I say … no. In fact my mission today is to tell you that your education was not in vain. You do have a great future ahead of you no matter how smart and capable ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Llama get. And here is the reason: You have something that no computer can ever have. It’s a superpower, and every one of you has it in abundance.
Your humanity.
Liberal arts graduates, you have majored in subjects like Psychology. History. Anthropology. African American, Asian, and Gender Studies. Sociology. Languages. Philosophy. Political Science. Religion. Criminal Justice. Economics. And there’s even some English majors, like me.
Every one of those subjects involves examining and interpreting human behavior and human creativity with empathy that only humans can bring to the task. The observations you make in the social sciences, the analyses you produce on art and culture, the lessons you communicate from your research, have a priceless authenticity, based on the simple fact that you are devoting your attention, intelligence, and consciousness to fellow homo sapiens. People, that’s why we call them the humanities.
The lords of AI are spending hundreds of billions of dollars to make their models think LIKE accomplished humans. You have just spent four years at Temple University learning to think AS accomplished humans. The difference is immeasurable.
This is something that even Silicon Valley understands, starting from the time Steve Jobs told me four decades ago that he wanted to marry computers and the liberal arts. I once wrote a history of Google. Originally, its cofounder Larry Page resisted hiring anyone who did not have a computer science degree. But the company came to realize that it was losing out on talent it needed for communications, business strategy, management, marketing, and internal culture. Some of those liberal arts grads it then hired became among the company’s most valuable employees.
Even inside AI companies. liberal arts grads can and do thrive. Did you know that the president of Anthropic, one of the top creators of generative AI, was an English major? She idolized Joan Didion.
Furthermore, your work does something that AI can never do: it makes a genuine human connection. OpenAI recently boasted that it trained one of its latest models to churn out creative writing. Maybe it can put together cool sentences—but that’s not what we really seek from books, visual arts, films and criticism. How would you feel if you read a novel that shifted the way you saw the world, heard a podcast that lifted your spirit, saw a movie that blew your mind, heard a piece of music that moved your soul, and only after you were inspired and transformed by it, learned that it was not created by a person, but a robot? You might feel cheated.
And that’s more than a feeling. In 2023, some researchers published a paper confirming just that. In blind experiments human beings valued what they read more when they thought it was from fellow humans and not a sophisticated system that fakes humanity. In another blind experiment, participants were shown abstract art created by both humans and AI. Though they couldn’t tell which was which, when subjects were asked which pictures they liked better, the human-created ones came out on top. Other research studies involved brain MRIs. The scans also showed people responded more favorably when they thought humans, not AI, created the artworks. Almost as if that connection was primal.
