The questions that give technology meaning
AI's hardest questions are humanistic. We have been asking them for fifty years.
AI's most consequential questions are humanistic. Who flourishes, and on whose terms? What do we owe one another? How should knowledge be made, shared, and governed? For fifty years, the Integrated Program in Humane Studies has trained students to ask exactly these questions. In 2016 we put them at the center of an AI curriculum — the first program in the world to do so. A decade later that work has been downloaded nearly 100,000 times across 198 countries, and a growing movement of humanities-led AI research is taking shape around the conviction we have always held: that the meaning, purpose, and evaluation of AI are humanistic problems first.
The humanistic frame
Decisions about what AI should do, whom it should serve, how it should be evaluated, and how it should be governed are not technical residue left over once the engineering is finished. They are the questions the engineering exists to answer. Philosophy, ethics, hermeneutics, intellectual history, critical theory, and the literary, artistic, and political traditions that carry them forward are the disciplines that have spent millennia clarifying these questions. Treating them as primary — not as oversight functions, not as compliance — is what humanistic inquiry contributes to AI work.
This is the conviction that founded IPHS in 1975, and the conviction that drove the launch of the world's first human-centered AI curriculum in 2016. The technology has changed; the questions have not.
How humanistic inquiry moves through AI work
Every IPHS research project follows a loop in which humanistic questions enter at the start and humanistic evaluation closes the loop at the end — with AI tooling in the middle, not at the wheel.
The loop is not a workflow imposed on top of standard practice. It is what practice looks like when meaning, purpose, and evaluation are treated as the work itself.
Three projects, one frame
Each of these projects begins from a humanistic question that long predates AI, then uses contemporary AI tooling to extend the inquiry. The inquiry remains the work; AI is the instrument.
We are not alone
Humanities-led AI work is growing fast. Major funders — including Schmidt Sciences, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Mellon Foundation — are building portfolios that ask humanists, ethicists, and cultural scholars to lead, not advise. Below is a partial list of the cohort IPHS is part of.
This list is partial and growing. If your institution is doing humanities-led AI work and you would like to coordinate, we want to hear from you.
The work needs humanities-trained principal investigators
Humanities-led AI work is not a matter of advisory committees or ethics review boards. It requires principal investigators whose primary expertise is in the humanities, ethics, history, the arts, and culture — with budget authority, intellectual direction, and accountability to the communities the work concerns. Three reasons this matters:
Anticipating, not reacting
AI's pace of change is real, and humanities-led AI work has to keep up. IPHS faculty publish on the trajectory of AI progress — open-source generative AI risk (ICML 2024 oral presentation, top 2%), multi-agent and agentic systems, alignment frontiers, and international AI policy (EU, China, U.S.). That work moves the curriculum forward in advance of each new generation of systems, so students are reading what is coming, not what is already deployed.
Anticipation is itself a humanistic skill. It is what intellectual history teaches: that ideas have arcs, that recurrences can be recognized, that the next iteration is rarely a clean break.