Humanistic and social sciences are eagerly adopting the last AI hype. This is good news, since In recent years, humanistic and social sciences are eagerly adopting the last Artificial Intelligence (AI) hype. The crossbreeding with computer science and STEM offers an immense horizon of applications, able to sharpen the humanities’ sensitive grasp on society, art and the cognitive reality of the human being. The history of AI shows its originality in revisiting traditional ontological, epistemological and cognitive problems (e.g. the frame problem); moreover, computational methods keep being inspired by humanistic thinking (e.g. markup languages, schema/frame-based data structures, ontologies). These early efforts have begun producing a treasure trove of innovative methods able to improve our description of emulated cultural, social, and psychological worlds.
Humanistic AI (HAI) is a fairly novel branch aimed at integrating psychological, social and computational methods in a systematic way, in order to reframe the study of both the embodied human mind and social and cultural contexts, as well as their reciprocal relations.
Applications of AI techniques to humanities range from the classification, exploration, management, and preservation of cultural heritage, archives, or demo-ethno-anthropological materials, to the exploitation of novel models (e.g. distributed neural networks) and platforms (e.g. robotics) often inspired by biological models: the central nervous system, the human sensory-motor system, etc.
On one hand, HAI leverages the advantages of existing computational hybridisations (e.g. semantic technologies, digital humanities, social data mining and visualization, machine learning on large humanistic archives, datasets and corpora). On the other hand, a unique feature of HAI consists in its potential to suggest original analyses, alternative to the mainstream ones (e.g. connectionist vs. symbolic linguistics). Humanistic AI is not limited to giving new answers to traditional research questions, but allows to completely rephrase the outdated ones. Never losing sight of the human factor and the social context, new (ecological, evolutionary) approaches are suited to the investigation of the embodied and culturally-aware human mind alongside the analysis of its interaction with cognitive artifacts in a given environment (e.g. “cultural affordances”, evolutionary perspectives on human societies).