As a humanities professor, I’ve grown accustomed to the perennial declarations that my field is in decline. The most recent was “The End of the English Major,” a lengthy New Yorker feature that opens by blaring, “Enrollment in the humanities is in free fall at colleges around the country” and then lists all the reasons students won’t and shouldn’t go into literature, art history or film studies.
I know all the arguments. Poetry is useless, and philosophy is pointless. Music is a hobby, not a vocation. Studying medieval sculpture is great, but only if you want to stay in school for the rest of your life. They all tend to boil down to one simple claim: The humanities are adorable, but they won’t get you a real job.
So it was with more than a little bit of satisfaction that I recently had a friend in finance confess that he was afraid an artificial intelligence stock-picker would put him out of work in the not-too-distant future. That chat was followed up by a similar conversation with an architect who admitted he’d likely be competing with AI designers by the end of next year. And then there was a third, with an accountant whose employer is already looking at AI-fueled programs that she feared would make her position obsolete. (All this is to say nothing of Hollywood writers, who are striking right now in part to prevent Marvel from hiring a robot to pen the next “Avengers” screenplay.)
Finally, the coup de grâce. In March, a programmer demonstrated one of the most impressive capabilities of GPT-4, the new artificial intelligence language model from OpenAI. He wrote down the parameters for a website he’d like to create on the back of a napkin and fed it into the program, which promptly generated code and launched the site in a matter of seconds.
I can’t tell you how many times in the past few years I’ve heard skeptics say that students need to stop studying Toni Morrison and Diego Rivera and start learning to code. Not so fast, my friends.
Because here’s the thing I’ve been realizing: So many of the disciplines my students have been pushed toward as they flee mine are the ones most likely to be replaced by computers as we enter the age of AI.
As for the humanities? They are literally irreplaceable. Let me explain.
The Nigerian philosopher Joseph Omoregbe offers a definition of his discipline that I think does a good job of describing the humanities as a whole. “To philosophize,” he says, “is to reflect on human experience in search of answers to some fundamental questions.”
Which questions? Only the big ones, he explains. Why are we here? Where did we come from? Where are we going? What is our purpose? What happens when we die? How should we treat each other? Are we part of nature or above it? How can we be happy?
Or in sum, what is it to be human? As its name suggests, this is the core question of the humanities, and every single philosopher, novelist, painter and director that I teach offers some sort of answer to it. By studying them, we learn more about who we are.
Now, I should admit, this is a question that AI can answer. Plug it into ChatGPT and you’ll get a response, perhaps even an elegant-sounding one. (Or perhaps not. “Being human is a multifaceted and dynamic concept,” the program writes, “that encompasses a range of experiences, emotions and behaviors.” Vague me with a spoon.)
But I would argue that no matter the quality of this answer, it is one that we deeply do not want. Because the moment we let artificial intelligence define what we are, we cede our last, most vital piece of turf. Or in other words, my field is not only about humans; it’s created by humans.
Further, it’s my sense that humanists are better equipped than those in other fields to ask some of the questions we need to be asking as the pace of AI development quickens. The first question of a software developer or a tech executive with respect to artificial intelligence is often, what can it do? But it is only the humanist who will first demand, what should it do? And what should humans keep doing as AI proliferates?
Fears that these questions are not being considered seriously enough recently led Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak and others to sign an open letter calling for a pause on AI research. These same fears also just compelled Geoffrey Hinton, the so-called “godfather of AI,” to leave Google so he can speak more freely about the technology’s dangers.
That being said, while humanists may help guide the growth of technology, they should not only be its handmaidens. So here’s what I both hope for and predict: In coming years and decades, the rise of AI will be accompanied by a renaissance in the humanities as young people return from the many disposable jobs to which they’ve been shortsightedly directed, often only by the brutal logic of capitalism. It will be a future with more philosophers and composers, fewer programmers and coders. I can’t wait.
Joshua Pederson is an associate professor of humanities at Boston University.