Tuesday 25 October 2016
Professor Steven Connor (Peterhouse College, University of Cambridge).
'The Humanities and the Machine'
For the last century or so, the humanities have defined themselves defensively and self-aggrandisingly against a paranoid notion of the dominion of the machine that I want to say does us no good and should be abandoned. At a time when we must be less sure than ever what a machine is, or might be, it makes no sense at all to think of humanity separate from the experience of and feeling for machines. In place of the defensive question ‘What future in a technical world is there for the humanities?’, we should be asking ‘What future in a technical world is there but the humanities?’
