The recent explosion of AI capacity\, alon g with booming prophecies about its limitless potential\, arrives at a mome nt of profound unease. Just over a century ago\, in the aftermath of the Fi rst World War\, W.B. Yeats gave poetic form to a similar anxiety. In The Se cond Coming\, he described an old order unraveling\; “the centre cannot hol d\,” and something new and uncertain is taking shape.
He imagined thi s new revelation in the form of a sphinx\, rising from the desert sand\, it s gaze “blank and pitiless as the sun\,” and ended the poem wondering “what rough beast\, its hour come round at last\, / Slouches towards Bethlehem t o be born?”
Is AI\, then\, a new Copernican moment? Not because it mo ves us in the cosmos\, but because it unsettles our sense of what makes us central\, distinct\, and human. What would it actually mean for AI to surpa ss us? We exercise judgment\, form relationships\, create culture\, make me aning\, and act from values and beliefs. As AI becomes more and more capabl e\, which\, if any\, of these practices remain distinctly ours?
Philo sopher and responsible AI leader Ken Ar cher\, who heads Responsible AI at Microsoft\, and Jackson Kernion\, who leads the human feedback progra m at Anthropic\, join literary scholar and BKC Faculty Associate Moira Weigel to consider whether Yeats’ apocalyptic vision has become not just “rough\,” but rogue — and whether it will leave\, or already has left\, humanity behind. This co nversation launches All Too Human: How AI Is Changing the Ways We Make Mean ing\, a year-long series examining how AI is reshaping our relationships\, beliefs and values\, art and creativity\, and our most intimate emotional e xperiences.
CATEGORIES:Discussion,Speaker/Panel LOCATION:Lewis Hall\, 5th floor at the Berkman Klein Center's Multi-Purpose Room 515 GEO:0.000000;0.000000 ORGANIZER;CN="Matt Kristoffersen":MAILTO:mkristoffersen@jd27.law.harvard.ed u URL;VALUE=URI:https://hls.harvard.edu/events/what-rough-beast-on-ais-potent ial-to-surpass-humanity/ ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://hls.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/Screenshot-2026-09-09-at-11.28.00-AM-scaled.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VTIMEZONE TZID:America/New_York BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:-0500 TZOFFSETTO:-0400 DTSTART:20260308T070000 TZNAME:EDT END:DAYLIGHT END:VTIMEZONE END:VCALENDAR