Envision a New Era with Humanist Technologists

The pursuit of knowledge has always driven human progress. From scientific discoveries to technological advancements, it has transformed lives, shaping the way we live, work and communicate.

With each increasingly rapid leap in science and technology, the humanistic perspectives underlying new innovations can sometimes be overlooked. In contrast, the gulfs between seemingly disparate fields, such as art and science, can appear insurmountable.

However, at the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences of City University of Hong Kong (CityU), an interdisciplinary approach towards research has revealed that the humanities and social sciences are successfully informing and enriching our understanding of science and technology and vice versa. Moreover, at the forefront of this interdisciplinary movement is not only a diverse community of students but also research clusters led by some of the world’s most brilliant minds.

CityU aptly calls them “humanist technologists”. These are the scholars that are leading the charge, enriching the conversation and pushing the boundaries of what is possible. Their work highlights how the interplay between humanities and the social sciences, and the development of science and technology, are working together to innovate in ethics, history and communications, creating a new cultural context.

Ensure AI Ethics in Play
With the rapid adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) in society since the explosion of interest following the launch of ChatGPT-4, the need for an ethical code surrounding its proper use and behaviour cannot be stressed enough. For this reason, the further development of AI is not just about the evolution of physics or computing, but perhaps more importantly it is about developments within the humanities.

“The humanistic perspective is critical because technology by itself cannot bring value to us,” says Professor Fiona NAH Fui-hoon, who is a professor in CityU’s Department of Media and Communication as well as the convenor of the College’s Brain research cluster. She argues, “To bring out the true value of technology in society, we have to look at human-centred AI and human-centred technology. They should all be human-centred for us to progress in the right direction to bring the best value to society.”

While this seems like obvious conjecture, Nah, who is listed as among the world’s top 2% of scientists according to a study by Stanford University, says that the development of AI technology has shown that it is easy to get caught up in the science and to overlook the humanities aspect and that this is a mistake.

“As a developer, you might think that you have all the information and what you have developed is perfect, but, CityU’s scholars take an interdisciplinary approach to understanding progress, viewing science and technology and the humanities as interwoven disciplines that contribute to our advancement interestingly, when you run a test on the user, you may realise many things don’t work,” she explains.

This is why open communication and the consultative process are so important. “The world is changing. Business processes are changing. It’s about making the system better, and you can’t eliminate the human from the socio-technical system because, ultimately, the system needs to serve the users,” says Nah.

Citing Hong Kong’s Smart City objectives as an example, she explains that as the technology is developed, there are clear expectations from society that it will be trustworthy, reliable and safe. “While engineers can focus on the technological side, the humanistic side needs to be there to ensure that the technology is not harming people by creating negative consequences.”

And this is where ethics comes into play. Nah argues that one of the ways ethics will play out in AI will be the development of more sophisticated monitoring systems: “I believe we need to have a monitoring system on AI because AI is going to learn and adapt, so somebody has to watch over it, both machine and human, a combination of both to ensure that it doesn’t deviate from the norm.”

Honouring the Past, Paving the Future
Another interdisciplinary area at CityU that has benefited from close collaboration between the humanities and science is in the study of art history. When it comes to advancing the human race, we cannot underestimate the value of lessons from our past in helping us to make more informed decisions about our future. To this end, understanding historical contexts can help us to avoid repeating mistakes while providing us with insights into the cultural, social and economic factors that shape our world today.

In this sense, the use of technology in the study of artworks has revolutionised our understanding of the past.

“The development to use the natural sciences to study artworks already started in the early 20^th century in America and Europe,” says Professor Astrid HARTH, Assistant Professor of the Department of Chinese and History. As both an art historian and a conservation scientist, Harth specialises in technical art history, bridging the gap between art and science.

“Today, we have more imaging techniques available to us,” she explains. These include using visual methods to study paintings’ chemical composition, using AI to analyse works, new mobile equipment, and even advanced scanning methods using X-ray fluorescence and other spectral imaging technologies.

