Automated Thought: The Life of the Mind in the Age of AI

media release: Elvehjem Building, Room L140, 800 University Avenue

Free and open to all. Part of the Humanities Without Boundaries series.

What’s the point of thinking? This is not an idle question but a dilemma we face constantly in daily life — and one that has become more frequent as we outsource more intellectual and creative tasks to machines. The rise of AI conceals many philosophical assumptions about the link between thought and language, as well as the relationship between freedom and necessity, and ultimately raises questions about the very purpose of thought: is it a means to an end, or an end in itself? Two twentieth-century philosophers, Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil, wrote about this question in the context of the technologies of their time, and their insights anticipate many of the moral challenges of the digital age. While our technologies are new, the tradeoffs they proffer recall much older concerns about attention and automaticity, the mindless use of language, and the more ordinary and insidious ways we often fail to “think what we are doing.”

Meghan O’Gieblyn is the author of God Human Animal Machine and the essay collection Interior States, which won the 2018 Believer Book Award. She writes essays and criticism for Harper’s, The New Yorker, WIRED, Bookforum, n+1, The New York Review of Books, and other publications, and is the recipient of the 2023 Benjamin H. Danks Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.