“What May AI Hope for?” by Dr. Antón Barba-Kay

The Wheaton College Department of Philosophy presents the 2026-27 McManis Lecture, “What May AI Hope for?” by Dr. Antón Barba-Kay, on Tuesday, October 13 at 7:30 PM.

Barba-Kay writes: "Most everyone seems to agree with the view that AI development should align with human needs—that it should serve us and not the other way around and that it can help us achieve some higher human potential. Unfortunately, no one seems to have any clear idea of how this would be possible and what this would entail. I want to discuss the intrinsic difficulty of this question as well as the question of what makes AI and other digital technologies so difficult to bring into focus. I then mean to convince you that some of our stock ways of approaching these technologies are wrongheaded; they are by turns transhumanist and dehumanizing. I'll conclude by offering a couple of alternative suggestions for the progress of AI, such as might yield a better (if qualified) vision of what we may hope for from it."

Dr. Antón Barba-Kay is Distinguished Fellow at the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law School. He was formerly an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Catholic University and Robert Aird Chair of Humanities at Deep Springs College. In addition to his scholarly publications in nineteenth-century German philosophy, his essays about culture and technology have appeared in The New Republic, The Hedgehog Review, and The Point, among other magazines. A Web of Our Own Making – his book about what the internet is and what a difference it makes – was published in 2023 by Cambridge University Press. He earned B.A.’s at St. John’s College and the University of Cambridge, as well as a Ph.D. from the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.

This event is free and open to the public and will take place in Barrows Auditorium in Billy Graham Hall, located at 500 College Avenue in Wheaton. For more information, contact Amy Park at 630.752.5040 or philosophy@wheaton.edu.