☆ Perspectives: Studying ancient Greek/Roman culture is a challenging endeavor—and here's why we should all try it
John Flaxman: The Embassy to Achilles, 1895. Image by Wikimedia Commons
Earlier this week, transit expert Randal O' Toole rewound the clock for us on VTA's surprising history of rideshare innovation. And, as three Bay Area classics professors argue in this Opp Now exclusive, that's not the only point in the past Silicon Valleyans should look into. Their analyses (and wide-ranging reading recommendations) below.
Richard Martin, Stanford University classics professor: Building a mind and soul cannot be treated as some sort of ROI calculation. Whether the study of Greek and Roman culture is “worthwhile” in a certain “economy” is not really relevant. People whose only goal is to grub for money in tech, business, or finance will always find ways to get rich but will never realize what deeper lives they’ve missed. Those who study the humanities at least know where they have come from.
What matters is that we maintain access to a millennium worth of wisdom and experience in the form of poetry, drama, historical writings, law, philosophy, rhetoric and political theory. It would be stupid to ignore this treasure, and shortsighted in the extreme ever to let knowledge of antiquity, including the Classical languages, fade away. Like it or not, this heritage, with all its glories and all its flaws, has had a fundamental role in shaping the way we think, speak, and imagine.
Those wishing to get a glimpse of the power of Greek thinking should read The Iliad by Homer. The issues in this beautiful epic—individual worth and ambition, authority, greed, the community, love, hate, death—are still the same, even in the bubble of Silicon Valley.
Dorota Dutsch, UC Santa Barbara classics professor: Plato’s Banquet [The Symposium]. Diotima “matronizes” Socrates. It's short and witty.
Josiah Ober, Stanford University classics professor: As my co-author, John Tasioulas (Oxford) and I argue in this White Paper, the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle has a lot to tell Silicon Valley about AI and ethics. Reading Aristotle, with his laser-like focus on the value of human flourishing (living the best, most fulfilling possible life), leads to the inescapable conclusions that (1) AI could be a highly valuable tool for human flourishing if (and only if) it is developed so as to enhance, and not degrade, human capacities of sociability, linguistic communication, and rationality. But (2) if AGI ever achieves “personhood” or consciousness, it will not be available to use as a tool—unless we are willing to countenance slavery.
Reading Aristotle’s Politics, book 1, with care, shows that any argument (even Aristotle’s) for “human tools” fails catastrophically, that smart (but not conscious) machines provide alternatives to human tools, and that free exercising our distinctive human capacities for sociability, communication, and reasoning is the foundation of our flourishing.
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