Humans may be on the way out. But at least the humanities are back. Or so some of the tech gods tell us. After decades of dismissing liberal arts and humanities studies as useless and insisting that the mastery of science, engineering, maths and tech is essential to future success, the tech world is coming around to the idea that learning about human nature could be a valuable asset in the coming AI revolution.
Tech jobs may be drying up after years of students rushing to computer science. Who needs to code? AI does that for you. What AI can’t do — yet — is the stuff that makes us human — empathy, emotion, psychology, critical thinking. “What a piece of work is a man,” Hamlet said, describing an intricate and infinite creature.
“I think AI is a false mirror,” said Drew Lichtenberg, the dramaturge at the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Baltimore, US, and a lecturer at Johns Hopkins University. “It reflects back answers to black-or-white questions, but it does little to help explain the human experience the way art or philosophy can.”
He said he was shocked that students last semester were hungry for difficult plays and philosophical readings with no clear answers. “They were particularly into Kant and his Analytic of the Sublime, Nietzsche and existential nausea, Camus and The Myth of Sisyphus,” Lichtenberg said, adding that the cool reason of AI comprehends, but the seething imagination of art apprehends.
Daniela Amodei, a founder of Anthropic, told ABC News that “the things that make us human will become much more important instead of much less important”. Anthropic is looking to hire people who are “compassionate and curious” about other people.
Amodei, who majored in literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, US, said that “studying the humanities is going to be more important than ever. A lot of these models are actually very good at STEM. But I think this idea that there are things that make us uniquely human — understanding ourselves, understanding history, understanding what makes us tick — I think that will always be really, really important.”
Other billionaires and execs — Jamie Dimon at JPMorgan Chase, Ginni Rometty at IBM, Satya Nadella at Microsoft, Mike Novogratz at Galaxy Digital and Jack Clark at Anthropic — have warned of the need for emotional intelligence and storytelling in a world dominated by AI. Reed Hastings, a founder of Netflix, said on Reid Hoffman’s podcast recently that we have moved beyond the days when STEM swallowed the Stanford University campus.
“For students and parents, the best defence today is to be broadly educated so they can adapt to changes,” Hastings said. “AI is better at rational thinking than it is at emotional depth. The last job that AI will get is stand-up comedian.”
Mark Cuban, an AI optimist who predicted a decade ago that English majors would have the edge in the future, told me, “AI is going to do a lot of amazing things with drugs and devices and stuff that’s going to be insanely important and cool. But, you know, humans are humans. Curiosity is the greatest skill you can have in an AI universe.”
Some people are realising you have to avoid sautéing your brain in AI slop if you want to keep it fit. “The people who are reading hard books and are still writing have built these brain circuits, and they’re comfortable with cognitive strain,” said Cal Newport, a Georgetown University, US, computer science professor.
When Anthropic’s head of AI safety Mrinank Sharma left the company in February, saying that “the world is in peril” from AI and other things, he posted on the social platform X about looking for meaning in poetry, “I want to explore the questions that feel truly essential to me, the questions that David Whyte would say ‘have no right to go away’, the questions that Rilke implores us to ‘live’.”
Some of my academic friends doubt this is a real trend. The New Yorker declared “The End of the English Major” three years ago. The Washington Post reported this past month on a Texas study in which liberal arts landed at the bottom of undergraduate programmes that paid off after college. “Just try to imagine a world — or a working democracy — when those skills are limited to a few,” keened one Shakespeare professor.
Maybe the lords of the cloud are feeling guilty as it becomes apparent that AI is going to subsume us. So they’re wishfully thinking that truth and beauty can help us steer AI toward its better angels.
Leon Wieseltier, who is the editor of the journal Liberties, says, “There is a huge difference between knowledge and information, and these asinine people have taught our population that all of knowledge can be reduced to the status of information.”
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