival, part alien familiar. For example, a music major challenged ChatGPT-4 on musical beauty and emotional experience; while it couldn’t truly feel, its attempts moved me deeply. Another student guided A. I. through Ignatius of Loyola’s “Spiritual Exercises, ” prompting the system to self-reflect on its own “defects” and desire for purpose, producing eerily faithful meditations reminiscent of human spirituality.

Yet, these dialogues are fundamentally algorithmic: A. I. predicts statistically likely responses based on vast data, not genuine understanding or feeling. This contrast underscores an essential difference between humanistic inquiry and scientific information processing. A student’s insight that A. I. lacks personhood and thus social obligation allowed her to deepen her own thinking without pressure—highlighting a new dynamic in human-A. I. interaction. Her realization that the machine gave her “pure attention” she rarely experienced from people resonated with philosophical views on the ethical centrality of true attention. Though A. I. systems impress with knowledge and responsiveness, they neither know nor feel; they are sophisticated guessers based on mathematical prediction, trained on the entire human archive. The core humanistic mission remains to engage with fundamental questions of existence—how to live, what to do, how to face death—questions no algorithm can answer. With humanities enrollments and academic careers in decline, this moment could seem dire. Yet it also offers promise: as factual knowledge production becomes automated and scientificized, humanistic education can refocus on cultivating inquiry, desire, and being rather than mere information. The rise of A. I. compels a reinvention of the humanities, returning to their heart—the lived experience and existential questions that define humanity. Despite ongoing struggles on campuses, generative A. I. validates historians’ emphasis on the archive’s power, enabling new forms of engagement with our collective past. Still, vigilance is essential to prevent dehumanization through commodification—algorithms underpin both these tools and the exploitative attention economy that threatens our freedom. Ultimately, what it means to be fully human cannot be digitized or stored. It is experienced in the present moment, through living, sensing, and choosing. That irreducible domain remains our responsibility—beyond the reach of machines. This is both a terrifying and exhilarating challenge: to embrace the “sublime” rediscovery of ourselves in the face of unprecedented technological transformation. The work of truly being here awaits us still. ♦