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.
When AI systems fail to reflect human diversity, they do not fail equally. They exclude, misrepresent, and reinforce systemic inequities. Because the communities most likely to be harmed by poorly designed AI are the ones historically underrepresented in building it, changing the output requires rethinking who is in the room.
We see the alternative taking physical form in Professor Raj Korpan’s robotics lab. There, undergraduates from communities historically overlooked or actively failed by technology are designing socially aware, inclusive robots. They are learning that every design choice, from a robot's vocabulary to the problems it is tasked to solve, reflects the blind spots of its creator. They are learning to move from the role of the technologically impacted to the role of the architect.
Arguing with Socrates is one kind of education. Building a robot differently is another. Hunter students can do both precisely because of who they are.
We are not preparing our graduates for a narrow lane in a tech company simply to use AI or even to regulate it. Instead, we are teaching them to shape it. The students who move between these disciplines will take their insights into public service, cultural institutions, newsrooms, and community advocacy groups. They will carry the literacy to wield these tools with intention and the imagination to build entirely new ones.
The future of emerging technology like AI is ours to shape, and to ensure it belongs to everyone, the students who will shape it must come from everywhere, including the streets, neighborhoods, and immigrant families that built New York City. Higher education must stop trying to beat the machines at their own game. We don't need to add a few token humanities concepts to technical programs; we must ground technology in the humanities.
At Hunter College, that architecture is already underway.
Erica Chito Childs is the Ruth and Harold Newman Dean of Arts and Sciences at Hunter College and an internationally recognized scholar of race, media, and popular culture. A qualitative researcher whose work explores how social narratives shape our lived experiences; she leads Hunter’s HUMANities x Tech initiative to ensure equity, creative expression and critical inquiry remain at the center of technological development.
