AI and the Interdisciplinary Turn
The above diagram captures the seven liberal arts, drawn originally from the trivium and quadrivium. Trivium: rhetoric, grammar, and logic. Quadrivium: astronomy, arithmetic, geometry, and music. A liberal arts education is differentiated from the technical, vocational, and professional arts. Today, the landscape of schools looks remarkably different in structure.
The seven areas in this list are still there, but there are now many more. The number of academic disciplines has grown exponentially. My most recent appointment was a hybrid — in the humanities (systems theory, simulation) and engineering (computer and information science), but it is far more common to evolve from one discipline and stay within it. The world needs specialists but it also needs generalists.
Let’s bring all of this home. You are staring at a wildflower. From what discipline does this wildflower emerge? That’s the thing about objects. They don’t belong to any specific discipline despite our tendency to associate objects with subject areas. Objects belong to every subject or discipline. The wildflower can be associated with mathematics, biology (at both the taxonomic and genomic levels), poetry, or the visual or performing arts. Or even architecture.
We don’t learn from objects but that is now on the frontier of change. In school, we learn subjects. We get degrees or certificates. And then we go out to find work. What happened to learning directly from objects?
It never really took off in the way that it did for subjects. Why not? Even places where objects are the center of attention, in museums, there is the focus on subject. It is the natural history museum, the automobile museum, the science museum, and the art museum. You learn about the objects, but in a manner consistent with the normative and conventionally derived subject.
The bronze object you are looking at has a history of supernovae, but you’ll find this only if the object is located within a science museum. The painting you see has many fascinating information structures which model it, but you’ll learn that only if the object is in a mathematics or computer science museum.
Oh wait, computer science museums cover the history of hardware and software and not interpreting objects with computer science as a theoretical subject.
This brings us to Artificial Intelligence (AI) and back to interdisciplinarity. The capabilities of large language models are ripe for changing how we see objects around us. A recent post, Art Appreciation in the Era of Artificial Intelligence, covered this evolutionary change for objects in an art museum.
You are back to looking at the wildflower. Do you want some poetry, or do you want to make some poetry for your particular flower? Do you want to analyze it mathematically or do you want to know whether it has a medicinal use? AI can provide a vision capability, allowing you to use your smartphone, or soon, AI glasses (such as the Ray-Ban for Meta’s AI technology) and you get the ability to just say “Create haiku poetry of this flower in the style of Matsuo Basho.” Or maybe “Create a python program that replicates the structure of this flower.” The flower is host to hundreds of academic subjects.
Will schools, universities, and museums have to change with the new AI possibilities for the interdisplinary? I don’t think so. We need specialists and teams of specialists whether in universities or museums. There could be the new university/museum of everything but this makes little sense.
This new universe of AI learning will mainly assist the learner or the viewer. It is on us to reimagine that our curiosity knows no bounds. Which subjects will you learn about today? Now you have a technology that is finally interdisciplinary at the core.
