From autonomous vehicles to robot care-givers, automation and artificial intelligence (AI) are transforming how we work, live and understand what it means to be human.

Occupations that have long been the responsibility of humans are now the work of machines. The implications of these changes for employment and economic stability have been the subject of lively debates among economists, policy experts and politicians. But automation will alter life far beyond work, reorganizing social relations and challenging some of our core values around equality, political representation, and human autonomy.

In partnership with the Humanities Without Walls (HWW) consortium, along with the Modern Language Association (MLA) and American Historical Association (AHA), the Chicago Humanities Festival will convene a two-part summit bringing prominent humanists together to explore the limits and potential of automation.

Louis Hyman, Associate Professor at the Industrial and Labor Relations (ILR) School of Cornell University, and Darrell West, Director of the Center for Technology Innovation at the Brookings Institution, in conversation with Paul Ortiz, Associate Professor of History at the University of Florida, will explore the longer trajectory of significant changes in the history of labor and work, considering what previous periods of economic and industrial transformation have to tell us about our current situation. Frank Valadez, Director of the Division of Public Education at the American Bar Association, will introduce the second part of the 2019 National Humanities Summit, “Historical Perspectives.”

This project is supported by the Humanities Without Walls consortium, based at the Illinois Program for the Research in the Humanities at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The Humanities Without Walls consortium is funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.