“Modernity, Critical Infrastructure, and the Limits of Critique — The Critique of AI (I),” Digital Modernities, Alternative Futures symposium, HASS Digital Research Hub, Australian National University, 17 August 2026.

  • Abstract: What now is the right balance in the humanities between critiquing AI in the manner of the “hermeneutics of suspicion” and embracing the promise of AI? The “now” framing this question is not just the present moment but the longer history of modernity constituted as critique, and, recursively, of the modern and postmodern humanities (and adjacent social sciences) as the critique of modernity itself. Alan Liu proposes as a thought-object for considering this question something that is difficult to square with the problem-space of humanities critique: “critical infrastructure” in the sense of cannot-fail power grids, transportation systems, water and sewage systems, financial exchange networks, communication and information platforms, and, increasingly AI. Such infrastructures embody a notion of criticality that is orthogonal to humanities critique. Using a digital “kit” of word embedding models, topic models, and other models of a corpus of 537 recent articles on AI, Liu illustrates how the humanities might explore the larger critical problem-space of the “AI modern” as a case study of the critique of the modern.