200 years after Mary Shelley's masterwork appeared in print, “Artificial Intelligence” is running amok, provoking extreme claims of opportunities and threats.  Many assert that AI is an “exponential technology,” a “new electricity” that will transform every industry.  Advocates claim that fully autonomous cars and robots with human dexterity are just around the corner.  At the same time, headlines report that robots will soon steal the majority of our jobs.  A number of well-known and otherwise reasonable scientists and technologists state...

Read more about Is AI the New Frankenstein? The 1st Annual Humanities & New Media Lecture by Prof. Ken Goldberg

Take a break with art!

On Thursday, December 6, join fellow Harvard students on a free Gallery Crawl exploring arts spaces both familiar and unfamiliar across the Harvard campus. Meet at the Harvard Art Museums and start crawling to the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, the Johnson-Kulukundis Gallery at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and the Cooper Gallery at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research. At each space you will be introduced to its art and mission and receive snacks and ‘passport’ stamps. Students who collect stamps from all...

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First-Year students and their families meet Arts & Humanities Dean Robin Kelsey with faculty representing the many Arts & Humanities departments and programs. Learn more about the experiences and opportunities students can expect studying the humanities at Harvard.

Join New York Times-bestselling author Madeline Miller (The Song of Achilles and Circe) for a conversation about voice, literary adaptation, and the creative process. Fans of historically-informed fiction, fanfiction, and classical texts can participate in an author-led creative writing exercise and explore using adaptation in their own writing and learning.

 

Free event (no tickets or registration required). Seating is limited.

Come read The Odyssey with us!

Beginning with the Ancient Greek, traveling book by book through centuries of translations, and ending with Prof. Emily Wilson's newest rendition, read by the translator herself.

Sign up to read a 5-minute segment of this epic oral poem, and join us in this collaborative endeavor!

To sign up and find out more, visit: https://arts-hum.wixsite.com/homerathon 

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Nuclear weapons strategy in the United States is designed around “presidential first use,” an arrangement that enables one man, the president, to kill and maim many millions of people in a single afternoon. What legal or philosophical principle differentiates the moral harm or moral wrong that would be attributed to a terrorist, non-state actor or hacker who delivered a nuclear weapon from a presidential launch of a nuclear weapon? The conference will bring together international and constitutional scholars and statesmen to examine the nature of presidential first use in the United...

Read more about Presidential First Use of Nuclear Weapons: Is it Legal? Is it Constitutional? Is it Just?