Faculty at Home: Ian Baucom

Please join President Ian Baucom for a talk entitled “On Human Intelligence in an Age of Artificial Intelligence.”

One of the key goals of Middlebury’s new strategic plan is to support our faculty in fashioning a distinctive 21st-century liberal arts curriculum dedicated to strengthening the forms of human intelligence—across the arts, humanities, natural sciences, social sciences, and languages—crucial to living and working in a rapidly evolving and ever more cosmopolitan world: creative intelligence, entrepreneurial intelligence, civic intelligence, global intelligence, critical intelligence, and more. In doing so, our goal is not to set up a false and rigid opposition between technology and human life. The world is hybrid. Technological innovation emerges from human action, creativity, innovation and imagination. At its best it makes our social, medical, economic, and cultural life better, even as it holds equally negative capacities. We are now entering a fascinating and horizon-changing moment in which we are experiencing technology not simply as a tool to extend human intelligence but as form of intelligence itself.

Middlebury is committed to ensuring that our students, faculty, and staff can creatively and responsibly explore the affordances, possibilities, creativities, and costs of these new technologies—AI technology in particular—across the registers of their life, education, and future careers. At the same time, one key virtue of such a moment is that it asks us to name, explore, and advance the signature forms of intelligence that are distinctly human—and which a liberal arts college can distinctively pursue—not in simplistic opposition to technological or artificial intelligence, but as urgent and complementary ways of knowing and being in the world grounded in our commitments to the common good, creativity, codes of ethics, senses of beauty, civic responsibility, democratic life. As president of Middlebury there are very few questions more urgent to me than this. I welcome you joining me for a discussion and chance to think together on this basic question: what are the forms of human intelligence essential for our students in an age of artificial intelligence?