Damon Horowitz is a director of engineering for Google (GOOG), but his other title at the Internet giant is “In-House Philospher.” After studying artifical intelligence at MIT, Horowitz earned a PhD in philosophy at Stanford, and he says that humanities work is crucial to the social search technology he’s trying to pioneer at Google.
“You come to have a much broader perspective on what intelligence is about,” Horowitz said of humanities scholarship. “It’s not the kind of thing you can just stuff into a machine. It’s about our human form of life, and our human concerns and the way we interact with one another.”
Horowitz will be among a group of Silicon Valley business leaders who will come together with humanities scholars for a groundbreaking conference at Stanford Wednesday. Born of a concern about the widening gulf between technology and the humanities, the first BiblioTech conference will begin a discussion about how humanities doctoral students can play a bigger role in Silicon Valley tech businesses. The conference, its organizers hope, will go beyond talk, perhaps sparking the creation of an organization that could work toward bridging the gap
Other conference speakers include Google vice president Marissa Mayer, venture capitalist and early Google investor Michael Moritz, Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne, and Vivek Ranadivé, CEO and chairman of Palo Alto cloud computing company TIBCO, whose keynote address is titled, “How the Right Brain Helped Me Make a Billion, Win a Basketball Game, and Land This Gig.” Stanford president John Hennessey, a former Silicon Valley entrepreneur turned academic, will provide the opening remarks.
The sold-out conference was the brainchild of Anais Saint-Jude, a PhD student studying 17th century French literature, who believes that humanist PhDs can contribute to tech companies like Google. With some universities talking about killing off disciplines like literature, Saint-Jude said she thought it was time for a broader discussion about bridging the gulf between the humanities and business.
“I don’t know how but somewhere along the line, a humanist degree, particularly a humanist PhD degree, got cast in the shadows and forgotten about,” Saint-Jude said.
The stereotypes about people with humanist degrees — they are unable to think in quantitive terms like engineers and computer scientists and are only suited for careers in fields like marketing or public relations — are wrong, Saint-Jude said.
“I believe we can do so much more,” she said. “From the very beginning, we’ve been trained in innovation. We’re not learning a set of data, and codified knowledge. The essence of the humanist PhD and the humanist discipline is to be both going into depth and going broad, in order to look at the landscape of ideas and come up with something new.”
The BiblioTech conference starts Wednesday at the Bechtel Conference Center in Encina Hall, and is open to the public. More information is available at http://humanexperience.stanford.edu.
Horowitz is not the only philosophy PhD among the tech leaders speaking. Byrne, the CEO of Overstock.com, also has a doctorate in philosophy from Stanford.
Horowitz was co-founder of a start-up called Aardvark, which relies on human connections rather than computer algorithms to allow people to discover information. Google bought Aardvark last year for a reported $50 million.
With technology shaping culture, Horowitz said ethics and other humanist sensibilities need to keep pace, and he said his study of philosophy helped “change our vision of what to build” with Aardvark.
“We took a totally new approach to the traditional problem of search,” he said. “When you ask a question, you get connected to another person instead of to a list of websites. That arose from thinking about what are the actual human needs when you are asking questions.”
Contact Mike Swift at 408-271-3648. Follow him at Twitter.com/swiftstories.
