The austere members of the New Hampshire Vanderbright Liberal Arts College Philosophy Faculty sit around a dull grey plastic table. There are four of them remaining after five straight years of job cuts and now Covid-19: One struggles with a face guard, the other three adjust their masks uncomfortably. For a moment, they stare at each other, haggard eyes worn down by continuous threats, losses, and plain overwork. Then Patricia Vanderbright (no relation) begins to speak.
“Attracting undergrads to philosophy. Anyone got ideas?”
Buddha “Buddy” Armstrong wipes the sweat from his forehead. A dark hand gently rubs at a slowly growing bald patch. “What’s that new thing in the news… uh… yes. AI.”
“What about AI? Everyone and their mother’s heard of the Chinese Room by now.”
“Well…” Buddy falls silent, pretends to check his phone. It’s obvious, but the others make no comment.
Sylvia is the next to speak. “You have to link it to classical stuff somehow.” She’s fiddling with something on her laptop. She’s the only one who’s bothered to use a model other than the faculty supplied Chromebooks. “AI as a Kantian Evil Demon?”
Buddy shifts uncomfortably. “Look, we’re smart people. Maybe this whole AI thing will blow over and—”
Toni Abdou cuts in. “And what? We’ll get right back to losing our jobs one by one? Tenure track isn’t tenure, Buddy.”
His demeanour snaps. “Oh, fuck you, Toni. Just because you’ve just come off a ph.d and don’t have a permanent position—”
“None of us have a permanent position. That’s what this contingent faculty ‘trend’ means. Do you not know that, or are you just pretending to believe otherwise?”
Buddy had in fact launched into a spirited justification of knowledge as true justified belief for a recent article submitted to the Duke University Press Philosophical Review, but all of a sudden that piece of thorny ontology/epistemology seems incredibly remote and simply irrelevant to the present matters being debated. One of his increasingly frantic button presses starts the text to speech feature on his news app, and for what feels like seven agonising seconds he can’t figure out how to turn it off.
“AI INSPIRED DEEP DREAM ART EXHIBITION TO BE PUT ON—”
“God- god damn it this-”
“IN UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AUSTIN AFTER RECENT ADVANCES-”
“Ugh” he was sweating now, big fat beads of embrarassment and annoyance
“IN VISUALISATION OF THE INNER WORKINGS OF CONVOLUTIONAL NEURAL-”
Silence.
“Well, let’s pretend that never happened, shall we?”
Somewhere in the distance on a Harvard zoom call someone with a permanent position and free time to research interesting topics proposes comparing deep dream images to the concept of a platonic ideal for a given object. Patricia takes out a large legal notepad and begins to write.