Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 39, No. 325.
        Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
                      Hosted by DH-Cologne
                       www.dhhumanist.org
                Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org


    [1]    From: J.J. Naughton <jjn1@cam.ac.uk>
           Subject: Re: [Humanist] 39.321: ’ΑΙ’ is a forgetting (63)

    [2]    From: maurizio lana <maurizio.lana@uniupo.it>
           Subject: Re: [Humanist] 39.321: ’ΑΙ’ is a forgetting (24)


--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------------
        Date: 2026-02-10 08:30:46+00:00
        From: J.J. Naughton <jjn1@cam.ac.uk>
        Subject: Re: [Humanist] 39.321: ’ΑΙ’ is a forgetting

Dear Willard


“AI” was a cunning re-branding of “machine learning” by the tech industry. And,
sadly, it worked.

Best

John
.........
Professor John Naughton
Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy
University of Cambridge
Director, Press Fellowship
Wolfson College
e: jjn1@cam.ac.uk
w: memex.naughtons.org
t: +44 7836 373799

> On 10 Feb 2026, at 06:59, Humanist <humanist@dhhumanist.org> wrote:
>
> 
>              Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 39, No. 321.
>        Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
>                      Hosted by DH-Cologne
>                       http://www.dhhumanist.org/
>                Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
>
>
>
>
>        Date: 2026-02-09 09:49:14+00:00
>        From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@mccarty.org.uk>
>        Subject: taking 'AI' at its word (or acronym)
>
> Thanks to John Naughton for underscoring the enshittification Abbate
> highlights in Susskind's "glib survey". But I would go a step further
> back to the act which makes it trivially easy for glibbers like Susskind
> to darken the public mind: reifying the phenomena uncovered (or
> created) by artificial intelligence research, reducing them to a
> ghostly acronym. Befuddled by a deluge of promotionalism we fail
> to ask the core question: What is 'AI'?
>
> In Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments ([1969] 2002),
> Max Horkheim and Theodor Adorno put the problem in a nutshell: “all
> reification is forgetting” (p. 191). 'AI' is a forgetting of the significance
> of what the products of artificial intelligence research has enabled.
> Mindlessly using 'AI' as if it were a thing, we drop the question before
> it can be asked. We are dumbed down.
>
> Much work to do, no?
>
> Comments?
>
> All best,
> WM
> --
> Willard McCarty,
> Professor emeritus, King's College London;
> Editor, Interdisciplinary Research in the Arts,
>   Sciences and Humanities (Berghahn); Humanist
> http://www.mccarty.org.uk/


--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------------
        Date: 2026-02-10 08:45:36+00:00
        From: maurizio lana <maurizio.lana@uniupo.it>
        Subject: Re: [Humanist] 39.321: ’ΑΙ’ is a forgetting

as teachers, as many of us are, but also in broader sense as thinking
persons, we face the problem that with all the endless important and
interesting things that can be said about AI systems, which ones matter
most in activating and maintaining the ability to /think/ about the
subject, and not just making its /use/ interesting?

the reification/hypostatization/personification of AI systems is
probably a clear boundary between a critical and an uncritical approach.
hence the need to choose carefully the expressions, verbs, adjectives,
and pronouns we use when talking about AI systems.

Maurizio


----------

tout est et n'est rien
motto dei conti di challant

-----------
Maurizio Lana
Università del Piemonte Orientale
Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici
Piazza Roma 36 - 13100 Vercelli


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