By Hussein Ali Rifath
Students and faculty from various departments met on Oct. 2 at the Swirbul Library Innovation Center to design a hypothetical time capsule preserving humanity’s most important technological innovations. The event was organized by Lauren Rosenblum, director of Interdisciplinary Studies at Adelphi, in hopes of bringing together Adelphi students and faculty from various disciplines.
“My whole goal for the event was to show students that we need all the disciplines: that there's not one that's better than another, and that we're all influencing each other at all times,” she said.
Rosenblum drew inspiration from Apocalypse Debate, an annual event hosted by Logos, Cornell University’s undergraduate philosophy club. “They had five Cornell professors [each coming from different disciplines] debate on whose area of study will best help humans stay alive,” she said.
She immediately saw the potential in hosting a similar event at Adelphi. “I'm always really interested in getting the professors from different disciplines to talk to one another. As director of Interdisciplinary Studies, that's a priority for me: to look for connections in approaches, methodologies, contents and interests,” she said.
Anil Venkatesh, a professor of mathematics and computer science, envisioned a different approach for the event where faculty could work together rather than compete against each other. Instead of having faculty debate whose specialty is most important for human survival, he thought, faculty could each argue their cases for which innovations should be preserved for future civilizations.
During the event, there were three rounds of discussion and one final run-off vote. Each round saw faculty arguing for the preservation of advances in math, science, history and art. Students got to select which ones ultimately moved forward. Those in attendance said they were inspired to think differently about technology we often take for granted.
Matthew Sabu, a junior computer science major, said he saw immense value in passing on humanity’s advances in artificial intelligence.
“Looking back on the machine learning and AI concepts, recently I've just got involved in that. And one topic I found really interesting was neural networks: they’re really cool and interesting. I think that's one thing we should preserve,” he said.
Anabel Ojeda, a senior studying mathematics, wanted to preserve the human element in problem-solving.
“As we move into the AI and data science world, where a lot of things get calculated for you, I think there are certain processes that should be kept,” she said. “I'll reference how last night I was tutoring my brother for his math homework. They're doing geometry, angle measurements and things like that. I think it's important to still know how to do those things, even if you could just use GeoGebra to do it for you.”
Some students, like sophomore computer science major Aryeh Donath, were more excited about the food offered at the event. “I really liked the pizza,” he said.
Each round, faculty nominated a wide variety of innovations across various disciplines. Christopher Davis, a professor of African, Black and Caribbean history and culture, spoke about the importance in preserving archives during the first round.
“Critically, in an archive, you can learn about the thoughts and the minds of many historical actors,” he said. “Ultimately, thinking about what an archive has and maintains can tell you about how higher societies think. I can argue that you all [Adelphi students] are archivists yourselves because many of you might have Instagram or Facebook, and a scholar in the future might go back and look at your Instagram account and say, hey, this is what these people were thinking at this time. My contribution is archives because they record all the prior knowledge that we have as a society.”
Venkatesh argued to preserve technical drawing. “I am amazed at how well this event came together, because we're thinking about people building stone monuments and we're thinking about people using electricity to make machines. We also heard about the archive storing all the knowledge that started 5,000 years ago up to the present day. But how do you actually tell somebody how to make a machine that you imagine in your head? You have to create a diagram,” he explained.
“The idea of an exploded diagram showing the internal structures of a complicated object–which is not the way the object appears to you in real life–allows them to be communicated to another person. We could not have had the Industrial Revolution without a first revolution in technical drawing,” he added.
Students ultimately selected one innovation from each area–math, science, history and art–to be a part of their hypothetical time capsule.
“Each discipline won a race. I was thrilled that it just happened to work out that way. I couldn't have been happier. It was great,” said Rosenblum.
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