Research

As artificial intelligence takes part in producing knowledge, exercising judgment, and creating, many of the assumptions through which we understand the world and order our lives call for renewed examination. What constitutes understanding? How is knowledge established? Where does human value lie? These questions give science and the humanities an increasingly immediate set of shared concerns.

Research at Fangtang Institute, Tsinghua University, examines philosophy and the humanities in the age of AI, with a focus on the human condition amid technological change.

Philosophy and Humanities in the Age of AI

Faced with the new phenomena that AI brings, philosophy must first clarify the questions at stake. How far do our existing concepts of intelligence, consciousness, understanding, and subjectivity still hold? Can human experience adequately account for the capacities and behaviour of machines? Beginning with foundational questions in AI ethics, Fangtang examines the limits of inherited concepts and methods, seeking more precise ways to describe and understand these phenomena.

These inquiries are inseparable from lived experience. As machines undertake more work and creative activity, how do people understand their own worth? As AI enters the acquisition of knowledge and the sphere of intimate relationships, how might the foundations of trust, authority, and shared life change? Our research extends from questions of meaning and purpose to the reorganisation of labour, distribution, and power, examining possible forms of social order in which humans and AI coexist. Philosophy, the humanities, and technical research meet around these concrete problems to examine both what is changing and what those changes mean.