This is not science fiction. It is “Ask an Ancient Philosopher,” a signature experience of Hunter’s HUMANities x Tech initiative. The HUMAN is not an accident. This is a year-long series of collaborations across the School of Arts and Sciences putting human values at the center of every encounter with emerging technology. In this case, students converse with a classical thinker like Confucius, or rather a chatbot created collaboratively by a computer scientist and a philosopher with his writings, not just to answer questions but to provoke them. Students explore how to build such a system, while also debating whether it should exist at all. Can you simulate wisdom? What is lost across 25 centuries and a large language model? Who authorized this representation, and whose Socrates is it?
Right now, the national conversation about AI in higher education is trapped in a defensive crouch. Caught in a state of panic, universities are scrambling to rewrite academic integrity policies or frantically bolting AI certificates onto tech degrees. Worse, many institutions are simultaneously scaling back the very humanities and social science disciplines that cultivate critical thinking.
This focus positions the university as merely reactive, assuming we must passively adapt to technology after it arrives. It is the wrong approach. At Hunter, we treat artificial intelligence not as a received system to be accepted, but as a cultural system to be interrogated. The most critical questions about AI are not engineering problems alone — they are human ones.
Through our yearlong HUMANities x Tech initiative, we ask a foundational question that the tech sector routinely ignores: Who decides?
Technology is never neutral; it is built, framed, and deployed in the service of power. If students are to navigate an AI-driven economy, technical fluency is not enough. They must be equipped to probe whose interests technology serves, and who loses in the bargain.
This interdisciplinary collision is happening across our campus. Throughout this year, a computer scientist and a music professor examined how AI finishes a musical composition, forcing students to analyze whose aesthetic assumptions the algorithm encodes. Another collaboration paired a Japanese program professor with a computer science colleague, giving students the experience of learning the ancient Urasenke tea ceremony ritual by hand and then building the virtual reality version of the tea house itself. A film and media professor showed her students how AI is already deployed in New York City's housing and homeless services, and then challenged them to reimagine what those systems could be. For our student body — predominantly first-generation college students of color from immigrant and working-class backgrounds — these case studies are not academic abstractions. They are the lived realities of their own families and neighborhoods.
