Join guest lecturer Meghan O’Gieblyn for a session titled Attention & the Sacred in the Age of AI.
Technologies are being built that are designed to offshore cognitive tasks that once required sustained thought and focus. But is attention simply a means to an end, or does it have value in its own right? Thinkers like Simone Weil and Iris Murdoch have argued for the intrinsic value of attention and its relationship to morality, the will and spiritual devotion. As intellectual work is becoming automated, they remind us that attention is ultimately sacred and foundational to what it means to be human.
Guest lecturer Meghan O’Gieblyn is the author of God Human Animal Machine and the essay collection Interior States. She is the recipient of three Pushcart Prizes and the 2023 Benjamin H. Danks award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She writes for The New Yorker, Harper’s, Wired, The New York Review of Books and other magazines, and her essays have been anthologized in The Best American Essays and The Contemporary American Essay. Her book Will and Attention, a bibliomemoir that engages with the work of Simone Weil, will be published by Doubleday in October.
Registration is not required.