Disenchanting Technoliberalism

n a recent issue of PMLA, Wai Chee Dimock’s Editor’s Column, entitled “AI and the Humanities,” refers to two distinct paths for the artificial intelligence of the future: “How can we create algorithms that would complement rather than replace human beings, help rather than destroy us?” she asks.1 Dimock prefaces these alternatives with PMLA’s readership in mind, citing studies that warn “those ‘with graduate or professional degrees will be almost four times as exposed to AI as workers with just a high school degree’” and that the advent of new AI will “[hit] educated workers the hardest.”2 What “exposure” to AI might mean for literary scholars practically is never specified but the implication is that impending automation poses yet another threat to knowledge workers in literature programs who already find their material livelihoods jeopardized by the crises of defunding and adjunctification. To adapt, Dimock intimates that scholars of literature might enter into interdisciplinary arrangements with the computer scientists and engineers who have a hand in AI design. She observes that Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, for example, now counts English professors among its faculty. In