“It is in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough—it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our heart sing.” – Steve Jobs
Humans are dreamers. Whether we are dreaming of a better life for ourselves or our children or of Middle Earth, creativity is at the center of our existence. According to Leonard Shlain, “Every child is born with a desire to re-create the world in his or her own terms. This powerful motivation for producing art has always been a means of imposing order on the disjointed pieces of the child’s emerging worldview” (Art & Physics pp. 141-142).
Lately, the news has been filled with stories about Humanities departments shutting down at universities across the country. This week at Davos Palantir CEO Alex Karp proclaimed that AI will “decimate” humanities jobs.
I couldn’t disagree more.
Morality, ethics, and the logic of “why” will be the premium human skills required to operate in an AI-driven world. Without dreams there is no “why.” Technologists like Doug Engelbart, Alan Kay, Steve Wozniak, and even Steve Jobs were dreamers first. The reason their innovations “worked” is because they baked their dreams into everything they built.
Chatbots don’t dream of electric sheep. We do. Our dreams come from within or they may come from the dreams of others. The Humanities are the stuff of dreams. Philosophers dream of a better us. Historians dream of other times. Writers just dream.
Science is also filled with dreamers. Every great scientific invention was driven by a dream of something different. Most truly successful scientific visionaries also had a “soft” side. Einstein was a talented musician. Richard Feynman was also a musician. Music is math.
So why this fascination with killing off the humanities? Our obsession with STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) over the last 30-40 years failed to grasp the need for this other side of our brain to be engaged in the development of innovation.
This is a legacy of industrial thinking and late-stage capitalism. Everything must have a purpose and turn a monetary profit or a return-on-investment (ROI). The thinking was that if you focused on the “hard” science, humans would be better at navigating and thriving in a technological world. ROI dominates everything, including the learning process.
Instead, we ended up with a lot of frustrated people because their studies lacked any purpose other than profit. We gradually stripped meaning from learning. We lost our compass in the pursuit of an elusive goal. And when society (and education) didn’t deliver that profit, it bred resentment.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard students say, I can’t do math (or science or technology) because it’s too hard. I’ve had two students drop my class this semester because they were intimidated by the prospect of having to build a website. Their mantra was, “I’m not good at technology.”
They gave me very cogent ROI arguments why taking my course, which forces them to explore a different way of learning, was a risk to them. Making an argument that this technology could operationalize their dreams had little resonance with them.
This version of STEM education separates humans from their dreams. Money is not a dream. It may be a mechanism in today’s world to purchase the facsimiles of dreams but the pursuit of it doesn’t really change the world.
Now, we are faced with a situation where AI can do so many of the STEM activities that form the centerpieces of study in those areas. It’s not the artists who should be threatened by AI, it’s the engineers.
I can code with AI. I can create technical documents and drawings with AI. I can reinvent my classes with AI. I can do all these things because my education is grounded in the humanities and I have the tools to systematically dream what I’m trying to accomplish.
A curious thing happened to my courses as I worked with AI (a curated library in Notebook LM) to develop my AI-infused curriculum: The design systematically stripped ROI (the product) from my assessment strategy in favor of communication, collaboration, and inspiration (the process). Instead of assessing papers, I am assessing how they created meaningful artifacts. I am teaching the process of turning dreams into reality.
The power to actualize dreams is what education should provide and what AI forces it to provide if it wants to keep humans relevant in the job market. As Emad Mostaque said in a recent interview, “if you are part of the machine, your job is gone.”
We can automate the building of today’s world, but only the humanities gives us the power to dream of tomorrow’s world. If we learn only to exist in today’s world, tomorrow’s world will never come and all of the dystopian visions of job replacement will come to pass.
The AI may help provide the diagnosis but the doctor and nurses will still provide the care. AIs may develop solutions to long-standing problems of climate change, poverty, and preserving individual choice, but it will be humans who decide which course is the most humane one.
These are not things you get from STEM courses. Sure, they may have grafted moral or ethical requirements to their syllabi but those come from the humanities. And if those things are afterthoughts, we really will have an AI-driven, but human inspired, dystopia.
This also misses the point of STEM. Without inspiration, without purpose, without dreams, science and math become a mundane technical exercise.
My son is studying to be an engineer. He has passion for building and designing things but his courses seem divorced from that reality because they reduce dreaming to a formulaic activity.
AI is good at logistics. I love how it clears all of the low-hanging clerical things from my plate. However, while it can help me brainstorm, that spark of inspiration must come from me.
The humanities teach us to dream. Without dreams there would be no AI. AI doesn’t replace that. It never can, just like a car doesn’t quench our thirst for finding new places. AI has no “why.” We do.