Seminar details

Progress in Artificial Intelligence is brisk and seems nearly unstoppable. Machines can drive cars in a variety of environments, can beat humans at chess, go, and Jeapardy!, and are involved in making medical and legal decisions. One futurist even predicts that by 2029, we will have produced an AI that can pass for an average, educated human being in every way. Are human beings to be replaced by machines altogether, then? The answer to this question depends at least as much on our understanding of what it is to be human as it does on our technological progress. I will argue that some of the most fundamental things that human beings do involve creativity, and that creativity of the most fundamental sort is an essentially human phenomenon. To see this, however, we will have to explore the degree to which genuine creativity is not just doing new things, but doing them in such a way that others can recognize their significance and worth. To make genuinely creative contributions to the world – in mathematics, physics, literature, philosophy, business, or any other significant domain – is to set the standard for what counts as good in the relevant sphere. This is much more than solving a problem – even a very difficult or thorny one. It is being involved in the world as a human being is.

About Sean D Kelly

Sean Dorrance Kelly is the Theresa G. and Ferdinand F. Martignetti Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University. He served as Chair of the Philosophy Department at Harvard from 2009-2015 and is currently Dean of Harvard’s Dunster House. Before arriving at Harvard, Kelly taught at Stanford and Princeton, and he was a Visiting Professor at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. His work focuses on various aspects of the philosophical, phenomenological, and cognitive neuroscientific nature of human experience. Kelly has published articles in numerous journals and anthologies and has received fellowships or awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEH, the NSF and the James S. McDonnell Foundation, among others. His book, All Things Shining: Reading the Western Canon to Find Meaning in Our Secular Age, jointly written with Hubert Dreyfus, was a New York Times bestseller.