Two things in this article stuck out to me: > Here is a humanist proposition for the age of Google: The processing of information is not the highest aim to whi

Two things in this article stuck out to me: > Here is a humanist proposition for the age of Google: The processing of information is not the highest aim to which the human spirit can aspire That's an uncharitable paraphrasing of Google's mission statement which, taken to its logical conclusion, might as well say "To know everything there is to know in the universe, to grant agency to this knowledge, and to make it available to everyone." Maybe this just reveals a fundamental rift between my values and those of the author, but I cannot think of a higher calling for the human spirit. > Searches for keywords will not provide contexts for keywords. Patterns that are revealed by searches will not identify their own causes and reasons. The new order will not relieve us of the old burdens, and the old pleasures, of erudition and interpretation. The author is making an empirical claim here, and it is wrong. AI is already advanced enough that such absolutes as "searches for keywords will not provide contexts for keywords" are demonstrably false. To a limited but growing extent, software is already capable of erudition and interpretation; these are not uniquely human endeavors. The biggest problem with this article (and so many others like it) is tying an argument for the value of the humanities with unscientific denial of materialism. That the human mind is ultimately an emergent property of matter does not make art and literature any less worthy of study.