In his novel Life and Fate, Vasily Grossman imagines that we will one day engineer an artificial intelligence that will mimic humans in every way. In order to reproduce “the peculiarities of mind and soul of an average, inconspicuous human being,” however, the computer that houses it will have to be bigger than the Earth. This essay takes Grossman’s novel as the start and endpoint for a discussion about the role of the public humanities in the age of artificial intelligence (AI). The response of the humanities to the pervasive fatalism about an AI-driven future should be twofold. First, they can serve as an antidote to a credulous, amnesiac present which sees the future as already decided, with inexorable effects that we can only adapt to. Second, they can challenge the now pervasive view of intelligence as computational and algorithmic. The humanities refuse to see humans as codable, or as just part of the data stream. We should certainly study the ways in which AI is changing what it means to be human, but we should never lose sight of what is most astonishing, and uncopiable, about us.
