Human Freedom in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

In the 21st century, machines are learning to write essays, diagnose disease, create visual art and even write new computer code. As our lives are increasingly guided by artificial intelligence, what are the implications for the humanities, and for human freedom itself? This talk and discussion will explore Renaissance humanism’s origins in a similar moment of technological upheaval and will suggest that humanistic study can articulate concepts of human agency, academic freedom and truth that are indispensable in the age of the machine.

Join the Oklahoma Center for the Humanities in welcoming Blaine Greteman. Greteman is a professor at the University of Iowa and the author of Networking Print in Shakespeare’s England (Stanford, 2021), and The Poetics and Politics of Youth in Milton’s England (Cambridge, 2003) He is also a regular contributor to magazines including Time, Newsweek, The New Republic, and The London Review of Books. His teaching and research focus on early modern book history, poetry and drama, including Milton and Shakespeare. After leaving Oxford, where he attended on a Rhodes Scholarship, he began writing for scholarly and popular publications.