AI & THE MORE-THAN-HUMANITIES
This project starts, firstly, from the premise that the humanities — the disciplined study and critical appreciation of human cultural expression across the ages — have always been more-than-humanities, since they have always concerned human experience within a world that is larger than us and that we foundationally depend on. The humanities are, in this sense, both global and ecological. And, secondly, that current technological developments, including the rapid development of digital technologies and especially so-called artificial intelligence, raise serious challenges for the humanistic disciplines — disciplines of thinking, reading, writing, creating, interpreting, and collectively imagining our worlds. It’s not obvious how best to meet those challenges; they need rigorous and thoughtful deliberation.
The project aims to chart a way forward by proposing and articulating a set of cross-cutting perspectives that could be brought together into a workable synthesis in our thinking about what makes us human, up to now and going forward. For heuristic purposes, we classify these as three:
a critical humanist perspective that grounds itself within a reasoned understanding of the best of what humanity has achieved in its social, cultural, and intellectual productions, and that assesses present and future possibilities in light of that understanding;
a political-ecological perspective that contextualizes current developments, including new technologies, within a systemic and historically grounded analysis of their sociopolitical, economic, and ecological conditions and determinants;
and a technotopian perspective that understands that the impacts of new tools and technologies — from fire, language, and writing to digital computation — can never be fully known in advance because their capacities are emergent, and that they call for an imaginative openness to the possibilities for creative advancement of human and more-than-human capacities. (“Technotopia” is not meant to suggest technological utopianism, though it doesn’t discourage such speculation. The word, which refers to the “place” or “space” of techne, is meant to grant a space for the unknowns and unpredictables that technologies might bring.)
The first suggests a cautious orientation toward artificial intelligence, coupled with a concern for how it could negatively affect human values and practices. The second suggests a critical orientation rooted in an understanding of AI’s shaping by the pressures of a global-capitalist economy, with its competition for market dominance, military superiority, and the like. The third suggests a deep curiosity and openness to the novel possibilities that technologies may avail to us.
The project draws from a symposium held at Simon Fraser University in September 2025 on “Generative Artificial Intelligence and the Future of the Critical Humanities.” It is being developed in connection with courses on AI and the humanities offered by SFU’s Department of Global Humanities (in collaboration with the Digital Democracies Institute’s Data Fluencies 2.0 project) and the Graduate Liberal Studies Program, and in connection with a program of public activities on AI co-sponsored by the J.S. Woodsworth Chair in the Humanities and the SFU Institute for the Humanities in 2026-27 and beyond. Materials to be shared here are only one component of the project. Stay tuned.