“In general, these tools allow us to become more interdisciplinary in our approach as art historians, art conservators and even as art curators because we can delve more deeply into the material side of artworks and use this as source material rather than just relying on traditional source material like written sources,” she says.

New technologies have therefore given value to our understanding of the past in immeasurable ways. Just as valuable, non-invasive methods mean that it is not always necessary to take physical samples.

“You can now scan an entire painting and know its entire chemical composition without even touching or moving it,” Harth explains. “Or you can use machine learning to gain a deeper understanding of inscriptions on paintings that are lost and are no longer readable. AI can help reconstruct those lost writings–that’s quite popular.”

Given that art is an important medium to understand society in a time and place, technology-assisted discoveries have allowed researchers like Harth to gain new perspectives on different periods.

“For instance, during the Renaissance, European courts really wanted to attract painters like Da Vinci because of their great minds. Men like him were polymaths, and not only could they create these beautiful works of art, but at the same time, they could come up with your military strategy. So while they were scientists, their medium was often in painting,” she says.

Further telling examples of why an interdisciplinary approach is so important to the research of art were the discoveries brought to light at one of the world’s most famous religious works, the Ghent Altarpiece. Also known as the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, in 2012, imaging techniques were used to scan its surface and revealed that the piece was heavily painted over in the 16^th century, about a century after its creation by the Van Eyck brothers.

“There were changes made to the original style of the painting, and certain motives were changed, but we don’t know why,” Harth remarks. “For centuries, we thought we were looking at this great painting from the 15^th century, but actually, we were looking at a 16^th-century treatment. This is an extreme example of how these new imaging tools allow us to unravel the material history of important works of art.”

Understanding Human Behaviours
Of course, underlying it all is the understanding of how the brain works. One can look to physical science alone or psychology to understand human behaviours, but to gain a holistic picture, both disciplines must come together for us to get a true understanding.

Leading in this area is Professor ZHEN Shanshan, Assistant Professor in the Department of Social and Behavioural Sciences. She has spent her career studying psychology and cognitive neuroscience, focusing on decision-making and social reasoning in different populations like young adults and children. Using advanced neuroimaging technology such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalogram (EEG), Zhen has been able to map the human brain and better understand the neurocomputational bases of decision-making in social contexts.

“I use neuroimaging methods to see how the brain regions are activated when people make decisions so that we can understand the underlying neural mechanisms of most behaviours, and we can use that to predict people’s behaviour”, she explains.

With an emphasis on social decision-making, Zhen’s work is focused on the humanistic parts of her field. Advancements in new technologies that build on new metaphors and algorithmic systems that analyse data have helped the scholar gain a deeper and broader understanding of the human decision-making process.

“For instance, looking at brain’s reward system and how they affect our motivations when we interacting with others, we no longer look at just one area of the brain to see how that affects our behaviour; instead, we are using new data analysis to understand how all parts of the brain work together,” she says.

Although Zhen makes her work sound relatively straightforward, the process is far from simple. Zhen’s work delves into the psychological mechanisms of people’s behaviour, drawing on a person’s past life experiences and even the study of a whole generation to understand the cultural and humanistic effects that might have affected a group of people and how that may influence their individual decision-making style.

“My research is trying to see how our own decision-making patterns may affect others or how other people’s decision-making patterns affect our own. That’s social decision-making skills,” she says.

In studying the nuances between the human brain’s cognitive and psychological aspects, Zhen is also part of the College’s Brain research cluster, where researchers from various departments and disciplines come together using different methods to study people’s behaviour.

Ultimately, CityU’s interdisciplinary approach aims to help build a better environment to impact and advance society at all levels. As Zhen concludes, science and technology and the humanities are disciplines that interlace with each other, and when one looks back throughout history, it becomes clear that the study of one cannot proceed without the other. As such, it is easy to understand why the University is keen to lead the way in this field.

“The more studies we do of this kind, the more we can help the government and other institutions, even at the educational level,” says Zhen. “That way, we will have more resources to help people understand their limitations and their personal motivations. Helping them to understand themselves will help develop society as a whole.”