After decades of dismissing liberal arts and humanities studies as useless and insisting that the mastery of science, engineering, math 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 artificial intelligence revolution.<\/p>\n
As it turns out, tech jobs may be drying up after years of students rushing to computer science. Who needs to code? AI does that for you.<\/p>\n
What AI can\u2019t do \u2014 yet \u2014 is the stuff that makes us human: empathy, emotion, psychology, critical thinking. \u201cWhat a piece of work is man,\u201d Hamlet said, describing an intricate and infinite creature.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think AI is a false mirror,\u201d said Drew Lichtenberg, the dramaturg at the Shakespeare Theatre Company here and a lecturer at Johns Hopkins University. \u201cIt reflects back answers to black-or-white questions, but it does little to help explain the human experience the way art or philosophy can.\u201d<\/p>\n
He said he was shocked that students last semester were hungry for difficult plays and philosophical readings with no clear answers. \u201cThey were particularly into Kant and his \u2018Analytic of the Sublime,\u2019 Nietzsche and existential nausea, Camus and the myth of Sisyphus,\u201d he said, adding that the cool reason of AI comprehends, but the seething imagination of art apprehends.<\/p>\n
Daniela Amodei, a founder of Anthropic, told ABC News that \u201cthe things that make us human will become much more important instead of much less important.\u201d She said that at Anthropic, the company is looking to hire people who are \u201ccompassionate and curious\u201d about other people.<\/p>\n
Amodei, who majored in literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said that \u201cstudying 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 \u2014 understanding ourselves, understanding history, understanding what makes us tick \u2014 I think that will always be really, really important.\u201d<\/p>\n
Other billionaires and execs \u2014 Jamie Dimon at JPMorgan Chase, Ginni Rometty at IBM, Satya Nadella at Microsoft, Mike Novogratz at Fortress Investment Group and Jack Clark at Anthropic \u2014 have warned of the need for emotional intelligence and storytelling in a world dominated by AI.<\/p>\n
Reed Hastings, a founder of Netflix, said on Reid Hoffman\u2019s podcast recently that we have moved beyond the days when STEM swallowed the Stanford University campus. If he had a 3-year-old today, he said, he would be \u201cdoubling down\u201d on teaching the child emotional skills.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor students and parents, the best defense today is to be broadly educated so they can adapt to the changes coming,\u201d Hastings told me. \u201cAI is better at rational thinking than it is at emotional depth. The last job that AI will get is stand-up comedian.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mark Cuban, an AI optimist who predicted a decade ago that English majors would have the edge in the future, told me: \u201cAI is going to do a lot of amazing things with drugs and devices and stuff that\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Some people are beginning to realize you have to avoid saut\u00e9ing your brain in AI slop if you want to keep it fit.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe people who are reading hard books and are still writing have built these brain circuits, and they\u2019re comfortable with cognitive strain,\u201d said Cal Newport, a Georgetown University computer science professor. \u201cThese are the people with real value if everyone else has fried their brains.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rob Reich, a Stanford professor who teaches the social ethics of science and technology, said that computer science students are awash in anxiety about their future. \u201cThe first time that there\u2019s been a decline in computer science enrollment at Stanford in 20 years is in the past 18 months,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Maybe humans are getting worried about becoming less human. As a friend of Reich\u2019s says, we have gone from visiting people on birthdays to letters to phone calls to texts to emojis.<\/p>\n
Reich suggested that humans, unable to keep up with AI, may have decided to go read some poetry or literature or philosophy and remind themselves of \u201cenduring sources of meaning in the world.\u201d<\/p>\n
When Anthropic\u2019s head of AI safety, Mrinank Sharma, left the company in February, saying that \u201cthe world is in peril\u201d from AI and other things, he posted on the social platform X about looking for meaning in poetry: \u201cI want to explore the questions that feel truly essential to me, the questions that David Whyte would say \u2018have no right to go away,\u2019 the questions that Rilke implores us to \u2018live.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Reich said that some people think that once AI does the majority of economically valuable work and we live in a world of abundance, \u201cwhat will be left for humans to do is fundamentally a more humanistic set of questions about artisanal projects that people might want to direct themselves toward.\u201d<\/p>\n
Some of my academic friends doubt this is a real trend, as they see liberal arts and humanities departments shrinking and closing, graduate enrollments slashed and reading scores falling.<\/p>\n
The New Yorker declared \u201cThe End of the English Major\u201d three years ago. The Washington Post reported this past week on a Texas study in which liberal arts landed at the bottom of undergraduate programs that paid off after college. \u201cJust try to imagine a world \u2014 or a working democracy \u2014 when those skills are limited to a few,\u201d keened one Shakespeare professor.<\/p>\n
Maybe the lords of the cloud are feeling guilty as it becomes apparent that AI is going to subsume us. So they\u2019re wishfully thinking that truth and beauty can help us steer AI toward its better angels.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey know that American society is going to turn against them in big ways because they are the greatest and most illegitimate pirates who ever lived,\u201d said Leon Wieseltier, editor of the journal Liberties. \u201cTech is the single most powerful force that was ever arrayed against the humanities.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere 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,\u201d Wieseltier said. \u201cPress a button, you got your answer. So the whole humanistic mentality of mystery, obscurity, patience, beauty \u2014 it\u2019s the opposite of what this technology has inculcated.\u201d<\/p>\n