AI and Changing Understandings of Humanity

March 30, 2026

AI and Changing Understandings of Humanity

Event Series: Barcelona, March 2026

Much of the current debate around AI centers rightly on its implications for the economy and for job displacement in particular. At a more fundamental level, though, the explosion of human-machine interaction raises fundamental questions about what it means to be human. What remains–and will remain–distinctive about human intelligence, creativity, and community in an AI-infused world? Does AI pose an existential threat, and if so, how?

Join the livestream from the Georgetown Global Dialogues YouTube channel

Participants

Mohsin Hamid

Mohsin Hamid is an acclaimed British Pakistani author known for creative fiction and commentary that address contemporary global issues. His recent novels include The Last White Man (2022) and Exit West (2017), which received the 2017 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction. His book The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and later adapted into a successful film. Hamid’s engagement with themes of political turmoil, cultural displacement, and shifting individual and collective identities informs his influential essays on contemporary affairs in leading outlets including The Guardian, The New York Times, and The Paris Review.

Kohei Saito

Kohei Saito is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Tokyo and a leading contemporary Marxist thinker. His most recent book, Capital in the Anthropocene (2020), has sold more than half a million copies in Japan and was published in English as Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto in January 2024. Saito’s previous book, Karl Marx's Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy (2017), which creatively explored the ecological dimension of Marx’s thought and its contemporary relevance, won the Deutscher Memorial Prize.

Nicoletta Pireddu

Nicoletta Pireddu is director of the Georgetown Humanities Initiative and professor of Italian at Georgetown University. A specialist in comparative literature, her research focuses on European literary and cultural relations, national and transnational identities, borders, cosmopolitanism, and translation studies. Her publications include Migrating Minds: Theories and Practices of Cultural Cosmopolitanism (2021, 2023 René Wellek Prize); Reframing Critical, Literary, and Cultural Theories (2018); The Works of Claudio Magris: Temporary Homes, Mobile Identities, European Borders (2015); and Antropologi alla corte della bellezza (2002, 2002 American Association for Italian Studies Book Award).

Paul Elie

Paul Elie is a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs and a regular contributor to the New Yorker. He is the author of The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage (2003) and Reinventing Bach: Music, Technology, and the Search for Transcendence (2012), both National Book Critics Circle Award finalists; The Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex, and Controversy in the 1980s was published in May 2025. He also writes for the New York Times and its Book Review and Sunday magazine, The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, and Commonweal.