Abstract

In 2008, a Wired magazine op-ed famously declared that big data would spell the ‘end of theory’; when everything is just data points, then we would no longer need to care why humans did things, only to map that they did; so Farsi would be no different from Klingon, said the op-ed, and we wouldn’t need Psychology or  Sociology. We are now living in the moment prophesied by Wired as transformer models and diffusion models reshape the landscape of knowledge-production, teaching, and learning. This talk has two aims: to surface concerns about making knowledge and learning in a blended human-machine world; and second, to share how a Humanistic Social Scientist might consider the landscape of pedagogy in AI times. Taken together, they indicate the kinds of ethical, social, and cultural concerns associated with AI and ethics.