The HUMAN Book Club, sponsored by the HUMAN grant, will be convening this year to discuss ethical matters related to Artificial Intelligence. This multi-year initiative aims to explore artificial intelligence through a humanities perspective, equipping students with the skills to ethically integrate AI into their professional lives with an emphasis on equity and justice.
Our goal for the HUMAN Book Club is to process the implications of AI in community so that our campus can thoughtfully navigate how this technology shapes our teaching, research, and broader comportment.
We have an exciting line up of books reflecting on a variety of topics, including data, language, and the distinctiveness of human nature. Each session will have a different lead facilitator from our faculty and staff.
25/26 HUMAN Book Club Titles
Roose, Kevin. Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation. Facilitated by Colleen Monks.
Leckie, Ann. Ancillary Justice. Facilitated by Tommy Crawford.
Screening of Her, dir. Spike Jonze. Facilitated by Janet McCracken
Michaels, Sean. Do You Remember Being Born? Facilitated by Josh Corey
Chaing, Ted. The Lifecycle of Software Objects Facilitated by Alex McKinley
24/25 HUMAN Book Club
Roshni Patel
Roshni Patel
Assistant Professor of Philosophy
HUMAN Book Club Convener
Roshni Patel is an assistant professor of Philosophy. Her research is most centrally in Indian Buddhist philosophy, with particular focus on early traditions related to the Pāli canon and the Madhyamaka or Middle Way tradition. She also does research in 20th century continental philosophy (especially the figure of Martin Heidegger), philosophy of emotion, and feminist philosophy. Her current book project reflects on the Buddhist concept of compassion in conversation with Feminist Care Ethics to develop the ethical value of the internal disposition of care and compassion.
Roshni’s philosophical reflection on technology largely stems from Heidegger’s considerations of how technology configures the human in a historically contingent way. While modernity is hyperbolic in its manner of revealing this, technology is revelatory of our unbounded constitutions. Roshni’s work has drawn on Buddhist philosophy to consider the ethically relational possibilities of an otherwise spooky state of possible dispossession in modern technology.
Mollick, Ethan. Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI. London: WH Allen, 2024. Facilitated by Roshni Patel.
Christian, Brian. The Most Human Human: What Artificial Intelligence Teaches Us About Being Alive. London: Penguin, 2012. Facilitated by Tommy Crawford.
Stephenson, Neal. Fall; or, Dodge in Hell. New York, NY: William Morrow Paperbacks, 2020. Facilitated by Joshua Corey.
Ishiguro, Kazuo. Klara and the Sun. New York: Vintage, 2022. Facilitated by Davis Schneiderman.
O’Gieblyn, Meghan. God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning. First Edition. New York: Doubleday, 2021. Facilitated by Tessa Sermet
Buolamwini, Joy. Unmasking AI: My Mission to Protect What Is Human in a World of Machines. New York: Random House, 2023. Facilitated by Sara Jamshidi