Generative AI and the Future of Judgment: A Symposium on Technology and the Humanities
Nov 12–Nov 13, 2026 / 5:00 pm
UC Irvine campus, Humanities Gateway 1030
Co-hosted by the UC Humanities Research Institute, the UC Humanities Network, the UC Irvine School of Humanities, and Critical AI, an interdisciplinary journal based at Rutgers University’s Center for Cultural Analysis.
Generative AI and the Future of Judgment: A Symposium on Technology and the Humanities will focus on generative AI/machine learning from a humanities perspective, particularly on the work of computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum and philosopher Hannah Arendt. Weizenbaum was a computer scientist who created the early chatbot ELIZA, after which the famous “ELIZA effect” is named. ELIZA and its users’ relationships to it presciently predicted humans’ overidentification with chatbot interlocutors. Weizenbaum also felt strongly about the role of the humanities in understanding computer science and technology:
“[The humanities] have a greater familiarity with an ambiguous, intractable, sometimes unreachable [moral] world that won’t reduce itself to any correspondence with the symbols by means of which one might try to measure it. . . . [people’s] practice should involve itself with softer than scientific knowledge. . . . That is not a retreat but an advance” (Weizenbaum 1976: 279).
Thursday, November 12, 2026
Humanities Gateway 1030
5:00 pm | Keynote Address
Benjamin Recht (UC Berkeley)
Opening Remarks: Jaimey Fisher (Director, UCHRI) and Lauren Goodlad (Rutgers)
Friday, November 13, 2026
Humanities Gateway 1030
9:00 am | Breakfast and networking
9:30-11:30 am | The Legacies of Weizenbaum and Arendt
Luke Fernandez (Weber State) and Ewa Ziarek (SUNY Buffalo)
Respondent: Ricky D. Crano (UC Irvine)
11:30-12:30 pm | Lunch
12:30-2:30pm | Eugenics, Humanities, Posthumanism
Anita Chan (Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) and Leif Weatherby (New York University)
Respondent: Peter Krapp (UC Irvine)
2:30-2:45 pm | Coffee Break
2:45-4:45 pm | Teaching Critical Literacies
Laura Baudot (Oberlin) and Maeve Adams (CUNY, Lehman College)
Respondent: Pranav Anand (UC Santa Cruz)
4:45-5:00 pm | Closing Remarks
Jaimey Fisher (Director, UCHRI) and Lauren Goodlad (Rutgers)
Keynote Speaker Benjamin Recht, Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of The Irrational Decision: How We Gave Computers the Power to Choose for Us. He is the recipient of a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, the 2012 SIAM/MOS Lagrange Prize in Continuous Optimization, the 2014 Jamon Prize, the 2015 William O. Baker Award for Initiatives in Research, and the 2017 and 2020 NeurIPS Test of Time Awards. He has served on the Editorial Boards of the Journal for Machine Learning Research and Mathematical Programming. He also cofounded the Conference on Learning for Decision and Control.
View the full conference program below:
AI conference flyerImage credit: Writing engine conceived in Gulliver’s Travels, as illustrated in The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, DD, Volume 8 (1899).
