Tech without humanities 'ends in situations like that of Uighurs'

Forging ahead with technological advances in society without the input of the humanities leads to situations like the plight of the Uighurs in China or "obscene" military uses for technology, according to a groundbreaking scientist. Geoffrey Hinton (pictured below), seen as one of the pioneers of modern artificial intelligence for his decades-old research on deep learning and neural networks, also told Times Higher Education's World Academic Summit – held online in partnership with the University of Toronto on 1-3 September – that he was "very happy" if universities use big science grants to help fund the humanities. The distinguished emeritus professor at Toronto – who was hired part time by Google in 2013 and is now a vice-president and engineering fellow at the tech giant – said that although technology "allows us to create lots of goodies", other disciplines were vital for helping society determine how to use such advances. "How those goodies get distributed and used depends on things that aren't technology, that depends on social decisions about how we should divide things up and those are really important," he said in an interview with THE editor John Gill. A "technologically advanced society but without the humanities" then leads to problems, he said, adding that "modern China is a bit like that; you get things like the Uighurs in western China", subjected to high-tech and intensive surveillance by the Chinese state.